Slay the Spire: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan

Bit Oz -Wonder Crusher- Our home

Our own read-and-build game. A shooter x roguelite where you aim it yourself, but the moment you go to fire, an aim line shows how the shot travels and where it lands (Aim Mode slows time so you line it up like billiards). So it is not about landing the hit. You read the situation it creates and rebuild your next move in real time, while skill cards and reflective walls warp that line and flip the whole board.

Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend Buried gem

An MTG-style five-color mana system poured into a Slay the Spire deckbuilder. Which colors you commit to shifts the whole board. Loved in Japan and China, almost unknown in the West.

Mortal Glory 2 Buried gem

A turn-based gladiator-team roguelike. You recruit a squad, read each matchup, and draft counters and perks run by run. Brutal and deep, yet barely known in the West at a few hundred reviews.

Spell Tonaeru Buried gem

A roguelite where you do not just build spells, you spell them out by moving across a Japanese kana board to trace each incantation while bullets fly. Very Positive in Japan at 357 reviews and 97 percent, but it has no English support, so the West cannot read it yet.

ELbab Buried gem

A roguelite auto-battler set in an endless library, made by a Japanese solo dev who calls it Path of Exile meets Slay the Spire. You pick tiles to design a build, then the battles run on their own. Very Positive in Japan at 129 reviews, but only 15 English reviews, so the West has barely found it.

Shooters, Ready! Buried gem

A Japanese solo-dev FPS roguelite where you clear rooms against the clock, then spend leftover time buying cards to rebuild your weapon mid-run. Overwhelmingly Positive in Japan at 741 reviews and 99 percent, but its UI has no English, so the West has barely found it.

Harumachi Toroidal Buried gem

A Japanese doujin-circle game where conversations are card battles: you loop the last ten days before graduation on a remote island, fail and reset to day one, and deepen ties with twelve classmates to uncover the island's mystery and a self-proclaimed demon's true aim. Very Positive in Japan at 70 reviews and 94 percent, but with no English support, the West cannot read it yet (0 English reviews).

One Turn Kill Buried gem

A roguelite deckbuilder in which drawing a card from your deck is itself the cost of playing it, and every battle is a forced single turn: fail to kill the enemy before that one turn ends and you lose outright, developed by DenDen, a Japanese doujin circle that grew out of a 2021 winter hackathon-winning project built by members of traP, the student game-development circle at Institute of Science Tokyo, and published by the Tokyo indie publisher Waku Waku Games, the solo-run label of Ryuji Oyanagi since it split from Chorus Worldwide in 2022. You build a 20-card deck and open every fight with a 5-card starting hand, and because drawing itself spends your one resource, every card you pull toward a kill is a card you can no longer hold in reserve, so a run is less about surviving many turns than about proving, in that single instant, that your whole deck was built to end the fight before it can even properly start. Deck construction carries no randomness: skills and cards are earned through a persistent unlock system rather than random run rewards, so once you have found a combo it stays yours to execute again, reliably, across a roughly seven-hour, time-loop story told through five escalating difficulty tiers. Every card played triggers its own character animation, so the deck you have built is not just read off a hand, it is watched. The developer has named Slay the Spire directly as the influence behind the game's battle and card design, alongside Hades for structure and SANABI and A Space for the Unbound for how the story is staged. Released on January 15, 2026, it is Very Positive at 96 percent over 1,372 reviews, a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated assets and, by Steam's own content descriptors, nothing sexual. It fully supports English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese, interface, full voice acting, and subtitles alike across all four, and about 472 of its 1,372 reviews, roughly 34.4 percent, are already in English; an English-language YouTube review and a review from the English indie blog Gaming Parrot already exist, and it has a Metacritic page, but no major Western outlet or publisher-led push has picked it up yet, so real room remains for it to travel further west.

Harusuberiya Chronicle 2.5 Buried gem

Per Steam's own listing, this is a deckbuilding game designed around roughly an hour of play per session, a side story set in the world of the long-running 'Harusuberiya Chronicle' series. Legion commander Capena Nostiekrocca has lost most of her forces to a battle fought in dense fog, and even forgotten what her own legion once looked like; her scattered command ability is represented as a deck of 'command cards,' with victories in battle earning new cards. Losing is survivable: defeat grants 'lessons' that let you discard unneeded cards toward a stronger deck, but lose enough that your legion's ability to keep fighting is fully spent, and the 54th Legion, nicknamed the 'Lost Legion,' is gone for good. That legion is otherwise made up of undead girls serving a necromancer titled the Black Dragon Duke, Lord of the Graveyard, and the store text is upfront about the tone it's going for: a small-scale, cheerful game about tending to an undead girls' legion and 'flirting' with enemies on the battlefield, capped with a knowingly theatrical Latin-flavored flourish. Per Steam's own content warning, light bloodshed and violence depicting the war are present in both text and art, though not the main focus, and there is a bathing scene, which Steam's own content descriptors classify only as general mature content, not sexual content. Made and self-published by doujin circle Yashioji Tenkai Kessha, whose blog and Steam curator page confirm over a decade of activity; the Harusuberiya Chronicle series itself traces back more than ten years as a fan derivative of the Japanese freeware strategy game Valentooga, with an active Japanese-language fan community and a novel spinoff sold through Melonbooks, and this '2.5' marks the circle's first release on any digital storefront. Per the developer's own note, doujin convention and personal principle mean no individual discount is ever planned for this title outside of bundles. Released at ¥1,000, it is Positive at about 90 percent over 29 reviews (26 positive, 3 negative per Steam's own review API), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated assets. It supports Japanese only, no English option exists at all, and every one of its 29 reviews is in Japanese; not one is in English.