Chivalware is a bite-sized roguelike about matching tiles while dodging enemy attacks to power up your weapons and win battles. It has a neat aesthetic, some decent music, and a compellingly twitchy gameplay loop that feels a bit like someone mashed together Mega Man Battle Network and Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon. Developer Regal Pigeon released a demo on Steam this week, and I like what I’ve played so far.
Battles take place on 8X4 grids divided into two halves. Your half is filled with squares that correspond to your different weapons and abilities. Activating a connected sequence of three or more squares of the same type will power up your attack. Once the meter is full you can go on the offensive and unload on enemies. It’s easy at first, but as the real-time battles get more chaotic and your builds get more complex, the action ramps up quickly.
Everything in between fights functions like your standard roguelike. You choose between power-ups after encounters, select which room to enter next, buy upgrades at shops, and eventually face off against a tough boss. There’s variation in the weapons you collect and the perks you can leverage, but so far, I haven’t seen much that directly changes up the Match-3 elements to make them more complex or change how you interact with them. For now, at least, that’s what’s holding it back from being something more intriguing.
The game is currently slated to release by the end of 2026 and it’s not actually Regal Pigeon’s first game. The solo developer previously released a 2D top-down bullet hell roguelike in Early Access called Neophyte. Like Chivalware it was a very slimmed-down experience but received very positive reviews for the $3 price tag. Players only recently started review-bombing it after Regal Pigeon declared it had to move on from developing it.
“While Neophyte sold much better than I ever could have imagined for my first commercial game, it unfortunately wasn’t enough to sustain long-term support and the way it was coded made adding new content time-consuming and prone to crashes and bugs,” they wrote last month on Steam. “I’ve had to take on other work to support myself financially, which has left me with no time to work on Neophyte.”
Hopefully, Chivalware gets more time to cook.