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The Lonesome Guild demo for PC now available - Gematsu

A demo for single-player top-down action RPG The Lonesome Guild is now available for PC via Steam, publisher DON’T NOD and developer Tiny Bull Studios announced.

Here is an overview of the game, via DON’T NOD:

About

In a world consumed by loneliness, only friendship can save the day. Lead a quirky cast in this colorful single-player action RPG full of heart, battles, and bonds that change everything. The world might be lonely, but you don’t have to be.

A Tale of Togetherness in a World Apart

The Lonesome Guild is a single-player top-down action RPG all about togetherness. Embark on a heroic adventure as Ghost, a spirit who wakes to find they hold no memories. The world has become shrouded by loneliness and the mist just keeps spreading, corrupting everyone in its path. Now it’s up to you to get the band back together… even if they’re meeting for the first time.

Six Misfits, One Goal

The ragtag group of unlikely friends you’ll recruit each will bring their own story, quirks, motives, and abilities. Switch seamlessly between the six of them during exploration and combat to navigate Etere, solve puzzles, and defeat enemies!

Bond and Battle

Relationships are the heart and soul of The Lonesome Guild—it’s a party, literally. As your friendship grows, so does your power with new abilities and combos. A party can only be strong if each member is strong too—unravel your new friends’ stories and help them find peace. Unlock side quests, new abilities, and heartfelt chats by the campfire. Together, we’re unstoppable!

Fights That Keep You on Your Toes

Three difficulty levels, a roster of cool abilities, one very powerful Ghost power. Test your might in intense battles where you can switch between characters whenever you fancy and ambush enemies with clever combos. Build your dream team and fight your way through Etere.

A World Worth Fighting for

Etere is full of charm and secrets, mystery and treasures to uncover. From unearthing old secrets in the ruins to gathering round campfires in the forest, there’s always something new around the corner in The Lonesome Guild. Solve puzzles, explore vibrant landscapes, and find shiny things as you restore balance and hope to the world.

The Lonesome Guild is due out for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam this fall.

Watch a new trailer below.

Gameplay Trailer

#The Lonesome Guild #DON’T NOD #Tiny Bull Studio #action RPG #RPG #Gematsu #Youtube

Video Games I Played in November 2025

Unsurprisingly, being furloughed gave me ample time to play games, though given my life and lifestyle it wasn’t really a dramatic change in what I do or how I do it. It’s slightly altered my selection if nothing else, though at this point I could probably get away with not buying a video game for the rest of my life in terms of ‘hours of media I have access to’ vs. ‘hours I have access to’. In that vein, I’ve also been trying to be slightly more aggressive in moving on from a game if I feel that I’m actively not actively interested in any of its mechanics, setting, characters, or story. I have to balance potentially dropping a game that’s failing to grab me that I could ultimately love (NEO: TWEWY took me a year to get past the tutorial) but it also keeps me from putting undue time into action roguelikes and idle games.

The Keeper – Double Fine is a very odd developer. At this point I have to acknowledge that my love of Psychonauts 20 years ago can’t give me rose-colored glasses forever after Brutal Legend, Headlander, Rad, and now The Keeper all disappointed me. Like a lot of their titles, the concept is fascinating and the art is sublime but then you try to play the damn game and wonder why they stopped making point-and-click adventures. Playing as a lighthouse meandering through various complex and strange environments is a fantastical concept, and it would be lovely if the experience of doing so wasn’t ‘Limbo but clumsier’. I’m still gonna play Psychonauts 3.

Blacktail – These devs did the impossible. They made a stealth-archery game where you fuck around in the woods while Megera from Hades negs you as a voice in your head, and somehow despite checking six of my boxes they failed to keep me hooked. It was death by a thousand cuts; the archery was shallow especially after a dozen hours of The Axis Unseen, the writing was clumsy, and moving was constantly tripping on invisible walls or getting walled off by terrain that wasn’t marked off on the map. Their next game is Davy Jones as a Dullahan doing FPS pirate fights and isometric ship battles and if they’ve gotten a bit more polish under their belt I’m very interested despite falling off of this one. It was compellingly strange even if I eventually fell off.

