Word has reached my ear of a new graphical roguelike in development by Canadian developers Unlok. That game, Wayward, has just reached beta and is currently playable in-browser, being built in HTML5 as it is.

The premise:

In the game, there is a large focus on realism and survival. Because of these elements, most weapons, and items will need to be crafted by natural objects found around the terrain. Unlike traditional roguelikes, in Wayward there are no levels; however, you can gain different skills which increase your effectiveness for each of the individual skills. You can also increase your strength (health), hunger (starvation), and dexterity (stamina), by performing skills that would realistically use one or more of those attributes, for example, parrying increases dexterity while mining increases strength.

I count nearly two dozen skills present in the game’s wiki, along with 17 types of animals and monsters and quite a few craftable items. You can get a sense of the game’s various features in this trailer:

So it looks like a more traditional roguelike version of Minecraft, basically. Cool, if sort of expected at this point. For my money, Wayward’s coolest feature is how customizable its user interface is–just about everything can be resized, minimized, and moved around the screen.

Wayward is currently free, though I have no idea if it will remain that way; for now, try the beta in your browser here!