The releases from the past few days are probably the peak of November, with plenty of interesting RPGs and strategy titles now available, meaning lots of new things to consider for my faithful and timely recap.
Today’s lineup has a bit of everything, including a few entries that stretch the boundaries of turn-based, even if only slightly. Among these releases, three titles definitely stand out for me, but I won’t say which ones here in the intro.
With that said, here’s the best new stuff you can dive into this weekend, which, for me, is a rainy one, perfect for some gaming.
Kingdoms of the Dump
- Developers: Roach Games, Dream Sloth Games
- Platforms: PC
- Release Date: November 18, 2025
- Steam Page
The first of the three titles that have my attention this week is definitely Kingdoms of the Dump. After a long development cycle, this intriguing JRPG is finally available.
It wears its SNES love on its sleeve but pushes the joke way past a simple “trash” gimmick. Set in the Lands of Fill, it follows Dustin Binsley, a literal Trash Can Knight, as he marches across the five and a half kingdoms to clear his name, rescue a trash-picked king, and hold back the toxic Grimelin army before the whole dump tips into war.
The world is a full-on garbage fantasy: tin-shack towns, junkyard fortresses, and dungeons built from stacked refuse, all brought to life with chunky pixel art and a Mode 7-style overworld that feels straight out of the 16-bit era.
Battles play out on a 3×3 grid, with timed hits that echo Super Mario RPG, and exploration leans on character swapping: each of the six heroes has a unique field ability, from rusting metal to climbing, shooting, or bubbling across gaps, which lets you treat towns and dungeons almost like light platforming stages.
Built in Godot by two real-life janitors who funded it through a successful Kickstarter, Kingdoms of the Dump lands on PC (Windows, macOS, and Linux via Steam) as a very direct love letter to EarthBound, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VI, but with its own weird, earnest identity.
Rune Ark
- Developers: WelesGames
- Platforms: PC
- Release Date: November 18, 2025
- Steam Page
I talked about this very distinctive RPG in one of my past lists, though I don’t remember exactly which one or how long ago. Anyway, Rune Ark is a dark fantasy RPG that splices match-3 combat with dungeon crawling under a crumbling kingdom’s castle, with you in the role of a young squire who stumbles onto an ancient threat and ends up fighting for the fate of the realm.
Each descent takes you into procedurally generated dungeons where tile matches control your attacks, blocks, and special abilities, so positioning gems on the board matters as much as building stats and equipment.
Outside of combat you move through hubs, upgrade skills, craft gear, and talk to NPCs in visual novel-style scenes, with your choices shaping alliances, rivalries, and several possible endings.
Released on November 18, 2025 for PC via Steam, it supports full audio and subtitles in nine languages and targets players who like their puzzle RPGs with a stronger narrative spine and some roguelite replayability.
Hostile Takeover
- Developers: Whispering Spider Games
- Platforms: PC
- Release Date: November 19, 2025
- Steam Page
Another tactics title I find really interesting is Hostile Takeover. A cyberpunk roguelite tactical RPG where you control a small team of contractors hired for impossible jobs against giant corporations, with every action driven by a deck-building system.
Each character is a distinct class with its own card pool and custom cybernetics, and cards handle everything from movement and attacks to shields and trick abilities, all powered by a shared “power” resource that resets to zero each round and is rebuilt by discarding cards, forcing you to decide who gets to act and who fuels the team.
Runs play out across procedurally assembled corporate facilities built from handcrafted combat maps, hazards, events, and black market shops, while permanent upgrades and cybernetic mods shift how a character functions over time, rewarding synergies between builds.
Released on November 18, 2025 for PC via Steam as a single-player, turn-based tactics deckbuilder with pixel-art presentation and Steam Cloud support, it targets players who enjoy careful card economy and positioning rather than pure damage racing.
Demonschool
- Developers: Necrosoft Games
- Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch
- Release Date: November 19, 2025
- Steam Page
Of course, Demonschool is the second of the three I was looking forward to the most, despite the countless delays it went through.
It drops players onto Hemsk Island as Faye, a first-year university student who also happens to be the latest in a line of demon hunters, juggling lectures, friendships, and an encroaching apocalypse.
Structured as a 10-week “school term,” it blends social sim elements, planning your daily schedule, taking on side activities, and building bonds with a cast of 15 party members, with compact, puzzle-like tactical battles on an isometric grid where motion equals action.
Each turn is split into a planning phase and an execution phase: you line up moves for your four-person squad, then watch them play out all at once, chaining dashes, knockbacks, stuns, and combos to push grotesque demons away from rifts between the human and demon worlds.
With free rewinds during planning, it aims for fast, readable tactics rather than crunchy number crunching. Backed by vivid, horror-tinged visuals, big character portraits, and a strong sense of style, Demonschool is out now on PC (including Steam Deck, where it’s Verified), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
Sliding Hero
- Developers: Silent Chicken
- Platforms: PC
- Release Date: November 20, 2025
- Steam Page
Sliding Hero takes the classic “ice floor” puzzle idea and stretches it across a whole Metroidvania-style mansion.
You play Luca Sicomoro, a military man trapped in a sinister 18th-century Venetian villa where every move sends you sliding in a straight line until you hit something. Built around that single rule, the game turns both navigation and combat into logic problems as you bounce off walls, use hazards, weapons, and artefacts to line up attacks, and try to avoid holes and traps that reset the room.
The villa itself is an interconnected map inspired by Carnival masks and baroque architecture, full of secret passages, locked doors, shortcuts, and eccentric NPCs that open new routes as you gain tools and knowledge.
