Setting Sun is the debut title being produced in-house by the game developer known as Yean on Steam. It’s a roguelike dungeon crawler with some hack-and-slash elements. In it, you play as an aspiring samurai in the Japanese Edo Period (1603-1867) tasked with clearing out dungeons crawling with yokai as you rebuild your village with items and people you find along the way. As you progress, you gain new abilities and purchase better equipment and armor to help you in your journey to the top of the Daimyo’s castle.

Like most modern Dark Souls and roguelike games, the action is quick and the learning curve is steep, but that adds to the satisfaction of clearing the toughest areas. Even the most basic enemies pose a serious threat, so dying is simply a fact of life in this game. The controls are relatively easy to pick up, but the precise timing required to master each action in the heat of battle takes practice. This means that even the demo can provide a significant amount of play time.

On top of the constant action and rewarding mechanics, Setting Sun is a visually enticing game that will keep you on the edge of your seat for hours. Despite being a top-down game, the graphics are sharp enough to give the player a feeling of truly being in a 3D world. The well-mixed sound effects add to the game’s immersion, and a great soundtrack draws the player further into the feudal Japanese setting with its modern trap take on traditional shamisen music.

The demo for Setting Sun is available now on Steam. Despite the relative lack of information regarding the developer, updates to the game have been steady, so for the moment, its release is expected in early 2023.