BitSummit 2025 RPG Roundup

Every summer, the humidity gets beyond oppressive in the beautiful city of Kyoto, but that doesn't stop some of the most dedicated game developers and designers from attending BitSummit year after year. The premier Japanese indie game festival, BitSummit has been the home for indie devs to showcase their wares, link up with friends, and seek business opportunities for over a decade. Big name studios and companies always come to show support (Spike Chunsoft, Cygames, Nintendo, Sony), and a plethora of smaller dev teams are eager to show what they've been pouring their blood, sweat and tears into.

I live in Kyoto and make it a point to visit BitSummit every year, if I'm able, because the sheer amount of talent and love for the craft that is on display is heartwarming to see. It's easy to get lost in the mire of negativity when you see the current state of AAA gaming (looking at you, Microsoft), but one step out onto the BitSummit showroom floor, talking with developers and trying new games — it dispels all of that in an instant. Game development is alive and kicking, despite the attempts of capital to grind it into dust.

While I got to try a number of titles, the name of the joint is RPG Site, and we do focus on RPGs whenever possible, so unfortunately, some cool, non-RPG titles will not be featured. My goal with BitSummit article pieces are to highlight and showcase some indie RPG and RPG-adjacent games that would normally be lost in the vast ocean that is the Steam Marketplace. With that said, let's check out what we got this year:

Voidling Bound

Okay, a third-person shooter doesn't exactly scream RPG, but hear me out: what if I told you it was a third-person shooter with Digimon-esque evolution lines, stat growth and leveling, and personal modifications? Voidling Bound is a game where you capture alien creatures, mind meld with them, and force them to undergo rapid genetic evolution to give them the ability to more efficiently mow down enemies.

The tutorial demo only lets you pick one evolution line, but you are able to see how it splinters off into many different directions. Need your alien scrimblo to spew fire instead of acid? There's a fire evolution path for just that. Or you can go the Organic route, and give your alien creature poisonous shots instead. Perhaps you need more health — before every mission, if you have gained enough experience, you can assign stat points as you see fit. In a way, it's similar to other creature collectors, but instead of forming a team, you're forming a stable and selecting the right tool at the right time.

The devs, Hatchery Games, aim to launch Voidling Bound around Q1 of 2026, but there is a demo out for those curious in exploring forced genetic mutation of non-sentient creatures now.

ShapeHero Factory

I'll freely admit, I'm a little too stupid to play games like Factorio or Satisfactory. I don't really understand how to place things efficiently, I get lost and confused with the amount of options made available to me, and it generally is a genre that doesn't appeal to me much at all. That said, ShapeHero Factory simplifies the factory building genre down in an easily digestible package, so even lugnuts like me can get it.

You have a massive grid with a handful of drawn shapes in front of you. Your goal is to create factory supply chains from these drawn shapes to a portal, along the way making sure you have a harvesting route and a processing route so that you can take basic shapes and convert them into soldiers. Eventually, you can gather resources to upgrade and customize your units, your processing speed and power, and so on in a roguelite setting — allowing for new customizations and builds as you progress through the game.

The tutorial does hold your hand a little too much, but the cutesy graphics and interesting gameplay won me over, so if your brain is big and you like watching supply chains function, give ShapeHero Factory a shot. It's currently in Early Access for $18.99, and has a demo to boot so you can try before you buy.

Wretch: Divine Ascent

During my interview with the developers, Ogopogo, they called this game a "Backpack Battler" (which is a term I will use moving forward), but for the record, Steam has Wretch: Divine Ascent labeled as an Auto Battler. You see, Wretch is all about customizing your chosen hero class by filling his or her backpack full of stuff. Not just junk, mind you, but items that fulfill a specific purpose. A pair of gauntlets that, when attached to a combo string, grant 15% bonus damage, or a potion that triggers at 50% life loss, giving you 15% life back. It's the attaché case management of Resident Evil 4, except attached to an auto-battler PVP game with high fantasy characters.

Games of this kind have been on phones for a little while now, but this is the first time I've seen something like this on Steam — and the quality shows a little. Good voice acting combined with interesting character models and attack animations make Wretch a very compelling game to watch, but the true fun lies in meticulously arranging your bag of garbage to more efficiently do things. Do you sell the potion that clears debuffs to make room for the torch that gives a 15% attack power bonus? What if your next opponent is a debuffer? Thoughts like these were constantly running through my head while playing.

The game has a demo with a functional online asynchronous PVP mode enabled, as well as leaderboards, so you can tap in for nothing — but the game is still in early access, so don't go expecting a fully-finished game. Ogopogo has stated that their primary goals in the near future are to polish the game up, but they already have plans to add more interesting features, such as seasonal restricted item pools, more fluid new player onboarding, and more. Don't let that stop you from experiencing the raw thrill of your Assassin chugging twelve potions at the start of combat and melting through a Knight's armor plating, however.

Algolemeth

If, like me, you spent hours and hours sitting at your desk wondering why your code in Unreal Blueprint was just not working, you might get a little frazzled anytime you see a visual programming interface. When trying Algolemeth, I certainly felt a little bit of stress as I connected nodes, remembering the time that an old professor told me my node grouping was "wack". However, that all melted away once I saw my little dudes navigating the dungeon, killing goblins, opening chests, and navigating the floor with ease — well, until some spike traps took out my softer units.

Algolemeth is a game where your visual programming skills dictate the success or failure of your "golems" as they automatically navigate a route through the maze. You'll be calling functions like "If: Ally HP < 50%, Then: Action: Heal: Target Unit" all through the power of visual programming nodes. The tutorial does a masterful job of explaining how nodes intersect, even if you've never used Blueprint or similar programs in the past.

Combining the edutainment of programming with incredible music from Yuzo Koshiro, composer for the legendary Etrian Odyssey series, and the slick character art of Sanaki, you've got what I believe is going to be an incredibly fun learning experience for those interested in programming, or dungeon crawlers, or both.

For the record, this was my personal pick for Best Game Design at BitSummit. Keep an eye on this one, folks.

SacriFire

SacriFire leans a little more towards the traditional RPG side of things, with instanced battle maps and character stat growth, but still manages to try something different as well. The game has an HD-2D-esque feel, with 2D characters in a 3D space, and the ability to navigate them fairly easily. Encounters are a little too long, but there is a mechanic that allows you to instant-kill up to 5 encounters before needing to fight a real battle to recharge, which does help to mitigate the issue.

Fantastic sprite-work and an interesting story premise do help to sell this one quite a bit, but unfortunately, I was unable to hear the sound or voice-acting (the only station available was a Steam Deck station, with no headphones.) Still, it played well on Steam Deck from what I experienced, and had enough going for it to make me want to play it some more.

Well, that's all for BitSummit! Due to the sheer number of games on display, it's entirely possible I missed a few RPGs to check out — there simply isn't enough time in the day to try every single game at the event. You can check the full list of games here, if you're curious to see what else was on offer. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to check my closet to make sure the Ao Oni statue didn't follow me home...