Strip away the post-apocalyptic fog and the Mad Max-inspired aesthetic, and what Fogpiercer is really selling is a tactical proposition: that positioning an enemy matters more than simply destroying one. That is a harder pitch than it sounds in a roguelike market already saturated with card-based combat systems, branching maps, and procedurally generated runs. Yet the demo from Slovakia-based Mad Cookies Studio, which appeared during Steam Next Fest earlier this month, is making a credible case that the game has something genuinely distinct to offer.
According to Rock Paper Shotgun, Fogpiercer puts players in command of a heavily armed locomotive battling road bandits across a grid-based battlefield. Each run begins with a character and train selection before players set off down a branching map of battles, shops, upgrade stations, and boss encounters. The structure will be immediately familiar to anyone who has played Slay the Spire: the genre template is not reinvented here. What is different is what happens once a fight begins.
Your locomotive and its attached carriages form the basis of your card deck, with each carriage type contributing its own cards to your hand each round. A protector carriage deals out shield cards; a minigun carriage provides offensive options. The train is fixed to a central track, moving only forward or backward, while enemy vehicles swarm the surrounding grid. Crucially, the game gives players full knowledge of what each enemy intends to do before they act, turning every turn into a small optimisation puzzle rather than a test of reflexes or luck.
The mechanic that has attracted the most attention is the blast physics. Rather than simply dealing damage, artillery fire sends out a shockwave that pushes lighter enemy units into adjacent squares. A single well-placed shell can shunt a column of vehicles into one another, chain-damaging the lot. Or drive them onto the tracks, where your locomotive can then ram them. Or simply knock them sideways into a canyon wall. The Steam demo gives players enough of a taste of this system to understand why the comparison to Into the Breach has become almost inevitable in early coverage.
Into the Breach, developed by Subset Games and released in 2018, built its entire design around the idea that pushing an enemy is often more valuable than hitting one. The game holds a 90 out of 100 on Metacritic and remains a high-water mark for tactical clarity in games. Fogpiercer is clearly operating in its intellectual tradition, applying the same emphasis on positional play to a deckbuilding structure rather than a fixed mech roster. The question for Mad Cookies Studio is whether it can carve out enough of its own identity to justify the comparison rather than simply invite it.
There are reasons for cautious optimism on that front. The two playable characters in the demo each bring meaningfully different abilities: Monica, an ice harvester, can freeze enemies and strike them with ice shards, while Pan can manipulate time, forcing enemies to skip turns or swapping their positions entirely. Those wrinkles add a layer of strategic variety that sits on top of the core artillery-and-ramming loop. A crane carriage, glimpsed in the game's trailer, promises the ability to physically lift and relocate units on the grid, which would extend the positional toolkit considerably.
Hooded Horse, the publisher behind the project, is positioning Fogpiercer as part of its growing portfolio of deep strategic and tactical titles. The game is already ranking in the top 1,200 on Steam's global wishlist charts, with close to 2,000 followers actively tracking its development. For a title still in pre-Early Access, that represents a solid commercial foundation, though the roguelike deckbuilder space is competitive enough that wishlist numbers alone mean little without strong word-of-mouth at launch.
The demo does have a notable limitation. Rock Paper Shotgun's hands-on coverage points out that the repositioning mechanics only work on lighter enemy units, and that later encounters in the demo skew toward heavier vehicles that cannot be shunted around. When the creative, chainreaction play is removed from the equation, what remains is competent but less distinctive. That is a design tension the full release will need to resolve: a game whose best ideas are rationed is a game that risks feeling inconsistent.
Fogpiercer, developed by the Slovakia-based Mad Cookies Studio, is set to release into Early Access on PC in 2026. The updated Steam Next Fest demo, which ran through early March, remains live after the event concluded. For players willing to look past the familiar scaffolding of the genre, what the demo reveals is a game with at least one genuinely clever idea at its core. Whether Mad Cookies Studio can build a full release around that idea, rather than letting it become a highlight reel buried inside conventional roguelike structure, is the only question that actually matters for the game's commercial future.