# Upcoming survivor-likes worth tracking in 2027 > Tag: HORIZON · Watch list. Published 2026-06-17 by Tom and Ollie, FOXFIRE developers. Refreshed 2026-07-23. Mirrors https://getfoxfire.com/dispatches/upcoming-survivor-likes-2027/. Working developers in the survivor-like / roguelite space publish a watch list of upcoming bullet heavens for late 2026 through 2027 — including ours. Eight entries plus FOXFIRE. Dates are approximate; indie game dates move. **Refreshed 2026-07-23.** Hordes of Fate shipped in Steam Early Access on 22 July 2026 under a new name (Hand of Fate: Hordes: A Hand of Fate Adventure). Kept on the list because Early Access is exactly the kind of live iteration we want to keep watching. Small factual updates elsewhere. --- ## 1. Last Mage Spellcrafting survivor-like where the player composes runes inside a backpack-management grid. Backpack Hero meets Vampire Survivors. Every spell-rune has a specific shape; arranging the grid is the build itself. Demo on Steam (two maps, roughly 25 minutes). - **Why we're watching:** "build depth as a literal spatial puzzle" is brave in a genre that hides build depth in menus. - **What we're worried about:** backpack management is a verb a lot of players bounce off. ## 2. SealChain: Call of Blood Survivor-like built around chain-reaction loot. Items in your inventory link together into Seal formations that trigger combined effects. Closer to spell-crafting than to auto-shooting. - **Why we're watching:** wordless combinatorial discovery is hard to design well; the games that pull it off (Slay the Spire, Inscryption) have communities that keep talking about them. - **What we're worried about:** combinatorial games live or die by combo readability inside the first three runs. ## 3. Hand of Fate: Hordes (was Hordes of Fate) — shipped 22 July 2026 From the Hand of Fate team — deck-building auto-shooter. Construct your run before stepping into the arena. Launched in Steam Early Access on 22 July 2026 under the full title *Hand of Fate: Hordes: A Hand of Fate Adventure*. - **Why we're still watching:** deck-builder layered onto a survivor-like was the obvious-in-retrospect combination someone was going to crack. Now Defiant has. Early Access iteration is the whole story now. - **What we're worried about:** two layers of randomness can multiply rather than compound. The deck choice has to feel meaningful inside the arena, not just before it. ## 4. Monsters Are Coming! Vampire Survivors loop crossed with tower-defence mechanics. Player builds defensive structures and shapes the field as wave intensity climbs. - **Why we're watching:** survivor-like and tower-defence share more DNA than most players realise. Both are about reading wave shape and committing to a defensive posture before the wave arrives. - **What we're worried about:** their pacing has historically pulled in opposite directions. The first ten minutes need to commit to one or the other. ## 5. PUNK (Pixadome) Open-world survivor-like variant. The space you survive in is a real, navigable world rather than an arena. Pixel-art biome exploration crossed with twin-stick bullet hell. - **Why we're watching:** we have a stake — FOXFIRE leans on travel-as-system instead of arena-as-system, and PUNK is exploring a different version of the same thesis. - **What we're worried about:** open worlds are expensive. The survivor-like loop relies on density; the open-world loop relies on space. ## 6. Carouspell Magic-fusion action roguelite. Adjacent to survivor-like. Players combine spell-elements during runs to produce hybrid effects. ARPG-flavoured take on the auto-fire formula. Steam page live; demo coming. - **Why we're watching:** the action-RPG end of the survivor-like is underexplored compared to the bullet-heaven end. The audience that liked Death Must Die is hungry for more of this register. - **What we're worried about:** the more direct the combat, the harder it is to justify the auto-fire layer at all. ## 7. O3: Hollow Descent Dark top-down roguelike from solo developer Simy. Tighter patterns, smaller player hitbox, more dodge-heavy combat than typical Vampire Survivors derivatives. Closer to Touhou with progression than to a bullet heaven. Targeting a 2026 Steam release. - **Why we're watching:** bullet-hell crowd has been adjacent to survivor-like crowd for years without much crossover content for them. - **What we're worried about:** bullet-hell skill curves and survivor-like accessibility pull in opposite directions. ## 8. Warhammer Survivors Licensed entry. Specific characters, factions, aesthetic from Warhammer 40K applied to the survivor-like template. Later-2026 release across PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 1 and 2 — unusually broad platform coverage for the genre. - **Why we're watching:** a strong licensed survivor-like would tell us something about the format's audience reach beyond the indie scene. - **What we're worried about:** licensed games in adjacent genres have a notoriously variable design floor. The licence raises the marketing ceiling and almost never raises the design one. --- ## And ours: FOXFIRE Top-down space recon survivor-like with real thrust physics, evolving weapons, and 18-minute roguelite runs. Five ships share the same controls with materially different feel — Military (baseline all-rounder), Freighter (freight train), Scout (high-skill-ceiling switchblade), ODEC (retro controls + time dilation), Crescent Moon (fused A/D thrust). Targeting Steam Early Access Q1 2027. Shown at Supanova Sydney 19–21 June 2026. - **Why you might want to watch:** if "the survivor-like with movement that actually matters" is a sentence that perks your interest, this is that sentence in playable form. - **What we're worried about:** same as every dev on this list. The genre is full, the audience is sharp, and the bar moves every release. Steam wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4714090/FOXFIRE/ More on FOXFIRE: https://getfoxfire.com/game/ --- ## What this list is and isn't Working developers' watch list. Not a Steam rankings post. We don't have early access to most of these games; the reads are impressions from publicly available material plus the team's collective intuition. This list gets refreshed periodically as games ship, dates move, or new entries emerge worth tracking. --- ## Where to look next - https://getfoxfire.com/dispatches/survivor-likes-we-tune-against/ — five peer survivor-likes we reference while tuning ours - https://getfoxfire.com/dispatches/nova-drift-and-foxfire/ — long-form Nova Drift comparison - https://getfoxfire.com/dispatches/hand-foxfire-to-strangers/ — three days at Supanova Sydney and what we learned - https://getfoxfire.com/game/ — FOXFIRE systems overview - https://store.steampowered.com/app/4714090/FOXFIRE/ — wishlist on Steam Last updated: 2026-07-23