The theatre went dark, and the players woke up.
Snarekin is a monster-collecting roguelike staged on a Victorian toy theatre. Every one of its 151 creatures is a jointed card puppet on brass pins: engraved, washed in watercolour and jerked across the boards in stop-motion, while a paper audience in three rows cheers, jeers and throws things at the stage.
You are the hand that sets them on their marks. Pick a lead, take your troupe on tour, snare the performers you beat, and fill the cast list one engraving at a time.
Battles are turn-based and easy to read: no hidden stats and no reflex tests. Nine types on one small wheel decide who hits hardest, so the right move is always something you can work out.
- Catch what you beat. A creature can only be snared once it falls, so even a boss has to be earned. Throw a snare, watch the cage rock, and hope.
- Build your own movesets. Moves aren't born, they're made: 46 abilities crafted from the loot creatures drop, fitted to any performer in four slots.
- Make every use count. Each move has a limited number of uses for the whole tour, so a long run is a question of what you save for the finale.
Myths, machines, spirits and household objects, each cut to its own silhouette: a moth whose abdomen is a lit gas mantle, a parlour stove whose grate is its teeth, a weeping willow with eyes behind its fronds, the fly-loft itself come alive with ropes and sandbags.
Every creature is printed Penny Plain until you catch it. Then it is brushed into colour, Twopence Coloured, and stamped as a fresh print in your cast list. A rare few take the stage under a shower of tinsel.
Spend a crafted key to play a venue: four scenes and a boss finale. Twenty venues across five acts, from Ember Grove to the Backstage Abyss, each with its own painted set and its own cast to find. If the whole troupe faints you are thrown out, but everything you caught or looted on the way is yours to keep.
Play the final act and the Endless Curtain rises: a stage that never ends, deeper and stranger with every floor, with checkpoints, richer loot, rising shiny odds and a record to beat.
Between tours, the theatre is yours to run.
- Gather. Bring a performer to the forest, the wheat field, the fishing spot or the mine and harvest goods off a conveyor belt as fast as you can press. Keep the audience hyped for double drops and rarer finds, and hire stagehands to keep the belt moving while you are away.
- Craft. Cut keys, brew draughts and tonics and twist snares in the props room. Put anything on the shopping list and the backstage village tells you when it is ready.
- Breed. Board up to four performers in the nursery. Win battles and eggs appear, with a chance to inherit their parents' moves and better odds of a shiny.
The crowd is part of the fight. Win and the house fills; lose and they walk out. Mid-battle they toss snares and goods onto the stage, patch up your performer, heckle the foe, and now and then hit the wrong side with a prop. Land super effective blows in a row and they start to chant. After every fight the curtain call deals out your takings, the rarest find saved for last.
Somebody left the ghost light burning on the empty stage, and it seems very glad you came back. It is gentle, a little wry, and not telling you everything.
The story is told the theatre's way: in short interludes between acts, in torn leaves of the prompt script pasted into the cast list, in pencilled notes in the margins, and under the boards, for anyone who goes looking. How the play ends is up to you. The theatre remembers.
- 151 creatures to catch, each with a shiny form
- 20 venues across five acts, plus the Endless Curtain
- 46 abilities to craft and fit to any performer
- Keyboard, mouse or controller, with every button rebindable
- Larger text, high-contrast lettering, reduced motion, and type names printed wherever a colour is used
- A light print setting for modest machines
- Steam Achievements and Steam Cloud saves
