It’s fair to say the market is currently oversaturated with Souls-likes. We’re seeing a flood of titles vying for a piece of the Elden Ring pie, but unfortunately, many fall short, resulting in experiences that feel generic and uninspired. But Tombwater clawed its way out of the pile. It’s mean. It’s dirty. It’s going to frustrate the hell out of you. Here’s why you’re going to enjoy every single moment in the game!
Wild Wild West (in a nutshell)
Top-down combat based on stamina and committing to slow attacks.
A “Bullet Economy” that forces you to hit enemies with melee weapons to reload your guns.
Zelda-style map layout with 16 biomes requiring backtracking with new gear.
A “Madness Meter” that fills up and punishes you if you cast too many of the 40 magic spells.
The Meat Grinder Under the Floorboards
Welcome to another game where you’re dying a lot.
In Tombwater, you’re creeping down dirt streets, watching your stamina, and trying not to get mauled by tentacle monsters in cowboy hats. The game is incredibly stingy and it doesn’t just hand you bullets. If you want to reload your shotgun, you have to run up and hit something with a pickaxe. This way, it forces you to play aggressively, to swing and, often, to miss. The game thrives on getting your face full of teeth. It’s hard, simple and, yet, incredibly fun.
To some, Tombwater feels like a classic Zelda-style map wrapped around a punishing combat loop. Hitting a dead end gets you flattened by one of the numerous bosses, making you sigh heavily, curse destiny, backtrack. You’re picking weeds to craft bombs just to survive the next street. We’re counting our blessings and we’re gratefull that the game actually gives us a map and a quest log. The team keeps the pain where it belongs—in the fights, not the navigation.
Building the Boomtown
Making a top-down Souls-like seems like a nightmare, but Moth Atlas—just two guys, Max Mraz and Jake Wagner—knew exactly what they were doing.
They built this game on the bones of Yarntown, Mraz’s crazy 16-bit Bloodborne demake. They used the Solarus engine – an open-source tool usually meant for retro adventure games. That classic exploration skeleton was taken and crammed full of brutal combat and weird western grit. It took in-depth knowledge and great experience to completely avoid the boring dark fantasy stuff we’ve seen a million times. The risk they took paid off because the combat fundamentals actually work.
Molasses in the Mud
A lot of players are furious about how the game feels. It is sluggish. But, we feel like that’s on purpose. If you swing a sword, your character stops dead in their tracks. It feels awful at first in a genre where dodging is everything. Plus, aiming your gun with a controller’s twin sticks is rough. They clearly built it for a mouse, and controller players are begging for aim assist right now.
It’s not totally bug-free, either. NPCs get stuck on stairs all the time. Sometimes that ruins a quest. Sometimes it lets you shoot a scary monster from total safety. Oh, and sometimes you boot up the game and there’s no sound. You just have to mess with the menu to fix it.
Hey there, partner, did yer know that:
Started as a side project based on Yarntown, an old 2D demake of Bloodborne.
Has exactly 25 bosses and roughly 95 enemy types.
Zero voice acting. The story is told through text boxes and the environment, which annoyed some players looking for modern features.
Seven starting classes, including a weak “deprived” class if you really want to suffer.
Watering Tombs, Growing Pains
Tombwater is a miserable but intensely beautiful trap. It mixes cosmic horror with a western setting, and gives you combat that hates you.
We love it.
Souls-likes are not our cup of tea. Fast, slow, it doesn’t matter—we die anyway, usually in some embarrassing, entirely avoidable way. But we love the abuse. That’s why Tombwater feels so refreshing. It’s still an unforgiving meat grinder, sure. But it forces you to “git gud” on a completely different axis.
Narrative (8/10): No boring lore dumps. Touching blood puddles shows you flashes of the town’s awful past. It just works.
Gameplay Mechanics (9/10): Having to punch things to get bullets makes fights intense. The difficulty sliders are a lifesaver if you just want to see the sights.
Audio (8/10): When the sound actually works, it rules. Gunshots crack hard over creepy background synths.
Graphics (8/10): The pixel art is gorgeous and gross. Cute little sprites turn into massive piles of teeth and tentacles..
Overall Score (8/10):A brutal, top-tier action game that makes you bleed for every inch.
ID Card
- Developer: Moth Atlas
- Publisher: Midwest Games
- Engine: Solarus
- Platforms: PC (Steam)
- Release Date: March 31, 2026
- Genre: 2D Top-Down Souls-Like / Action-RPG
Dev & Play Media 
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