Today, we are looking at Conquest Dark, an Early Access ARPG where players are dropped in naked (and hilariously, you can turn on anatomically correct adult models) and unarmed against waves of undead monsters.

Conquest Dark is a timer-based survivors-like where players have to defeat cultists, ravenous spiders, skeletal abominations, and more to complete dark rituals that will bring back humanity from the brink of extinction.

With a sword-and-sorcery setting inspired by Conan The Barbarian, Conquest Dark is a unique take on the survivors-like formula. It sets itself apart from other titles in the genre by arriving with a higher focus on RPG mechanics and an active combat system.

Characters in Conquest Dark are generated randomly, possessing different races, traits, and classes, which the player can pick from before starting a run. A character’s class will dictate their stats, available abilities and weapons, and certain passive traits. This also opens up some unique combinations as you can trade the usual advantage for other, more superficial traits, such as Treasure Hunter, which will allow you to start with a higher chance to find rare item drops.

Customizing different aspects of your character each run is very creative. It opens up many gameplay possibilities, especially since both skills and weapons have meta upgrades and rune sockets that can give them powerful effects.

Each class is also tied to a specific faction, which unlocks new powers, weapons, and meta upgrades at certain levels, incentivizing players to try out all classes and providing a nice sense of progression as you get more familiar with each class’ quirks. In addition, surviving each level until the end will allow you to unlock new skills, runes, currency, and locations on the map, so there’s plenty of reason to grind an area until you get all the rewards, significantly increasing the replay value.

Conquest Dark‘s combat is its strongest asset, as the game manages to provide players with the mindless survivors power fantasy gameplay while also balancing difficulty and making sure to not get too automatic by using dodge skills and melee combat limitations.

Mechanically, Conquest Dark is the closest we’ve seen a survivors-like game come to being a full-on ARPG, even featuring armor that can provide set bonuses or gain increases in quality that unlock more substantial stat effects as long as the player has acquired the needed meta upgrades.

Every survivors-like lives and dies through its gameplay. Conquest Dark fully delivers the visceral feeling of melee combat through its swings and the overpowered feeling that magic can provide by chaining through enemies or affecting large areas.

To go along with its brutal sword and sorcery inspirations and themes, Conquest Dark provides players with ten bars of health to tackle the undead hordes, although there is a deadly catch to this system.

Losing that first health bar means a player has now entered a bleed-out mode, which makes it so you slowly start taking damage as your limbs begin to be destroyed. This value also increases rapidly as the player loses health bars, essentially creating a system of borrowed time where the player has to act fast to finish the ritual. Depending on which class you choose, you can circumvent this by opting for gear that increases your resistance to bleeding out, but at the cost of damage or speed. This adds a new layer of strategy not often found in survivors-like games.

The bleed-out timer is a fantastic mechanic, as it ensures players can’t just eat a chicken and get back to full health like they would in Vampire Survivors, since that missing arm or leg is going to keep dealing damage, which you might not be able to out-heal. Depending on what you want from a survivors-like, this system will be either loved or hated, but it is undeniably unique.

Conquest Dark‘s progression is highly satisfying, although the game starts slowing down after players reach a certain point. Enemies scale slightly faster than the player as we start moving through stages, which becomes problematic after unlocking a few classes.

Part of this escalation is done by making regular grunt enemies stronger, but Conquest Dark does the unthinkable and adds mechanics to regular enemies and bosses. Rogue enemies will dash around and try to backstab the player, while barbarians will jump around and try to tank through your attacks, which is incredibly rare in this genre.

Even though it can get a little grindy, the game finds a way to make replaying stages fun through its sun-touched and moon-touched rituals, which add positive effects to dark rituals but also extend them, adding more bosses, which stop the timer until they are defeated.

Overall, Conquest Dark is one of the more exciting survivors-likes we’ve seen in a while, not only in theme but also in gameplay. It’s nice to see a game that doesn’t shy away from featuring actual mechanics, leaning more towards being a full-on ARPG than an automatic action roguelike at points.

Adding so many different meta upgrades (weapon sets, abilities, stat increases, factions, obelisks, and more) can make the game feel a little dense and grindy, but that might also be exactly what some people want. I enjoy the idea of a survivors-like where I’m not immediately OP and have to chip away at unlocks, although I’m aware that’s not a universal feeling.

To put it simply: this game is chocked full of low-poly nudity, gratuitous violence, and satisfying combat. If you don’t like that, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s brutal, it’s primal, and it’s extremely addicting.

Conquest Dark releases in Early Access on April 30, 2025, on Microsoft Windows (via Steam Early Access).