The Lonesome Guild – This is the kind of game where if I could find two of them every month I’d play very little else. In many ways it’s a fairly standard ‘animal people do generic fantasy stuff’ but much like Bug Fables the originality in the setting (a standout being the otter-bats in a seabed desert where all the water was magically forged into a wall around the city), the charm of the characters, and the earnestness that oozes from every pore does a lot to paper over occasional hiccups like stale combat or some glitches in the lategame. I wish the roster was a little smaller as each of the six races has a party member, a NPC from a prior version of the party, and additional tertiary characters from there. A character might go 5+ hours without major progress in their arc, though you level up the skill tree by deepening your friendship with the group so there’s frequently conversations that help keep everyone included. A bit more mechanical complexity like Chrono Trigger member synergies or overworld actions like an Airship Syndicate game would’ve gone a long way, but I was still very fond of this game despite its imperfections.

Lone Fungus: Melody of Spores – I play an uncomfortable amount of metroidvanias. As such, I try not to let each one I play get buried in comparisons so that it can stand on its own merits. That being said, when I saw the kickstarter for this game I looked at the whip attack and instantly knew it was going to be a subpar game. Slavish devotion to the Castlevania combat rhythm is a death sentence, especially in games with more complex movement. This is compounded by the fact that the dev responded to every boss in the first game getting shredded by pogos by making the pogo slower, diagonal, high commitment, and a setup tool for a damage multiplier rather than good for damage itself. The end result feels atrocious. The best part of the game is once again the platforming challenge rooms, but that light is hidden under a bushel as you have to find an NPC in a back corner, read their dialogue, jump into their cauldron, and then you get a confirmation prompt that you want to open the OPTIONAL challenge rooms. It’s far from rare that what’s missing most from a solo dev is an editor and this is yet another game that had phenomenal potential but ends up less than the sum of its parts.

Voidtrain – I’ve been on a bit of an openworldsurvivalcraft kick lately because I like going into dungeons and looting them, and when everything’s a roguelite you can’t keep your loot. Enshrouded was good though is getting overcooked in EA, Abiotic Factor was excellent but mostly scratched my personal itches, and I’ve been looking for something to try solo. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, this game fails on all four pillars of the genre. It’s a train that goes through open voids and small waystations on a track, so the world is very literally on rails. The world is limited to these small islands, so at best you get vignettes with no sense of continuity or place. The survival is keeping your food bar up, and you get a water filter in the first half-hour that makes water for free that you can drink to fill your food bar. The crafting is an endless slog that actively punishes you for trying to make more complex resources, and the basebuilding is limited to a train so density is impossible as you can only build longer and longer. All I wanted was to do randomly generated train heists like something between Void Bastards and Heat Signature. Abiotic Factor had a train heist that was the same every time and I still did that a few dozen times. I need something more. I’ve trained for this.

Hypogea – A perfect video game. You are a robot at the bottom of a hole and would like to not be there. Your buddy gave you a battery and a walking stick. Figure it out from there. Phenomenal movement, impeccable atmosphere, and clever level design lead to an incredibly dense two hour experience. Pseudoregalia still has a larger place in my heart but I’m very happy to have played this.

Skigill – Master Key was a phenomenal Zelda clone and ignited my love of nonograms. I’m very excited for the sequel, and this was mostly an excuse to give the developer a few bucks. It’s a basic survivors game with monochrome graphics and no text making many interactions obscure. The core gimmick is that the map is the skill tree, so you have to balance controlling space and keeping up momentum with being able to stand still on the nodes you want to unlock. It’s an interesting concept but not enough to salvage the fact that this genre was played out years ago.

GIGASWORD – I played the demo of this for 15 seconds to confirm the sword swing felt good. I should’ve played a bit longer. The central conceit of a sword so large it impacts your jump height is cool, and there’s some neat puzzles about needing to find ways to move your sword around. The issue is those puzzles quickly become tedious, the enemy and boss design is poor, and everything is wrapped up in a comically overwrought plot. In a game about a big sword I want to be chopping people in half, I don’t want ten minute cutscenes that are tell-don’t-show about the lore and the world. I’m reminded of a game I unfortunately cannot recall where the protag can’t even swing their sword, and can only attack by dropping it and summoning it back to them. That’s been bugging me for weeks.

