The Lightless World, the upcoming action roguelike game from The3rd.One Games, aims to redefine what players expect from the roguelike and survivor genre.
With a focus on dynamic progression, skill customization, and cooperative gameplay, it offers a fresh twist on the fast-paced, wave-based combat popularized by titles like Vampire Survivors and Soulstone Survivors.
It comes as a passion project from the team at The3rd.One Games and its founder and CEO Yannis Ziakas. Ziakas is also the CEO and founder of Insider Gaming.
“We wanted to create something that looked better, played better,” Ziakas said. “We were sick of being in Discord and sharing our screens. We wanted to play together.”
Rather than settling for familiar mechanics, The Lightless World builds on the genre with a procedurally generated talent system. Every run presents players with a unique skill tree and nodes hidden beneath a fog-of-war, filled with rare abilities and stat boosts waiting to be discovered. This ensures that each session offers new challenges and character builds, encouraging experimentation and making every playthrough feel distinct.
“It’s a mini game down to exploring the fog of war in your talent tree, reconnecting the nodes, the chance of nodes spawning as rare or epic nodes, and so on and so forth,” Ziakas said.
The game will feature 12 playable archdemons when it fully launches with the goal of making sure that no two runs feel the same.
“You could play as a Barbarian – Ker’beroth – and play 300 hours, and none of your runs will be identical,” Ziakas added.
It’s not just a single-player experience, either. Unlike most roguelikes that focus on solo play, The Lightless World introduces multiplayer, letting two players sync up for intense, coordinated runs.
Ziakas believes there’s a simple reason that nobody, so far, had made a game like this multiplayer yet because, as he put it, it’s “pretty hard”. Making a game like this multiplayer took quite a bit of research and development to make sure everything from collisions to spells being in sync to hit markets and more were all done the right way. With things like the spell synchronization and combat, the game creates a dynamic experience that scales with teamwork, enhancing both the strategy and fun.
Thematically, the game flips the typical hero narrative by casting players as archdemons defending their realms against invading forces of good.
“It’s reverse horror,” Ziakas said.
As players control archdemons, they must gather souls to reclaim their lost immortality while fending off waves of knights, archangels, and warriors. This narrative twist breathes new life into the genre, framing the endless waves of enemies with a compelling backstory that sets the stage for future updates and expansions.
The game’s visuals, powered by Unreal Engine 5, aim to elevate the genre with semi-photorealistic environments inspired by Doom and Diablo. Despite its graphical ambition, The Lightless World is optimized to run well on a variety of platforms, including the Steam Deck.
“Some of us have Steam Deck and run it without any optimization,” Ziakas said while also hinting at the potential for future mobile and console ports.
With simple but effective controls – WASD for movement, space for dodging, and R for Ultimates– the game remains accessible to a wide audience. Players will even soon be able to activate auto-targeting for more casual play as well as to be more accessible for players.
While the original plan was to release shortly after Steam Next Fest, where there is currently a demo available, The3rd.One Games is targeting a February or March 2025 Early Access release. This time window, Ziakas says, allows the game a better chance of standing out in what can be a crowded genre. Whenever the official release happens, however, he’s certain that what the team has built will provide players with a consistently fun experience.
“It has a lot of depth and difficulty and complexity in gameplay without losing its identity as a roguelike game,” he said.
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