Rutrum Is the Cozy Roguelike I Didn’t Know I Needed

Some games you play for the challenge. Some you play to relax. Rutrum somehow does both. It's a small indie game by uncertainkey that came out on Steam on September 2, 2026.

Quick heads up: I made the music for it, so I'm not exactly neutral. But I'm not here to only talk about the soundtrack. I just really want more people to play this game.

You've probably seen Suika Game, the one where you drop fruit into a box and matching fruits merge into bigger ones. Rutrum takes that idea and turns it into a roguelike.

Instead of fruit, you drop coins and gems. Two copper coins merge into silver, silver into gold, and it keeps climbing all the way up to sapphires and diamonds. The game sums itself up in three words: Drop, Pop, Unlock!

There's a story too. You play as someone digging deep underground to escape a life of forced labour. Every run takes you further down, through places like the Mushroom Forest and the Crystal Ribcage, with a boss waiting at the bottom.

Your crate (the box) is full of rocks. When two matching coins or gems merge, they pop the rocks around them, and those rocks fly at the enemies as damage. Bigger merges mean bigger explosions. When a chain reaction gets going, the screen shakes, rocks fly everywhere, and it feels great.

The clever part is the chests. Enemies guard treasure chests with locks, and to open them you need to make two specific items touch, like a gold coin and an opal. So you're not just merging as fast as you can. Sometimes you hold back on purpose, because a chest full of potions and gold is worth more than a quick kill. Wait too long, though, and the enemy dies with its loot still locked.

Enemies fight back too. They throw rubble, poison, sticky tar, lava and bombs into your crate to mess up your plans.

This is my favourite idea in the game. In most merge games, you lose the moment your box overflows. In Rutrum, your health is the crate. Every hit you take makes the walls a little lower, so everything gets harder to hold in. Run out of health and the walls are gone.

You can actually see yourself losing, and you still get a few turns to fight your way back. Some of my most tense moments came from staring at a crate with almost no walls left, hoping the next drop would save me.

Between fights you move across a map with shops, healing spots and upgrade stops. This is where the roguelike side comes in:

• Shovels are your main items. They give you bonuses like extra strength or free drops.
• Handles attach to shovels and add even more effects.
• Runes can be carved onto your gems, so something good happens when that gem merges.
• Quests on items upgrade them once you meet a goal.

Every character plays differently. The Flower Girl builds strength from coins. Beetle Bane can pop the biggest gem in the crate whenever they want. The Merchant turns things into gold and can even bribe enemies to just leave. People have found some wild builds too, like one that keeps getting stronger the more opals are sitting in the crate. And if that's still too easy, there are different crates that change the rules (one has no gravity at all), harder depths, and a challenge mode where every item you pick up is gone for the rest of the challenge.

I'll be honest: I'm not a roguelike person, and before this I'd never really played Suika-style games. Rutrum took me a while to get. There's a lot going on, and I still find it hard to finish a run.

I keep going back. The characters and builds are different enough that each run feels a bit new, and once it clicks, the merging is really satisfying. Mike Holmes at Rogueliker described it as a game for a relaxed Sunday afternoon, and I think that's exactly right. There's a challenge, but it never feels stressful, and it's a nice break from games that want you to destroy everything in sight.

And the art! It reminds me of Final Fantasy Tactics, a series I loved growing up. The little characters, the warm colours, the tiny details (there's even a door made just for little bears) give the whole game a lot of charm. You can tell it was made with love.

I started working on Rutrum's music in March 2025, and we're still going.

uncertainkey came in with a huge list of things they loved: game soundtracks, film scores, old songs, swing jazz, ambient tracks, folk instruments from all over the world. Two names kept coming up. One was the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, which mixes so many genres and still feels like one show. The other was Studio Ghibli music, which I love too.

We went back and forth a lot, and the sound slowly settled into jazz and ambient:

• Calm, atmospheric tracks for puzzling. You hear the same music for a long time while you think, so it should stay pleasant without getting in the way.
• Lively jazz for combat, so the energy picks up when the fight does.
• Boss themes for the big fights, like the Crystal Ribcage and the Mushroom Forest boss.

We've made dozens of tracks over about a year and a half, which honestly says more about uncertainkey than about me. Not many devs care this much about their game's music. They even added a lossless audio option, which made the game music nerd in me very happy. I listen to game music all day while I work. It's a big part of why I wanted to make it in the first place.

One small thing that made my week: when TimeToGrind first tried an early build, he stopped to ask the dev if the music was copyrighted.

If you like Suika Game but want more depth, yes. If you like roguelikes but want something calmer than a dungeon crawler, yes. And if you just want a cozy, good-looking game to unwind with, also yes.

It's not perfect. It takes some time to learn, and some players will find it easy once they discover a strong build. But it's one of those games that has real heart.

Thanks to uncertainkey for letting me be a part of it. I hope you enjoy the game, and maybe the music too.