The most immediately noticeable aspect of the new action roguelike "Curse of the Dead Gods," which is available today on Steam Early Access, is its stark and striking visual style. It is colorful, luminous, moderately shadowy, and colored with intense flashes of blood and fire. But the gameplay, too, looks very promising, if not groundbreaking.

Like any good roguelike, Curse of the Dead Gods is a do-or-die game of crashing through bottomless dungeons in search of gold and loot. There are traps everywhere, and all sorts of interesting monsters to take down in all sorts of interesting ways. Unfortunately, you are like a monster yourself: the deeper you dive, the more corruption of the dungeon and the creatures that inhabit it builds up inside you, allowing you to use different abilities and powers, but at a demanding price.

The Early Access release of Curse of the Dead Gods includes the first of three planned segments in the dungeon, each dedicated to a different god, the "Jaguar Section". Developer Passtech Games describes the game in its current state as "a full-featured rogue light with challenging curves, tight combat, dozens of weapons, relics, curses, rooms, traps, and much more to discover. All of the core systems are in place, but everything is still in beta (or earlier in some cases).

"We will be doing major updates every month during Early Access, as well as smaller patches almost weekly. Some of these will be unstable and will use special branches so the core game will not be in a state of disarray," the studio states in its Early Access FAQ.

"I am not a fan of the core game," the studio stated in its Early Access FAQ, "and I am not a fan of the core game.

I played a few minutes with the initial release. It's nowhere near enough to properly grasp everything involved, but suffice it to say that it's off to a really strong start. The mouse and keyboard controls are adequate, if a bit clunky (with the keyboard you can only move along the eight compass directions). (Not included in the game. My apologies.) Also, due to my hard-earned dumb experience: the torch and weapon are in separate loadouts and can be swapped with the 1 and 2 keys. Trying to kill a monster with the torch will result in multiple, pointless, infuriating deaths until you figure it out.

Curse of the Dead Gods is currently available on Steam for $15/£13/€15, and the developer says the price will increase as new content is added. More information can be found at curse-of-dead-gods.com.