Rogue Spirit

We picked up Rogue Spirit in 2021 during early access, drawn to Kids With Sticks' absolutely unique premise: a possession-based roguelike set in ancient Korea. Every enemy was a playable character if you could possess them—shift between a lumbering brute and a fast assassin, each with different strategies and weaknesses. The house loved the genre subversion. Instead of one character fighting through waves, we were constantly jumping into new bodies, learning their movesets on the fly, and adapting mid-run. The art style grabbed us—Korean mythology filtered through a hand-painted lens that reminded us how good early access Indies could look. We knew we were giving a platform to something genuinely different in a roguelike market drowning in Hades clones and floor-sweeper variants. Rogue Spirit wasn't trying to be the next Hades. It was being itself, which was more interesting.

We invested 37.3 hours into Rogue Spirit across 2021, with 13,924 hours watched by the community. Our average viewers held at 363 per stream, with 500 peaking at some point—solid numbers for an indie title that was still in early access. We grabbed just 5 followers net, but that understates the impact. We were discovering something genuinely new, not chasing trend followers. The engagement was deeper than the numbers suggest.