Pilot a powerful warship in the space bullet heaven roguelike Sublight

With a demo available in Steam Next Fest that's incredibly promising, space combat bullet heaven roguelike Sublight hooked me right in. I'm a sucker for spaceships, action and bullet heavens - so this was pretty much made for me.

The demo has a Native Linux version built with Unity, and worked great on my Fedora KDE 44 system.

It has some of the standard elements to expect from a bullet heaven - weapons that fire automatically, and various upgrades to pick from as you destroy enemy craft and collect experience points. But, putting this into space combat feels pretty glorious. You pick a ship, assign some weapons to specific set slots and go through a series of nodes on a system map through that's split across a few different acts (but obviously the demo is limited with the first few nodes).

What makes it also quite interesting is that weapons have a specific firing arc, so you need to position your weapon choices carefully as weapon and ship positioning are very important based on where the enemies are coming from. And as you play more and earn credits - the game will expand to let you unlock new ships, new weapons, new captains and more. There's a healthy amount of variety here, and the demo already has me repeatedly coming back to play some more.

See the trailer below:

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My main issue with it is the feel of the ship movement, it feels a bit too much like they're slowly sliding on ice, rather than being in space. If they can tweak the movement to feel better - then I would be completely sold on it. They'll also need to watch performance closely in the later more explosive waves, as it can struggle a bit at times with so many explosions, rockets and projectiles everywhere.

For a demo of an unfinished game, it's definitely one you need to try out and I'm looking forward to seeing the expanded content in the full game.

The full game is due out sometime in Q3 2026.