We found some absolutely wild genre mash-up combinations at Play Days this year. One of the most inventive was roguelike, twin-stick shooter Erosion. Using both joysticks in the fashion of the legendary ’90s classic Smash TV, you control main character Pop running and shooting freely in 360 degrees of motion. The control of that 360-degree range is effortlessly fluid and its fun just running and shooting in random directions to see how much control you have over everything. Erosion operates in a top-down, twisted perspective in a gorgeous hyper-stylized pixel art aesthetic. Pop looks cut from classic Western cowboy fiction, but the world is something of a neon futuristic old west. In true roguelike fashion, you can navigate an overworld and then venture into dungeons for a focused dungeon crawl.

Things get wild and colorful quickly as Pop starts to mow down the legions of monsters he encounters. We were shown a variety of amazing weapons. The old school DOOM player in us fancied the spread shot of the shotgun, but there’s something just awesome about an elaborate load-out of a laser shooter complete with dash-invoked security turrets. Pop has been granted special abilities and to some extent the ability to come back to life by a mysterious entity called Santa Muerte. But unlike many roguelike dungeon crawling games where you just respawn and progress with cumulative benefits, in Erosion there are dire consequences. Pop’s daughter has been captured by an evil gang lieutenant and he is on the guest to rescue her. If you die three times (one proper death all combined) you do come back to life, only ten years later in time. That means your daughter has aged ten years in captivity. The developers on hand from Lyrical implied while at first she may welcome her rescue, after enough decades pass, she may grow to resent you. And yes, after enough time, she simply won’t be alive anymore. So Erosion encourages you to hustle but also to try to avoid dying at all costs.

We got to see some exploration of the overworld by the game’s version of a trusty steed, a souped-up hover bus. There are towns to visit and overworld enemies a plenty. We got to experience just some of the wild ways that your choices can drastically change consequences for the future of the world. We met a cult all clad in chicken-inspired attire that worship their own god the Great Ol’ Rooster. They ask you to massacre a nearby town’s residents so they can move in themselves. You could side with the town and take out the cult, but you find out when moving forward in time that the chicken cult actually becomes a functioning community. We’re told that if you backed the local villagers and their mayor and take out the cult, the mayor basically becomes a slavelord enslaving his village. It seems consequences are not particularly easy to divine in this morally ambiguous, neo old west world. With Erosion boasting over 100+ weapons and abilities, we can’t wait to play this one more when it comes out in 2027.