Winter Burrow – Simple cozy survival game with 6-10 hours of content. Run around, chat with the locals, improve your house. I appreciate what they were going for but a lot of the crafting progress is blocked by NPC story flags in ways that make progress unpredictable, and the map does a very bad job at distinguishing what’s a hidden path and what’s a boundary. I also ran into a glitch that caused resource nodes to give me 5-10x the usual amount, so there was never a reason to prep food unless I wanted a movement speed buff for a few minutes, because I could always find food in the world. That being said, at the start of the game when my clothes were poor and my map knowledge limited, I very much remembered the stories of kids dying in the snowy forest mere feet from their door because whiteout conditions made navigation impossible. That tension was good, even if it lead to a somewhat boring reprieve.

Worlds – This is someone’s favorite video game. Janky, filled with 2010s edge, equal parts immersive sim and MGS, and with an expansive world with genuinely interesting sci-fi lore it’s a shame I fell off in the first area. The controls just don’t offer the level of precision that the stealth demands, and this is 2010s indie so if you want to respawn at a checkpoint you lose a life (though you can always go back to your last save at a save station). There’s a real difficulty and resource scarcity that rewards cleverness and persistence, but the trouble is that it’s a matter of trust between player and designer that such diligence would be rewarded. That trust was repeatedly undermined by things like the controls making it unclear how to punch a man rather than put him in a lethal chokehold, a dart gun that’s louder than my pistol, and guards spawning from the aether during an alert ruining my fallback positions. I love the design here, it’s a fascinating piece of media, but you have to grit your teeth the entire time.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault – Recettear was a game I fell in love with on release, back in the early days of indies. Somehow, it’s still unmatched in what seems like the slam dunk genre of shopkeeping dungeon crawler though Ever Oasis was very close and I hear good things about Final Profit. Moonlighter was a game that felt like it was close, but everything in it was 5 or 6 out of 10 and needed at least one 8 to really sell itself. Combat was basic isometric roguelike, shopkeeping was brainless with one correct price for each item with no market conditions or customer preferences, crafting was linear, the plot was insipid, the characters nonexistent. Moonlighter 2 is a regression on every axis from that lackluster starting point. They clearly overindexed on making the graphics 3D because mechanically and structurally this is dead in the water. I get early access has the promise of potential improvement, but the only kindness that earns them is that I won’t actively shovel dirt into the grave they’ve dug for themselves.

Subnautica – Most games in which you’re allowed to gather massive amounts of resources are those in which resource scarcity matters. This is where I realized I like the looting and the sorting and the optimization, and less so the survival aspects. It doesn’t help that being underwater looking at fish doesn’t do anything for me, so the stilted progression and bland movement were front and center. Much like metroidvanias, open world games are about their map, and much like metroidvanias when the player can move in 3D through the ambient medium it’s infinitely harder to give that map boundaries and texture. I get how some people love this game but for me it was somewhere below Aquaria and above Dave the Diver.

Treasure Adventure Game – I’m not one to feel like I need to know the full history of a genre before experiencing it, but as I’ve mentioned in previous months I’m trying to both get a better sense for early metroidvania freeware and also be more open to simpler games in general. Still need to try Knytt et al and I haven’t played Cave Story in a decade. Regardless, this is a neat little game with some frustrating game design typical of the era. What ended up making me fall off was the fact that it centers on sailing, so horizontal traversal of the overworld is intensely slow and tedious, especially when backtracking. There’s clearly warp portals eventually, but after three hours I get the gist of it. Maybe if I start jonesing I’ll give the remake a shot.

Total Chaos – After beating Abiotic Factor early in the month I’d been wanting to click on heads and loot shit from abandoned buildings. Survival horror isn’t my scene, but this was on gamepass so I figured it was worth a download. I didn’t get far in because eating moldy bread while slowly running from monsters so I can pull levers isn’t how I like spending my time, but it seemed decently well constructed on the whole. More than anything else I like how you can start the game, get back on your boat to go home, and roll the credits. To hell with these sewers.

