Jupiter Hell is a roguelike I'm following with great excitement, it's serving a the spiritual successor to DRL (previously DoomRL, now called DRL since ZeniMax flexed their legal muscles) and it's looking good.

After a rather successful Kickstarter, where they managed to get over £70K in funding it's coming along rather nicely.

Jupiter Hell is a classic, turn-based roguelike set in a 90's flavored sci-fi universe. Set on the moons of Jupiter, the game pits a lone space marine against overwhelming demonic forces. Rip and tear zombies, demons and unmentionable monstrosities, using classic weaponry such as shotguns, chainguns, railguns and the trusty chainsaw. All to the shine of CRT monitors and the tune of heavy metal!

It feels very much like a classic roguelike, with plenty of modern touches. I do love roguelikes, but I don't often love how basic they make things which is why I'm so happy with Jupiter Hell. It keeps some of the simplicity like a very basic interface and controls, while having up to date and quite impressive visuals. Their Linux support has been great too, they're serious about supporting Linux with support being in very early.

The latest beta version, 0.4.0 released this month to include new player classes; special levels to play through; in-game configuration; improved AI; better loot generation; utility slot and utility items along with upgraded audio and more music. Overall, a pretty sizeable update.

Since I'm a backer, I've been testing it out here and there and I come away very impressed each time. Here's an early preview of the game, do keep in mind it's far from finished:

It's running beautifully considering it's still far from finished, quite a challenging game too. It manages to capture the mood and spirit of games like Doom from a rather different viewpoint. Being able to manually target is nice, so you can blow up barrels and watch the fireworks as rubble spreads across the screen—what joyous destruction, hope they expand the destruction system for sure.

While it is really good, it's obviously still early. I'm hoping they plan to include more things to find and do inside the levels themselves, right now what you actually do is quite basic. Fun enough to keep jumping back in, but to keep me interested in the long run it needs more interesting things to find while exploring.

As far as future updates go, they are planning to finish the Vulkan support; improve the level generation; include more items, traits, master traits; new weapons and plenty more.

You can find out more on the official site, along with wishlisting and following it on Steam.