Dungeon Treaders is a stylish dungeon-crawler with bizarre pizzazz

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Studio Kobako’s Wizardry-inspired DRPG isn’t afraid to be silly in order to stand out among its dungeon-crawling peers.

Lucas White November 6, 2026 12:30 PM 1

Whenever there’s a new Steam Next Fest, I make a beeline for the nearest DRPGs, or first-person dungeon-crawlers. Or at least I try to, as I’ve only been kind of successful at best each time. It’s a niche genre, and skipping anything with an AI disclosure seems to have hit this genre particularly hard. But for the pre-Halloween October 2026 Next Fest, I struck gold. Dungeon Treaders is a blast, oozes style and personality, has lots of cool interactions, and I can’t wait to dive in deeper.

Dungeon Treaders starts by the book, but its quirks quickly start to shine through the cracks. You have to build a main character in typical Wizardry/DRPG fashion, meaning you pick a race, then a class, then character portraits. This is another one of these games that supports uploading custom assets, which is fun if you have the bandwidth to mess with the dimensions and whatnot. You can even upload music files for custom BGM, but you might not want to. More on that in a sec! Anyway, this game’s personality starts to shine when you realize you can choose “Cat” as a race, and nearly half the demo’s available character portraits are realistically-detailed drawings of cats. But once you’re done, the lid bursts open and Dungeon Treaders really pops off. 

You’re immediately dropped in a battle with a bunch of rats, a basic RPG enemy type, with a crew of auto-controlled NPC characters. And the music is absurd. You’d expect a dungeon-crawler to have some kind of thematic score, perhaps with some moody ambiance, or some dramatic percussion. Instead, you get an original J-Pop vocal track performed by an up and coming VTuber, complete with warbly English lyrics about the selfish perversion of DRPG heroes. It’s nutty in a way that’s hard to describe without going into the genre’s history, but luckily there’s a trailer with an excerpt and lyrics for a taste:

Wild, right? The rest of the game is an interesting mix between traditional framework and some contemporary mechanical decisions, seemingly meant to spruce up the pace of the typical dungeon-crawling experience. The camera is also set at an off-kilter angle, making the experience of moving through the dungeon feel different, even if you’re used to the genre. There’s a lot of chatter from accompanying characters who aren’t in your party, and a sort of post-fight healing and fatigue system lets you push through battles without having to constantly return to the surface to heal after rough battles. Moving around in Dungeon Treaders feels good, and it helps how boppy the music is. It’s a whole vibe, and really helps set this game apart from its close peers.

Another great bit is what happens when you actually have a cat in your party. By chance I made a cat thief, as that seemed to make the most sense with its stat spread. But cats are… cats, and they don’t speak human language. So when it came to identifying and disarming traps, the things thieves are chiefly responsible for in these kinds of games, all I got was different variations of “meow” while the rest of my party offered their best guesses and advice. I had to trust the cat as the professional of the group, but had no way to interpret how on the ball she was. It was just as funny when she triggered traps as it was when she successfully disarmed them. That’s good stuff.

The big drawback in the demo is harsh limits imposed on your leveling, which doesn’t let you explore the intriguing skill system very far, nor does it let you get ahead of the curve in relation to enemy strength. There’s a section right after the boss you really can’t deal with well, but the demo cuts off shortly after you start to visit the second area. It’s just enough of a taste to make you want more. And considering how much charm and fun mechanics Dungeon Treaders has, I’m absolutely buying what Studio Kobako is selling. 

Dungeon Treaders has a planned 2027 release window for PC. A public demo was played for this article as part of the October 2026 Steam Next Fest.

Shacknews staff does not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) in their content. Shacknews strictly prohibits the use of its content for AI training or to generate text, including text in the style or format used for this publication. Shacknews reserves all rights to this work.

Lucas White Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.

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