Sinners Verdict - https://dicegambit.itch.io/sinners-verdict

I’m glad there’s Psuedoregalia clones now. This one’s very clearly a game-jam game and is only a half-hour long or so, but even with the understandable lack of polish the movement is fun and the map has some cleverness to it. Fun little blip.

Death’s Gambit: Afterlife – I’d given this a shot back in 2020 and fell off after about an hour. I’m now better at parrying, more versed in both metroidvanias and soulslikes, and have a deeper jank tolerance so I gave it another run. This time I made it about two hours. For some reason Hollow Knight is the only soulslike metroidvania to understand that the central mechanical pillars are map interconnectivity, the use of corpse runs to incentivize returning to areas of failure, and difficulty that is more player mastery/knowledge than stats. So many others, Death’s Gambit included, focus on the ephemera; class systems that barely matter, fiddly stat systems with poorly explained effects, cumbersome animations, packs of archers that stunlock you. There’s some neat things here like how you get large numbers of estus flasks and need to sacrifice them to level up your remaining flasks, and how you drop one at places you die rather than currency. However, that’s not enough to save the mechanical staleness.

White Lavender – I’d had this on the wishlist for a while, mostly because it was recommended by the same circles that liked FlyKnight. Despite my love-hate relationship with soulslikes I think there’s some juice for me in King’s Field-likes, and being a little bug certainly helps. It’s a short 3 hour soulslike, the balance is crap, the story is simple. I had a good time even with some glitches, though later bosses were damage sponges best dealt with by very very slow games of keepaway and poking them exactly once during each vulnerability window.

Borderlands 3 – I still want to click on heads and loot shit, and that means going back to the well. I have spent an uncomfortable amount of time with Borderlands as a series. 500 hours in 1. 900 hours in 2. 250 hours in the Pre-Sequel. Before restarting this month I had ‘only’ 75 hours in 3. Between the scuffed launch on EGS and the performance issues it was already a tough sell on release, but coming back I’m reminded just how starkly 3 is far and away the worst one. Even by the standards of the series the story is flimsy, the characters are moronic and spiteful, the jokes seem designed to avoid landing, and through it all there’s a serious malignance that seems to hold the player in active contempt. Guns feel fine but power is overly centralized in the unique effects of legendaries and the maps are sprawling with nothing to help the player flow from objective to objective. Maybe 4 fixed some of this, but I’m not buying that until it’s $10 with all DLC in 2027.

Severance: Blade of Darkness – I see this recommended often for people wanting Hyborian hack-and-slash, and I can see why. It’s a very strange historical piece, with tank controls and a button to cycle what item near you is highlighted so you can eat fruit and burn barrels with a lit torch. There’s a lot of ambition here, and the result is a tone piece where you need some combination of nostalgia, patience, and practice to persevere. I found it a little too stiff to continue playing, but it’s a fascinating game and once again makes me wonder where sword and sorcery games would’ve ended up without Demon’s Souls.

Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody – I genuinely do not know why certain games charm me with their lack of polish and others earn my immediate disdain. There’s some combination of earnestness, ambition, and genuine expressiveness that gives me infinite patience for some games, and part of why I started keeping a journal at all was to try and understand why. One criteria I’ve found is ‘similarity to Vexx’ and boy howdy would I understand if this was made by someone who was once a kid who spent a summer playing exclusively Vexx and Wind Waker. The claw gauntlets are only for climbing, but they’re here. There’s Prince of Persia wall running. There’s BotW climbing on every surface. There’s Wind Waker sailing. There’s a Just Cause grappling hook. There’s some serious balance issues, the map is poorly laid out, I softlocked myself in a dungeon and only escaped by jumping off a cliff and throwing a fruit at a lever in midair so that I could land on a floating box two stories below during the cutscene of it activating. However, they’re trying something. I’m reminded of Astor: Blade of the Monolith or The Knightling where the game is made almost entirely out of problems but there’s a heart to it. Someone loved this game. I can love it too.

