Somehow another roguelike RPG 17 years in the making launched last year, and sitting beside Caves of Qud it's gotten 4,700 glowing Steam reviews in near-total silence

gamesradar.com:

After 17 years, a slightly confusing pre-alpha, a fat Kickstarter, and one false sequel, the true follow-up to legendary 2007 release Elona is out in the wild. Roguelike sandbox RPG Elin launched on Steam in early access last year, and it's gone down quite well with both Japanese and English-speaking fans, amassing over 4,700 94% positive user reviews at the time of writing.

Elin, not unlike fellow roguelike RPG Caves of Qud, which was also officially released last year after a 17-year wait, is one of those games that combines so many genres and experiences that it can be hard to describe succinctly. It is loud-and-proud weird, dense as a neutron star, and almost competitively Japanese.

The topline on Steam is this: "A sandbox, open-world RPG based on roguelike gameplay." That gets you most of the way there, but the next bullet is also important: "Live your life, survive, craft, build and manage bases and towns, enjoy housing, fishing, theft, music, farming, livestock breeding, childbirth, setting up shops, tourism, and much more."

Ignoring the fact that I don't know if childbirth is something you necessarily enjoy, we can reasonably call this a tile-based life sim with heaps of procedural and handcrafted content split between all walks of life, from adventuring to farming to shop management to base building. I told you it wasn't going to be succinct. It's a seemingly boundless creativity toy set in a charming but dangerous fantasy world rendered in endearing pixel art, and it has a Dwarf Fortress-rivaling ability to generate absurd new sentences. Naturally, this makes for primo Steam review reading.

"10 minutes in, I accidentally ate the corpse of my kitten and now have -5 karma," writes haybug.

"They had to nerf breastfeeding because at some point the meta was to start a war quest, milk the boss mid-combat, and feed it to your pets for an insane amount of levels and stats," reports Minkyew. I looked this up, obviously, and it is at least partly true. "The level