Conglomerate 451 looks a bit Grimrock-meets-XCOM-in-cyberpunk-cosplay

Fantasy folk and cyberpunks have much in common. They wear studded leather/pleather gloves, they can work wonders with the right incantation/code, they lust for gold coins/credit card numbers, they're a grubby lot whose morals can be overwritten by the promise of a big haul, and they're mega-horny. So how come fantasy nerks get to do all the dungeon-crawling? Italian studio RuneHeads say thee nay, making a first-person, turn-based, grid-wandering, roguelikelike dungeon-crawler that's set not in a medieval fantasy world but a cyberpunk future with neon lights and PVC tity armour galore. Conglomerate 451 is its name and coming to early access soon is its game. For now, hark, a trailer.

It looks a fair bit like that Dungeon Master/Legend Of Grimrock sort of dungeon-crawling at heart, walking through corridors, duffing up buddies, getting loot, and so on, just in neon-blasted concrete than candlelit caves.

It's also a bit like XCOM or Syndicate or summat in a broader strategic layer, having us choose our missions, research new equipment, upgrade our cloned agents with cybernetic implants and prosthetics, risk damage that can carry between missions (not to mention permadeath), and such.

Conglomerate 451's art style is kinda unremarkable, the usual cyberpunk concrete and colours and shiny suits and Tokyo touches. Cyberpunk in general often looks pretty generic, which is a shame given that the genre already lost a lot of its bite when it became more an aesthetic. But hey, same for fantasy, and Grimrock still brought giant snails and crabs and horrible crushing mechanocubes to its dark dungeons.

The Steam Early Access launch is "coming soon," publishers 1C Company say, with a full launch planned 6-8 months later.