Game: Combolands: Roguelike Citybuilder
Developer: Crux Games (South Africa)
Publisher: Crux Games (self-published)
Genre: Roguelike Citybuilder
Released: August 24, 2026 — out now
Platform: PC (Steam)
Run Length: ~30 minutes
Team Size: Two people
Steam Rating: Overwhelmingly Positive (1,135)
🏙️ Combolands is out now on Steam, and it’s sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 1,100 reviews. The two-person South African studio behind it includes the designer of BAFTA-nominated Terra Nil — and Polygon have called it the “coolest new roguelike in years.”
⚖️ Somebody Finally Noticed These Were the Same Idea
The shorthand doing the rounds is Balatro meets Cities: Skylines, and it’s apt — but the reason it works is more interesting than a mashup.
Balatro’s hook is that scoring is multiplicative and legible. You can see the chain forming, you can feel the numbers about to detonate, and the joy is in setting up the cascade rather than watching it.
City builders have had adjacency bonuses for thirty years. Put the right building next to the right building and you get a modifier. They’ve just always been buried in a tooltip, buried in a spreadsheet, and spread over forty hours where you’d never feel one land.
Combolands takes those adjacency bonuses, makes them the whole game, and compresses the payoff into thirty-minute runs. Place buildings, stack synergies, trigger cascading combos, watch the number go up.
Break the game. Build a city for the ages.
It started life as a free itch.io demo called Tiny Towns. It’s now Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with over a thousand reviews behind it.
Combolands is a tiny roguelike citybuilder from Crux Games, a two-person South African studio, and it’s available on Steam now following its August 24 launch. You construct buildings on a procedurally generated island, unlock synergies between them, and set off chains that send your score climbing.
The reception has been emphatic. It sits at Overwhelmingly Positive across 1,135 reviews, and Polygon described it as the “coolest new roguelike in years.” Not bad for a game that began as a free demo on itch.io.
Seven Guilds, Pick Two
🏛️ Twenty-One Combinations, and the Maths Checks Out
The run structure hangs on the guilds. There are seven of them, each with its own buildings, identity, strengths and drawbacks — and every run you pick two.
Seven choose two is 21 pairings, which is exactly the number Crux advertise. Nice to see a marketing figure that’s just arithmetic rather than optimism.
More to the point, it’s the right structure for this kind of game. A single-class roguelike gives you seven experiences. Pairing them gives you twenty-one, and the interesting ones are the combinations nobody designed on purpose — where two guilds’ drawbacks cancel out, or two unremarkable bonuses multiply into something absurd.
🏗️ 120+ Buildings
The raw material. What you place and where you place it is the entire decision space.
📿 100+ Heirlooms
Passive modifiers layered on top of your build. The Balatro-shaped part of the game.
🎩 13+ Councillors
Recruitable, each with their own progression and abilities. Another axis to build around.
🏆 10 Ranks
Escalating difficulty tiers to climb once you’ve worked out what you’re doing.
There are also upgrades that change how your buildings behave and potions that manipulate the map itself — so you’re not only optimising placement against a fixed island, you can reshape the island to suit the build you’ve stumbled into.
⏱️ Thirty Minutes Is the Point, Not a Limitation
The run length deserves calling out, because it’s the design decision that makes everything else work.
Traditional city builders are long. You invest dozens of hours, and by the time a clever adjacency decision pays off you’ve forgotten you made it. That’s fine for the genre’s usual appeal — the slow accumulation — but it’s death to a combo.
Combos need to resolve while you still remember setting them up. A thirty-minute run means the whole arc from “I wonder if these two guilds work together” to “oh, they very much do” fits inside one sitting, which is precisely why this hybrid works and previous attempts at city-builder-meets-deckbuilder have mostly felt like homework.
From a Free itch.io Demo to This
The origin story is a good one. Combolands began as Tiny Towns, a demo Crux put on itch.io. It did well enough that the team turned it into a full game under a new name — with, as they put it, some extra help from Landfall.
That last detail is worth pausing on. Landfall are the studio behind Haste, Content Warning and PEAK — three games that between them define a particular kind of modern indie success, the sort that arrives from nowhere and dominates a fortnight. Having that team in your corner as a two-person studio is meaningful support, and it shows in how cleanly this launch has landed.
The Terra Nil Connection
🌱 From Un-Building to Combo-BuildingSam Alfred, one half of Crux Games, is best known as the designer of Terra Nil — the BAFTA-nominated “reverse city builder” where you restore a barren wasteland to a thriving ecosystem and then remove every trace of yourself. It sits on over 7,000 Very Positive reviews.
Combolands is, in almost every respect, the opposite instinct. Terra Nil was quiet, contemplative and about undoing. This is a number-go-up rush about stacking bonuses until something breaks.
What connects them is the same underlying interest: both games are fundamentally about spatial relationships between tiles. Terra Nil asked what happens when you place things in service of an ecosystem. Combolands asks what happens when you place them in service of a multiplier. Same designer, same core fascination, opposite temperament.
Where to Get It
🖥️ Out Now on Steam
Combolands is available on PC via Steam now, self-published by Crux Games. No console versions have been announced.
It launched on August 24 and has accumulated 1,135 reviews at Overwhelmingly Positive in the time since — a strong signal for a self-published game from a two-person team with no publisher marketing behind it.
Runs take roughly thirty minutes, which makes it an unusually easy game to fit into an evening or a lunch break.
🏙️ Citybuilder
🎲 Roguelike
🃏 Deckbuilder DNA
📈 Number Go Up
🧩 Synergies
👤 Single-Player
Who’s Making It
🇿🇦 Crux Games — South Africa
A two-person studio run by Sam Alfred and Skye Scott. Combolands is their release as Crux, built out of the Tiny Towns itch.io demo with support from Landfall.
🏅 Sam Alfred — Designer, Terra NilTerra Nil earned a BAFTA nomination and sits on more than 7,000 Very Positive Steam reviews. It’s one of the more distinctive strategy games of recent years, and its designer turning to combo-chasing roguelikes is a genuinely interesting pivot.
🤝 With Help From Landfall
The studio behind Haste, Content Warning and PEAK lent support during Combolands’ development — a useful set of shoulders for a two-person team to stand on.
Hi there! I’m Marie, also known as CtrlQueen. I’m passionate about keeping up with the latest in gaming news and sharing my insights. RPGs steal my heart with their rich narratives and immersive worlds, but I also love unwinding with fun, casual games. Whether you’re here for deep dives into game mechanics or just to chat about your favorite casual game, you’ve found the right place! Let’s game and explore together.