Constance – If Zefyr is a janky mess where I smiled through the problems, Constance is a decently polished game that undermined itself to the point that I not only dropped it but returned it. Bosses and enemies were all cliches, movement abilities were reasonably fluid but tied to a mana system that dealt HP damage if overused making platforming attrition extremely punishing, traversal was a chore with blind jumps and healing exclusively through environmental objects, and while the art was very pretty it did nothing to differentiate areas especially with a map that was too simple to navigate by (even with them taking the screenshot pins from The Lost Crown, especially since that meant they gave very FEW pins). What really killed the game was the writing. I was already leery when it started with generic narration snippets about self-doubt capped off with the narrator punting through the 4th wall with some cliché “she disobeyed me” yadda yadda. It was dumb in The Stanley Parable and it’s dumb here. It got worse when it was clear this was all a metaphor for burnout with enemies shaped like household clutter and every NPC talking about how much potential the player has. It then became even more brazenly on the nose after the first boss where I’m forced to click through a cutscene of the main character in the real world answering slack messages, moving files around, and overall displaying a complete inability to establish boundaries, communicate with her teammates, protect her work-life balance, or function as a human being. This is not ‘relatable problems’ this is masturbatory exultation of the failures of the creator in real life, akin to the innumerable films about how being a starving actor is the true apex of the human condition. A human can be pathetic, broken, useless, malignant, and yet still worthy of their inherent dignity as a person. A character must be interesting.

Metroid: Samus Returns – I hadn’t played this since release in 2017. At the time I liked it well enough, but that was back when my concept of Metroid was enjoying Metroid Prime and having played it and Prime 2 several times. I wanted to wash the taste of Constance out of my mouth, and I was also morbidly curious how many of the issues in Dread could be seen nascent here. The answer is that all of them are here. The free aiming that absolves the designer of needing to design maps and enemy placements with any regard. The obsession with melee counters. The mana system used as a resource gate for basic utility. The ‘cinematic’ bosses. The one-way passages and story gates (though much of this is straight from the Metroid 2 source material). It’s baffling how they cut to the quick of what Castlevania actually was when reinventing it for Lords of Shadow, but completely missed the mark here. My 3DS’ circle pad cracked when playing after decades of service, so we’ll see if I get back to it once I fix that.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengenace – My first replay of this was in 2023, which was my first time beating it. Since then, I’ve played MGS 1-4 and have a much deeper understanding for the lore, setting, and writing style. This gives me the ability to respect and appreciate the deftness with which all of that is discarded. Raiden tossing a Metal Gear is not just for bombast and visual spectacle, it is to reinforce that the old paradigm is not at play. Nations as a concept are failing as PMC cyborgs give disproportionate power to the highest bidder, and so to does the previous symbol of a Gundam-esque monopoly on force cease to matter. This is not a war of materiel. This is a war of concepts and individuals. Mechanically the game is still sublime, and having played Nine Sols and Sekiro the past two years means that I’m able to play on hard without substantial trouble because I’m far better at understanding the actual combat rhythm. Sometimes you still get ratfucked in a corner by a wombo combo but what can you do, that’s Platinum for you.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin – A year ago, as a kindness to a friend, I bought Castlevania Dominus Collection and played Dawn of Sorrow. Although I concluded quickly that it was worse than Lords of Shadow, I was still going to beat it and because I had brain worms I was also going to spend a lot of time farming drops in a game where the luck stat is bugged. To entertain myself I needed a podcast and I turned to Til Death Do Us Blart, a podcast in which five men hold eternal vigil to rewatch Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 every Thanksgiving and review it. Should they die, another will take their place. Playing a 6/10 Castlevania and farming drops while listening to over 10 hours of Paul Blart discussion sent my brain through a rock tumbler. The end result is that Thanksgiving = Paul Blart = Castlevania, and so here we are. Game’s fine, the dual character gimmick isn’t used for anything particularly inventive but it’s here. Portraits as submaps solve some of the structural issues of Castlevania map design but at the cost of cohesion. I’m trying to be better about getting every drop from every enemy but when I get a 20% increase in power from farming a new sword it’s hard not to just flit in and out of a doorway for a bit.

#video game review #vexx #the lonesome guild #metroidvania #Hypogea