Volatiles is an upcoming action roguelike that reimagines the tile-by-tile map building of board games like Betrayal at House on the Hill and Dorfromantik as a gory, first-person survival shooter. Developed by a small studio led by game director Ian Dovhan and lead software engineer Fritz Copes, the title asks players to wake inside a mysterious facility where scientists claim to be helping them while secretly dunking them into a sensory deprivation tank to fight monsters born from their own haunted minds.
The premise sets up an uneasy alliance: the researchers around you insist they have your best interests at heart, yet the same people keep plunging you into darkness and forcing you into combat with horrors that seem to live inside your own skull. When consciousness returns, each new roguelike run begins in a single tile immediately swamped by nightmarish creatures.
Defeat the wave and you level up, which lets you place another tile next to the first. This expands the map, bolsters your character’s skills, and summons a fresh wave of enemies in an endless loop of expansion and survival.
If you have played titles like Blue Prince or Into The Restless Ruins, this approach to progression will feel familiar. With each move expanding the map and unlocking new abilities, players gradually assemble both a character and an arena from which to fight.
A Different Origin Story
Though Volatiles shares DNA with recent roguelikes that reward incremental map expansion, its creators insist they arrived at the concept independently. “This was back around March of 2023, and at that point none of us had ever heard of Blue Prince,” game director Ian Dovhan tells Gamer24h. “I don’t think it was even announced back then.”
Dovhan says the inspiration for the map building originally came from playing Dorfromantik, the chill tile-placing strategy game whose satisfying mechanics got him thinking about applying them to something more aggressive.
“What if you had an action-survivor-like game where you built the map yourself? What if your character’s strength was dictated by how you build? What if weapons, abilities, and health were all tied into the environment itself?”
Ian Dovhan, Volatiles Game Director
The Map Is Your Character Sheet
The tiles you place are not all created equal. Some award new weapons, others buff particular stats, but they each carry their own architecture that can prove decisive in upcoming firefights. As players build the character they want to play, they must simultaneously think about the geography they are laying down.
“You can decide to make a labyrinthine hellscape, at the risk of trapping yourself,” lead software engineer Fritz Copes explains. “You can build big open spaces, but you might run out of cover and escape routes. You could prioritise getting autonomous turrets and exploding barrels. Sometimes you might have to choose between advancing towards a point of interest, healing, or an ability that makes your bullets bounce off walls.”
Copes says those are the kind of strategic dilemmas the team is “always trying to throw at the player,” turning every run into a balancing act between power and positioning.
A Cartographer’s Take on Character Development
There is another layer to this process. Players control a character with no memory, and the tiles describe who that character is, along with their strengths and weaknesses. As players expand outward across the map and alter their tools, they are effectively reading a reflection of their own character screen.
The result feels almost like a cartographer’s take on a character sheet, raising questions about how much of each expansion merely redescribes who your character always was versus inscribing an entirely new personality. Whether that metaphor runs deeper than intended remains open to interpretation, but even stripped away, Volatiles still stands as a gory survival shooter with a genuinely interesting tile-placing mechanic at its core.
Looking Ahead
The studio is now inviting players to watch how the concept develops as it moves toward release. With its blend of strategic map building and visceral combat, Volatiles aims to carve out a distinct corner of the roguelike genre—one where every tile you place shapes not just your battlefield, but who you become while fighting through it.
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