Runeomicon makes you draw runes for the Goddess of Death
TLR Games' dark fantasy tower defence launches today on Steam, and the ritual is performed with your own hands while the villagers come for your head.
Runeomicon launches today on PC via Steam, and it hands you the villain's robe. You are a wizard whose family was destroyed by villagers, so you have opened the Runeomicon — a forbidden book of spells and rituals — and begun summoning Ilur, the Goddess of Death, to settle the score.
The catch is that the ritual is performed by your own hands, in real time, while the mob you have enraged throws itself at your sanctuary. Drawing a rune generates arcane energy; botching one generates nothing. Waves of peasants, priests, knights and worse keep advancing while you trace shapes, so every second spent drawing is a second not spent on towers, spells or eldritch summons.
Five rune tiers, seven worlds and six gods
TLR Games, the Bilbao studio behind the far gentler The Longest Road on Earth, has built a full campaign on the idea: five tiers of runes, each fiddlier than the last, across seven worlds, with more than 20 enemy types and two bosses in the way. Awakening any of the six ancient gods opens three magical abilities plus new defences and upgrades, and an awakened god can be picked at altars on the world map and dragged into later rituals. Six tower types, each with three upgrade levels and two final forms, round out the kit.
“Every time someone plays for the first time, they start yelling at the villagers and panicking while drawing the runes. That is exactly what we wanted,” said Arturo Monedero, executive producer at TLR Games. “You are not the hero of this story, and by the time the runes feel like muscle memory, you stop wanting to be.”
Why the drawing hand matters
Runeomicon welds the usual tower defence patience — build, place, wait, adjust — to a dexterity test, which puts it in the same agitated family as Vampire Survivors and Dome Keeper. There the pressure never quite leaves your hands, and attention rather than currency is the scarce resource. That means the game lives or dies on how the runes feel to draw: a shape that fights the mouse is not difficulty, it is friction.
Joystick Ventures — publisher of Enter the Chronosphere, StarVaders and Antonblast — is putting the game out on PC. No price was listed on Steam when we looked, and both the demo and a separate free Training Room are already up.
Our opinion
The smartest thing here is the honesty of the premise: a tower defence game where the towers are the boring half. Making you the villain fixes the genre's oldest problem, which is that you are usually defending something you never chose, and the hand-drawn ritual gives every wave a cost measured in concentration rather than gold. The risk is repetition. Five tiers of increasingly complex runes is a lot of tracing before muscle memory arrives, and if the six gods end up reskinning the same two strategies, the loop will sag in its second half. Verdict: try the demo before you buy. If tracing sigils while a mob kicks your door in sounds like a good evening, the full ritual is waiting.