Back in January, I wrote about From the Top, a roguelike designed for those of us who experienced the specific, unparalleled childhood thrill of detonating an older brother's Beyblade with an imported Japanese Driger V2 on Christmas morning, 2003. It was a promising omen for a subgenre targeting a very specific vintage of millennials. Today, I am pleased to report that the dream is alive and well in Slayblade, a top-battling roguelike currently featured in the Steam Next Fest demo lineup.
Y2K Nostalgia Meets Strategic Battling
While From the Top leaned into a darker aesthetic, Slayblade commits fully to Y2K nostalgia. The game features an airy, Toonami-core soundtrack and pixelated overworld sprites. The pseudo-Beyblades themselves sport the chunky, gratuitous plastic molding sensibilities of the era—though you might find yourself equipping a Wu Tang logo as a component. Don't worry about it; it's for the children.
You step into the shoes of a nameless battler with a singular goal: win the Slayblade World Championship. This victory is tied to a larger mystery involving your father, who vanished after inventing a form of perpetual motion technology that would have solved the energy crisis. The path to the championship involves a days-long run of skating between cash prize battles, using your winnings to buy new parts or register for tournaments. If you need extra cash or experience, you can spend your time mowing lawns or diving into "illegal," high-risk matches—though I'm far too afraid to ask what makes a top-battling match illegal in this universe.
Customization and Arena Chaos
The combat depth comes from the modular nature of your top. Parts are divided into heads, bodies, and tips, each carrying distinct attributes. Weight plays a major role in your top's handling, momentum, and impact, but the real strategy emerges from active effects triggered by hitting "power up cubes" during a match.
The synergy between parts can be chaotic. For instance, the aforementioned Wu Tang logo part halves the time until the next power up cube appears. If you pair that with a Buster body that summons a spin-draining ghost, you can quickly flood the arena with vampiric phantoms. In one of my own runs, I combined a body that drops landmines with a "Flat Earth" tip. The tip flattened the arena's typical bowl shape into a level plane, making it impossible for my opponents to recover once they slid into my explosives, resulting in an easy ring-out.
The Current State of the Demo
As it stands, the Slayblade demo in Steam Next Fest is a rough-around-the-edges proof of concept. The part selection is currently limited, the run cuts off just as you reach the initial tournament, and there is a fair amount of placeholder art and text. Despite that, it is a promising take on a genre I am thrilled to see return. While there is no official release date yet, the demo is available to play on Steam right now.