Released on November 20, 2025 for PC via Steam and available in eight languages including English and Italian, Sliding Hero sits in that niche between Sokoban-style brainteasers and exploratory Metroidvanias, with its demo already praised for its weird, carnival horror mood and slide-based movement.
Xenopurge
- Developers: Traptics
- Platforms: PC
- Release Date: November 20, 2025
- Steam Page
A small genre exception goes to Xenopurge, which is a tactical auto-battler that puts you in a remote command chair rather than on the ground, orchestrating an elite squad as they sweep derelict facilities and starships crawling with alien threats.
Missions play out through a bank of retro-futuristic computer screens, where you plot routes, set behavior priorities, and issue limited orders while your troops act semi-autonomously, making anticipation and planning more important than twitch reactions.
It mixes real-time tactics with roguelite structure: runs through procedurally generated interiors yield biomass and gear for upgrades, new squad recruits, and different loadouts, while failure feeds into long-term commander progression and new variants.
Inspired by Alien and Space Hulk, it leans hard into its text-heavy, late-’70s interface style to sell the tension of listening to marines report in from out of sight, and it’s out now on PC via Steam in Early Access, developed by Traptics and published by Firesquid, with very positive reviews highlighting its atmosphere and command-focused design.
Wretch: Divine Ascent
- Developers: Ogopogo
- Platforms: PC
- Release Date: November 20, 2025
- Steam Page
Here again, we’re looking at something that isn’t truly turn-based, but rather an autobattler built around inventory-driven mechanics and item optimization.
It’s called Wretch: Divine Ascent, and it takes the backpack-battler idea and builds a full 1v1 tactical auto-battler around it, casting you as a “wretch” climbing a brutal divine trial in a grim medieval arena.
Each match is about how you pack your inventory: weapons, skills, and relics are arranged in a grid-style backpack, and linking their shapes and symbols creates attack chains that then play out automatically once the round starts.
Between fights, you shop for new gear, fuse items into stronger versions that can’t be bought outright, and adjust your loadout to counter opponents whose own builds can hard-counter specific moves if you’re not careful.
Runs layer in roguelike structure with different characters, unlockable perks, and escalating difficulty as you chase win streaks, and early Steam reception has been very positive since its November 19, 2025 launch on PC, helped by a small roadmap that already promises balance tweaks and a free Musketeer character for all owners by the end of the year.
Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked
- Developers: Resolution Games
- Platforms: PC, PlayStation, VR
- Release Date: November 20, 2025
- Steam Page
And the last of the three standout titles, at least in my view, is Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked. A co-op tactical RPG that turns D&D’s Forgotten Realms into a fully digital tabletop, mixing minis, cards, and dice with streamlined, pick-up-and-play structure.
Built by Resolution Games as a follow-up to Demeo, it lets up to four players command classic D&D classes like paladin, sorcerer, ranger, fighter, bard, and rogue through turn-based battles where card-driven abilities, positioning on the grid, and d20-style checks all feed into your choices.
Instead of a single dungeon run, Battlemarked is built around full campaigns set in locations such as Neverwinter and Icewind Dale, with branching events, side quests, and persistent character growth via skill trees and gear.
It supports both VR and flat-screen play with full cross-play across Steam (PC, Mac, and PCVR), PlayStation 5 and PS VR2, and Meta Quest devices, and launched on November 20, 2025 at around $29.99, already drawing “mostly positive” early Steam reviews from players who want a lighter, more social take on tactical D&D without a dungeon master.
Project Thea (E.A.)
- Developers: MuHa Games, Eerie Forest Studio
- Platforms: PC
- Release Date: November 20, 2025
- Steam Page
Another very interesting title, one that the always-reliable Dinenae had a chance to try out and share more details about, is Project Thea.
We are talking about a dark, turn-based strategy-survival RPG from MuHa Games, set in a retro-futuristic wasteland where Slavic folklore collides with broken machinery and failing colonies, now out in Early Access on PC via Steam with a launch discount.
You wake as the Alloy, tasked with keeping humanity’s last settlement alive: rebuilding the city, sending custom-made characters (with selectable gender, class, and race) into dangerous zones, and juggling food, supplies, and research while story events and companions pull you down branching narrative paths.
Exploration feeds into tactical, card-based combat where decks, positioning, and quick choices decide whether your scavenging team walks home or becomes another ghost in the ruins, and the current build already offers a full playable loop with colony management, crafting, cooking, multiple party members, and the promise of more areas, events, and systems as Early Access develops.
Void Marauders
- Developers: Autarca
- Platforms: PC
- Release Date: November 21, 2025
- Steam Page
“Sleeper hit,” “dark horse,” and “under the radar” might all be fitting terms to describe Void Marauders, which finally leaves its long Early Access voyage behind with a 1.0 launch that puts players in command of a pirate starship and a motley crew of mercenaries, mixing a procedural campaign map with turn-based tactical battles against human, alien, and robotic enemies.
Each run is about recruiting soldiers from different classes and species, kitting them out, and dropping onto ships, colonies, and installations to board, loot, or blow them apart, then hauling the spoils back to trading stations for better gear and ship upgrades.
There’s a light management layer tying it together: you have to keep an eye on crew health, pay, and loyalty, since neglected pirates can desert, mutiny, or solve the problem by throwing you out an airlock, while the wider campaign pushes you toward tracking down and capturing the legendary vessel known as The Omen. Void Marauders is out now on PC via Steam with support for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
That’s everything of real substance, I think, for this week. I’m obviously looking forward to your comments on the new Reddit channel, which seems to be heating up and filling out just the way I hoped. With that, I wish you a fantastic weekend. Ciao
