I like an impressive polygon count as much as the next guy, but for my money, fantasy worlds are best brought to life by top-down, 2D tile graphics. In the words of my colleague Josh Wolens, “We don’t need graphics. The most powerful GPU of all is the mind.”
It’s why I’ve dumped countless hours into roguelikes like Caves of Qud, Tales of Maj’Eyal, and Dwarf Fortress’s adventure mode: All I need is some evocative sprite work and some good flavor text to chew on, and I’m off to the races. Or, as is more likely the case, being brutally murdered on my way to the races by some sort of ogre or minotaur.
Given my proclivities, it’s no surprise that Tuoni caught my attention. Announced by developer Old Dog on Reddit last month, Tuoni’s a turn-based, tactical roguelike with an emphasis on buildcrafting, Finnish folklore, and—for bonus points—a delicious CRT filter.
We’ve had plenty of Nordic inspiration in videogames since Skyrim’s heyday, but I’m always glad to see Finnish flavor on display. Compared to Norse mythology, Finnish folklore—as you might expect from a place where winter can last for 200 days of the year—skews gloomier and darker, with more primordial emanations than martial heroism.
That flavor seems well represented in Tuomi. Its Steam page says its procedurally generated worlds are inhabited by “silent but all-seeing forests” where “spirits drift between trees and water” and you “might even cross paths with Näkki by a dark pond or glimpse the ancient wrath of Iki-Turso rising from the depths.” I don’t know what either of those are, but I’ve never met a pond-dweller or deeps-ancient I didn’t like.
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In screenshots, the player character battles Maahinen imps and inspects Suli, a sort of troll that’s “covered in icy vapor from its crystallized back.” As a lover of nouns, I’m particularly thrilled by the glimpse at a character’s inventory, where we can see items like Jumal’s Snowsteel Cloak and Kalam’s Deathblade, a “shadowed blade of the moon-child, lost beneath fenlight.”
That’s the good stuff.
A gameplay trailer also gives us a look at Tuoni’s skill progression system. Instead of being limited to a single, defined class, characters can freely select skills from archetypes like Arms Fighter and Battle Shaman. I might start out as a run-of-the-mill axeman, but after spending a few stat points in Mystics and acquiring a couple Frostborn skills, I could be hitting enemies with arctic blasts and stacking additional frost damage on my melee attacks.
Whether or not that’ll be enough for my character’s long-term survival is a question for a later day, but at least it seems like I’ll get to inspect some interesting creatures before they knock my skull in.
Old Dog is aiming to release Tuoni some time in 2026. A demo will “hopefully” be available later this year. You can wishlist Tuoni now on Steam.
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