Planned Release Date: Q1 2027

About This Game

The map is a chessboard too

Your knight leaps forward square by square, and the road crumbles behind it. Every rival camp is a whole half-board sitting inside one square of the map: reach it and the camera dives in until that little board is the one you fight on. Battles, elites, shops, forges, challenges and the pages of a gamebook: choose your path, because there is no way back.

Chess without openings

Your army is a deck. Each battle draws three pieces plus your king and drops them wherever they land. No theory, no formations: read the board and play what you got.

Thirty seconds

Every battle starts at 30 seconds and adds two with each move. Premoves let you play as fast as you think. Only checkmate wins; if your clock runs out, so does your run.

Kings that break the rules

Four worlds, four kings. The first is a plain one; the others sweep the diagonals, leap like knights or stride like queens. Beat a world's king and your king learns its move.

An army of the fallen

The pieces you defeat offer themselves as recruits. Upgrade them, fuse two into one or burn the ones that weigh you down. Relics bend the rules and terrains change the board.

Every run uncovers something

Nothing is explained ahead of time. Lights that help you, Shadows that raise the stakes, and trophies for the things only a few players try: you discover every rule by playing.

Features

• A complete roguelite run: four worlds, with elites and a boss in each
  
• A map that is a chessboard, with battles that are boards inside it
  
• Six piece types, four special kings, relics, upgrades and terrains
  
• One life; you can quit a run and continue it later
  
• Hand-made candlelit pixel art, and original music that keeps time with the clock

What Rooklite is not

• Not tournament chess: no openings or rating required.
  
• Not a card game: your deck is pieces on a real chessboard.
  
• No purchases, no connection: the whole game, offline.

The demo includes the complete first world. If you like it, add it to your wishlist.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Some translations were generated with AI and are in beta, so more players can enjoy the game in their language.
The art and music were made without AI.