Dungeon Clawler may be the next Balatro, but Google is hiding it

Another fun roguelike deckbuilder flying under the radar

Stray Fawn Studio / Stray Fawn Publishing

The roguelike deckbuilder genre continues to be very popular among Steam users and indie devs alike, making its representatives strong candidates for becoming breakout hits – case in point: Balatro became a hit earlier this year after flying completely under the radar ahead of release, generating a million USD in revenue in just its first eight hours post launch.

During a roundtable discussion with several esteemed indie devs active in the genre, in which we talked about Early Access and the return of demos, Andrew Krausnick, the game director at Monster Train developer Shiny Shoe, brought up another potential success story he has his eyes on: “I think Dungeon Clawler is one right now for which the demo came out and I’m like ‘I think that’s going to do pretty good.’ But I think it’s kind of rolling under the radar.”

“That’s probably going to show up at some point and make people ask ‘Where did this one come from?’,” he added. “I think they put the demo out months ago and it was really fun. They probably polished it since then.”

Developers in the space are certainly keeping a keen eye on things, because everyone jumped on this train immediately. Little Leo Games’ Leonardo Castanho, the game designer of Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles, said: “Dungeon Clawler is one of those games that I looked at and said ‘Oh my god, I wish I had this idea.’”

“It’s such a good hook,” Krausnick agreed. “It’s so cool,” Castanho continued. “The idea – it’s just really cool. And the name is perfect as well.”

Though the name for the game is indeed perfect, as it alludes to its claw machine twist on the usual formula, it may pose some problems for the developers when it comes to visibility – try searching for its Steam page via Google and the site will always assume you were looking for “dungeon crawler” while making a typo. Welcome to SEO hell.

It's all in the name: Dungeon Clawler challenges you to run the gauntlet by pulling items from a claw machine. Wild? Yes. Satisyfying? Oh, yes. / Stray Fawn Studio / Stray Fawn Publishing

Kevin Chang, game director of As We Descend, was on board the hype train as well: “It’s one of those things that’s just so wild, where you’re like ‘Oh yeah, someone should have thought of this, obviously, it makes sense.’”

He went on to say that even the success of the greatest ideas hinge on execution: “If you just say ‘Hey, do a claw game roguelike’, then there are like 50,000 ways we could build that game and their specific version may be the one people are excited about.”

You can still play the demo of Dungeon Clawler on Steam for free and see for yourself if the fresh take on roguelike deckbuilding excites you – the game is set to be released in Early Access later this year.