When a roguelite needs to feel responsive through every dodge and spell-cast, knowing how it runs on your system before you commit is half the battle.
Setting — A modern fantasy realm shattered into floating islands, watched over by twelve zodiac guardians you must defeat to break free.
Heroes — Four distinct characters, each carrying their own personality and fighting style through the cycle of escape attempts.
Art — Frame-by-frame animation gives every slash and explosion a tactile weight that tweened rigs rarely match.
Co-op — A second player can join locally or online, which changes the rhythm of fights without watering down the challenge.
Performance — Tested on a Mac mini M4 running macOS Tahoe, the 64-bit Intel build held steady even in later rooms crowded with particle effects. A controller is the natural choice for the tight platforming, though keyboard play is entirely workable once you remap the defaults to your liking.
Your first few runs will teach you more than any guide
Unlock a second hero as soon as the option appears. Each one—Ayla, Kiran, Kalli, Octave—plays differently enough that a build that felt useless on one character might click instantly on another. Kiran's parry window, for instance, rewards a patience that Ayla's speed doesn't ask for.
Don't hoard keys. The Garden hands them out at a pace that suggests scarcity, but you'll find more before the next locked door matters. What you should stockpile are the aether currencies tied to permanent upgrades. Spend those on the hub's damage and health boosts first—surviving one extra hit in a boss fight changes more than any spell variation will early on.
When a Zodiac fight goes sideways, watch the attack patterns rather than your health bar. Each of the twelve guardians telegraphs their heavy hits in ways that become readable after two or three attempts. The Scorpio fight, for example, punishes players who retreat to the arena edges; staying mid-range turns several of its worst attacks into misses.
Single-screen co-op that zooms out instead of splitting
Does the co-op hold up on a single screen? It does. Local play splits the camera intelligently, zooming out far enough that both players can see incoming threats without turning the action into a postage stamp. Online via Steam Remote Play Together adds a frame or two of latency, which you'll notice mainly during parry timing, but it's perfectly playable for a full run.
Will an Intel Mac struggle with the later stages? The 64-bit Intel build is well-optimized. Even when the screen fills with spell effects and animated enemies, the frame rate stays consistent on modest hardware. The hand-drawn sprites scale cleanly at lower resolutions too, so dropping to 1080p on an older machine smooths things out without making the artwork look muddy.
How long before it feels like I'm making progress? The first two hours are the steepest part of the curve. After unlocking a couple of permanent upgrades and learning one Zodiac's patterns well enough to clear it reliably, the loop tightens. Runs that ended in ten minutes start stretching past twenty, and the spell combinations you dismissed early on begin to make sense in the context of later areas.
What recent versions refined
Build 1292 brought a handful of balance adjustments that change the feel of everyday play without rewriting the rules. Enemy density in the mid-zone floating platforms was pulled back slightly—those rooms used to spike the difficulty in a way that felt more like a wall than a ramp, and the tuning now lets the challenge climb more evenly toward the later Zodiac encounters.
Co-op stability on Mac saw quiet improvements across the last few patches. Disconnects during online sessions were rare but frustrating when they hit during boss fights; the netcode tightened up noticeably, and the game now handles brief network dropouts by pausing rather than booting the second player. A small change, but one that saves runs that would have been lost a version ago.
Frame-by-frame animation sequences for several spell effects received extra in-between frames, making the faster attacks read more clearly in motion. It's the kind of detail you might not notice consciously, but it contributes to that sense of tactile weight that sets the game's combat apart from roguelites that lean on skeletal animation. On a Mac display, the extra clarity in those quick multi-hit spells is immediately apparent.
- macOS (64-bit Intel build)
Questions from the booth
There are twelve boss fights in total, each tied to a zodiac guardian with distinct attack patterns.
Yes, the game includes local and online co-op for two players, alongside the single-player mode.
