Carry the Lantern of Eternal Flame, recruit allies, and push across a world map toward the lighthouse.
I had this interesting project sitting in my wishlist that, honestly, I’d completely forgotten about. My apologies, but it’s not always easy to keep track of all the cool things that are out there. In any case, just a few hours ago, the news dropped that CARNEDGE now has a confirmed PC release window set for January 2026.
CARNEDGE by indie dev OneShark is built around a simple job with a bad track record. Once a year, a lone warrior carries the Lantern of Eternal Flame across a decaying world to reach a lighthouse and keep hope alive. The game treats that pilgrimage like a run structure.
Corruption keeps creeping in as the player pushes through twisted lands, picks up allies, and keeps reshaping a build on the fly. Nobody has ever returned, yet the light keeps burning, and the story leans on the idea that death is not the end as long as the Lantern stays in the player’s hands.
CARNEDGE sits in the dark fantasy corner of deckbuilding roguelites, but its fights are described as auto battles driven by your setup. It’s like deckbuilding meets explosive RPG auto battles, where outcomes come from the cards you draft plus the gear, relics, and passives you stack together.
You are shaping a rules engine for your hero, then watching it collide with enemies that want to ruin your run. The store text calls out status-driven chaos as a big part of the feel, with enemies burning, freezing, shattering, and melting while the hero and summoned helpers tear through corrupted monsters.
Each run asks the player to choose cards, then pair them with items and relics to steer the character into a role. The examples given range from a lone tank to a swarm-summoning shaman, with the in-between space left open for hybrids.
OneShark claims more than 300 hand-drawn items, with the detail that each item visually appears on the character during combat, and that’s something I like in video games. It makes gear choices easier to parse at a glance, even when the run is cluttered with relic modifiers and passive bonuses.
Progression is mapped across a world map, the game describes a massive world map where the player chooses paths through story nodes, takes on quests, fights bosses, then keeps pushing toward the lighthouse.
A path choice is not just about difficulty; it is about what kind of rewards a build needs right now. More cards can mean more options, but gear upgrades might be the real power spike if your deck already has a plan.
When a run is built around corruption creeping in, route planning can become its own resource management problem. You are not only surviving fights. You are deciding what risks are worth taking before the build locks into place.
Right now, CARNEDGE is set to release on Steam on January 19, 2026, as a PC game. A demo is available through the Steam page, and below you can find the gameplay trailer.
