There’s a certain type of game that hooks you before you’ve had a chance to put your guard up. Pebble Knights, the Early Access co-op roguelike from 51% Games, is exactly that. You sit down for a couple of hours and suddenly it’s three in the morning and your friends are yelling at you to stop eating their corpse mid-wave. It’s chaotic, it’s surprisingly deep, and at $9.99 it’s one of the better value propositions in the genre right now.
The premise is immediately charming: a Hell Fungus is spreading across the land, and a band of tiny pebble warriors — up to five players or bots — must purge it under the command of their King. Days are for scavenging and building your power. Nights are for surviving relentless waves of enemies. Simple enough on the surface, but the systems underneath are where Pebble Knights quietly earns its place.
The item and build system is what sets Pebble Knights apart from the crowded action roguelike space. Almost any object in the environment can be picked up and used as a weapon — sticks, crowbars, hammers, slippers, even school triangles. Each comes with a randomly rolled perk that activates automatically during combat. Found something with a perk you love? Eat the item and slot that ability permanently into your build. Don’t like your current setup? Eat something disgusting, vomit up all your perks, and start fresh. It sounds bizarre in writing and feels genuinely brilliant in practice.
Progression layers on top of this through a central tent base that upgrades as you bring back gathered ore. Each upgrade lets you choose a new perk — general bonuses or entirely new weapons — that powers up the whole team. The shared progression creates a satisfying sense of collective momentum that makes co-op feel genuinely cooperative rather than just parallel play.
Each run follows a tight loop of daytime scavenging and nighttime survival. During the day, the playable area is refreshed with new objects to smash, loot to grab, and ore to haul back to base. At night, enemy waves pour in and the real test begins. Beat a wave, prepare again. Survive long enough and you’ll face a boss — straightforward but satisfying encounters built around learning attack patterns and striking in the gaps. Defeat one and you’re rewarded with some of the run’s best loot, then the cycle begins again with the pressure ratcheted up.
The pacing is sharp and the tension between spending time scavenging versus fortifying is a genuinely interesting micro-decision that plays out differently every run. There’s no downtime, no padding — you’re always either preparing or fighting, and both phases feel purposeful.
The death system is where Pebble Knights really finds its personality. When a teammate falls, they leave a grave. Any surviving player can pick up that grave and eat it to instantly revive their fallen ally. It sounds mechanical until you’re in the middle of a heaving night wave, enemies closing in from every direction, trying desperately to reach a teammate’s body without going down yourself. The chaos this creates is exactly the kind of thing that generates the stories you end up telling after sessions.
With friends the experience is genuinely excellent — communication, build coordination, and the frantic improvisation of co-op survival all click together in satisfying ways. Solo with bots is a different story. The bots are competent and will reliably revive you when you fall, but they can’t be directed or strategically deployed, which limits how much you can lean on the game’s more interesting co-op mechanics. Pebble Knights is best described as a 10/10 experience with friends and a solid but reduced 6/10 alone.
It’s important to flag that Pebble Knights is a genuine Early Access product and carries some of the expected friction. Random disconnects happen with more frequency than they should, and — critically — there’s currently no way to rejoin a lobby after being dropped. Losing a run mid-session because of a connection hiccup is genuinely frustrating. There are also some Early Access bugs and balance inconsistencies that the team is actively addressing through frequent updates, with patches dropping regularly based on player feedback.
The long-term progression loop is another area that needs work. There are no permanent unlocks or meta-progression between runs beyond what happens within a single session, which limits the pull to keep coming back once you’ve experienced the core systems. For a full release this would be a significant problem, but for an Early Access title with a clear roadmap it’s an understandable starting point.
| The Good | The Bad | The Ugly |
|---|---|---|
| Unique Item & Eat SystemEating items to absorb perks and reset builds mid-run is a genuinely fresh mechanic that creates wild variety across runs. | No Lobby RejoinRandom disconnects are common enough to be a real problem, and there’s currently no way to rejoin a lobby after being dropped. | Limited Solo ExperienceBots are functional but can’t be directed, and the best co-op mechanics simply don’t translate when playing alone. |
| Excellent Co-op ChaosThe corpse revival system, shared base progression, and frantic wave defense create genuinely memorable moments with friends. | No Meta-ProgressionNo permanent unlocks between runs limits long-term pull once the core systems have been explored. | |
| Sharp Day/Night PacingThe scavenge-then-survive loop is tight, purposeful, and consistently engaging with no filler between phases. | Early Access BugsSome balance inconsistencies and bugs remain, though the devs are actively patching based on community feedback. | |
| Exceptional ValueA full co-op roguelike experience for under $10, with the price set to rise at full release. | ||
| Responsive Developer51% Games is actively engaged with the community, shipping frequent patches and implementing player feedback quickly. |
Pebble Knights is a genuinely fun Early Access co-op roguelike with creative mechanics, strong moment-to-moment gameplay, and one of the more interesting build systems in the genre. The eating mechanic alone is worth the price of admission, and the co-op experience with a group of friends is chaotic in all the right ways.
The mixed Steam reviews are understandable — disconnect issues, the lack of lobby rejoin, and limited solo appeal are real friction points that will put some players off. But for $9.99 with a developer who’s clearly invested in improving the game, Pebble Knights represents a promising foundation that’s already delivering genuine fun. If you have three to four friends ready to play and can tolerate some Early Access roughness, this is easy to recommend right now. Everyone else should wishlist it and check back at full release.