Bad House, a dungeon-crawler auto-battler from Kingsway developer Andrew Morrish, has a demo on Steam now, publisher The Arcade Crew announced on Tuesday. Kingsway, Morrish’s solo game from 2017, turned a fantasy RPG into a fake computer desktop, where monsters popped up as windows, loot sat in folders and quests arrived by email. It still holds 92% positive across nearly 1,500 Steam reviews, so this one went straight to the top of my list.
Bad House is due in early 2027 on PC, and there is no price yet. The setup is a rental gone wrong. You move into a house whose last tenant left in a hurry and abandoned everything they owned. There is one rule: stay out of the basement.
You will not stay out of the basement. The Steam page says the place comes “partially furnished with a generous selection of items,” which turns out to mean knives, wands, rings, swords, shields and armor. The basement below is a dungeon that changes every run, and the store page warns of blood, gore and occasional body horror on the way down.
A run starts with a choice of three characters, Blake, Rory or Lou, each with a different playstyle, and the skills you take with you. Fights then play out automatically. Your part is the preparation: the skills you bring and the items you place, like bombs, spells, traps and summons. As you go deeper, you level up, upgrade your equipment and decide when to haul your loot back upstairs before the basement keeps it.
That shifting layout is a familiar idea from this developer. Kingsway also generated a new world for every playthrough and made death permanent, so Morrish has been building games around starting over for almost a decade.
The Arcade Crew is Dotemu’s independent label, and its recent catalog includes Drop Duchy and Abyssus. Most auto-battlers on my list live on a shop screen between rounds. Bad House puts the idea inside an actual dungeon map, from a solo developer who has already made one unusual frame work.
The demo is free on Steam now. If you liked Kingsway’s fake desktop, you already know you want this. If you missed it, the basement is a smaller commitment than an entire operating system.
