Winnie's Hole is a delightfully grim roguelite now in Early Access

Winnie's Hole is a delightfully grim roguelite where you infect and constantly mutate Winnie-the-Pooh. Now available in Early Access. Note: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.

Thanks to the classic character being in the public domain in the US, it was only natural that more media was going to be created featuring the much loved children's icon. Unfortunately for Winnie, there's no fairytale ending here and it's all a bit grim. But as the setting for a game, it's thoroughly interesting.

From the creators of Ring of Pain - you play as a virus that has infected Winnie that gradually warps them into some kind of abomination. No one is safe as you continue to progress through Winnie's innards to keep evolving and expanding to gather more abilities. It's a firmly weird blend of genres here too with multiple sides to play through. It's part deck-building strategy, part exploration roguelite and hard to pin down to be clearer on that.

You play a basic Tetris-like game of exploration and expansion inside the body, using different shapes to let the virus progress. By doing this you also gather a few different resources from the body, gain access to new shapes, heal up and more - all based on the shapes you use and what direction you go in. Gradually progressing the virus to a new hole, where you can mutate even further and keep the virus expanding into a new area of the body. You repeat this through various layers.

Winnie is always on the move through the forest, and eventually you get put into combat encounters when you come across other animals wandering around. You usually get a choice between three different encounters, each with their own set of enemies to fight and consume with different resources as rewards.

During combat you pick various shape blocks to position them inside Winnie's brain to activate certain abilities you've built up. You can always see what the enemy will do on their next turn, so it allows you to at least plan your moves with what abilities to activate and in what order. The order is important, as abilities activate in a line and certain abilities let you swap the order. Some enemy types are really quite challenging with their own special unique abilities, some enemies can even swap their special abilities between turns - so it will keep you guessing and planning at times.

Thanks to the resources you gather during combat, you can eventually evolve your brain too giving you more tiles that get filled up with abilities. So the shapes you use become more important, as does the position you set down to activate.

Through repeated runs you can unlock new types of viruses which act as the overall class, and inside each virus are different strains to unlock too with different abilities so there's a nice bit of variety on how you can play through each run once you've unlocked more of it. But even with just the starter virus, there's still a whole lot of mechanics at play. Especially with the perks system, which is like a relic system from deck-builders giving you some special bonuses through the run.

It reminds me of the first time I picked up Slay the Spire, and how I couldn't put it down for days. Winnie's Hole has that same feeling of just needing to give it another run, to see what incredibly grotesque creature I can morph Winnie into and to try out all the different abilities.

For an Early Access release it has been really great and I'm thoroughly excited to see it expand. The narrative parts to it add a nice dark comedic flavour to it too, which helpfully break up parts of the game and I can't wait to see that be explored more as well.

They're currently aiming to have it finished within a year, but we'll see. We all know how delays can happen in game development, and that depends a lot on how much feedback they get and how many copies are sold.

Tested on Linux with Proton 10 it has been an absolute joy. It is consuming me as much as the virus is consuming Winnie on my runs.

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Highlights:

• Bodybuilding in the worst way - Mutate Winnie as a symbiotic virus.
• Reimagining of A.A. Milne’s classic characters in a world of dark science and medical malpractise.
• An anti-cosy antidote - Cute animal friends discovering the horrors of increasingly parasitic viruses.
• Break the limits of your host in randomly generated roguelike runs.
• Explore cellular worlds with tetromino-like block shapes - No roguelite node maps, explore by spreading a virus through the body of your host.
• Combo-driven combat - Semi-auto battling within the brain of your host, using a single block shape to perform multiple actions at once.
• Genre-hybrid innovations - More strategic input than an autobattler, faster turns than a typical deckbuilder.
• Collect cells and make gut decisions - Influence the adventure with accessible turn-based gameplay.
• Evolve and unlock new virus types, strains, and mutations - Extract samples to research as you delve into uncharted biomes.
• ‘Holesome’ dark comedy with the grit of Brothers Grimm fairytales and humour of Nickelodeon cartoons - Embrace discomfort in a story of judgement and self-acceptance.

Once the initial sale ends on February 9th the normal price will be £12.79.