In Jarred Defense, which Czech solo developer Mikolas Zuza released on Steam on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, you build the enemy’s road out of the towers meant to stop them. It costs $12.99 (13.49 euros) on Windows, macOS and Linux, with 25 percent off at launch. There are no fixed tower spots and no set path. Every tower you place is a wall as well as a gun, and the robots route around whatever you put down.
So a level goes like this. Robots enter on one side and want the jar on the other. You spend scrap on towers, and each tower blocks a tile, so the shortest route bends. Stack enough of them and the shortest route becomes a long switchback that walks every robot past every gun twice. The catch is that the map fights back. Ice blocks near a heat source melt during play and open a route you did not plan for. Some enemies fly over your walls, some split when they die, and some speed up the longer they travel in a straight line. A lazy corridor gets punished.
The jar holds Yuki, a cat who teleports from jar to jar for reasons the campaign explains over four to six hours. Yuki has opinions about the whole arrangement, and the release notes admit they are not helpful. Past the campaign there is an Endless Mode with leaderboards, optional challenges that earn stars to unlock towers and items, and a level editor with community maps. You can also send waves early for bonus scrap, which is how the good runs get built.
Where the maze went after the Flash era
Building the path yourself is the older idea. Desktop Tower Defense, Paul Preece’s browser game from March 2007, had no set route. The creeps took the shortest way through whatever you built, and the trick was the long meandering corridor. Warcraft III custom maps ran on the same idea a few years earlier. Then the genre’s big sellers went the other way. Kingdom Rush and Bloons TD 6 hand you a fixed road and ask only where the towers sit. When Flash went dark at the end of 2020, the maze game mostly went with it.
Zuza said as much in the announcement. “I couldn’t find the game I wanted,” he wrote, so two years ago he started building one in the evenings, in Godot. He did the code, the art, the trailers and the marketing himself. His day job is leading the content team at Prusa Research, the Prague 3D printer maker, which is not a résumé that usually ends in a tower defense.
The whole game is the routing decision. If a long switchback corridor sounds better to you than a bigger gun, this was made for you, and the price is low for what it holds. Jarred Defense is on Steam now with the launch discount running, and it lists Steam Deck among its platforms.
