A rogue-like with a futuristic and parallel world spin on the concept of life and regenration.
It may take a bit to spin up, but when Playism & Cyber Space Biotope’s Million Depth finally does it reveals layer upon layer of both gameplay and narrative ideas.
The 2D sidescrolling game is set in a future without humans, except for one girl and her ship and her desire to head down to the planet below to discover why it’s all gone weird. There she finds the Million Depth, a sort of deep hole in the Earth without a known bottom. That’s where the general pull of the game lies, and how it builds its many systems on top of each other.
The levels are appreciatively short in design. We can battle a group of enemies, find a shop, interact with mechanical beings, or find nothing of importance. We descend down each one by jumping off of ledges, selecting our next path below as we freefall. Do we want to try and take our chances with another battle? Do we hope to land in a good resource hub? There’s some chance at play here, but for the most part it’s not difficult to figure out what we want to do next. Hint: it’s almost always to try and keep building up our gear. At least, it is early on.
The game includes a novel, fun crafting system. We have a floating mallet-type device that we can update and upgrade and grow, but have to do so in specific locations via a grid system. It’s almost like a storage-planning minigame, where we want to arrange and stick stuff together to create our optimal design. We initially start by adding spikes everywhere onto the mallet, making it a pure weapon (my first creation was to add spikes at both ends to that I could bounce the tool back and forth over enemies like a pinball to deliver damage). However as we play and go further we start to realize that we need to balance our device, adding defensive and offensive and aspects to it so that it becomes much more than just a way to “make enemy die.” By one of my later runs my floating mallet essentially had arms all around it, which I used for both defense and offense, and even used it to create a barricade. The game gives quite a bit of customization to make the tool really ours, and it’s something that becomes very engaging to sink time into.
The mallet is only one aspect of the battles. Controlled by the right stick we can move it around to smash into enemies, but we can also move our heroine to do the same, at the same time. Controlling both things on screen can seem like a challenge, but because both the character and the tool are simple, and the early enemies aren’t too fast, it’s not too difficult to get used to.
The game utilizes a phenomenon called Grace. Grace is sort of the game’s loot, and depending on how we fight a battle, we can win better and more versions. The “Grace Value” is determined by how much damage we take and how many enemies we defeat in a row. This idea works out well enough that we feel compelled to get and maintain momentum in battles; it becomes a little more strategic in how we approach a fight than in other games. To keep things clipping, as enemies are defeated the rooms begin to shrink, with walls moving in as the battle continues. This generally makes the fights more intense when there are a ton of enemies coming at us, which once again goes right back to that floating hammer that we need to develop accurately.
The game’s many ideas don’t make themselves apparent right away, instead slowly developing as we chip away at the Earth’s layers. Then, when we finally think we’re onto something, we get hit with a giant “wow” moment in the realization that we’re actually working through parallel strands and are meant to replay and adjust our runs to get better narrative aspects and more endings. There’s even a giant flow chart we have access to that lets us see what we’ve done and what we may want to do next.
Million Depth is a heady rogue-like, but once we’ve started putting in the time, the work, we may be chipping those millions down to thousands and hundreds until we’re finally at the core.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. This video originally appeared in The SideQuest LIVE for December 02, 2025.
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