Decrepit was announced at the 2025 Game Awards. The action game from a solo developer lets you escape from a huge castle full of undead creatures.
One of the first new announcements at The Game Awards is Decrepit. This mix of dungeon crawler and Souls-like game lets us explore a dark, medieval castle full of undead creatures from a first-person perspective. Our goal is, of course, to escape this terrible place, but the attempt will cost our character their life again and again.
The unique feature of Decrepit is its progression system. It prioritizes our accumulated experience above all else, without measuring it in points and levels.
Those who don’t learn are lost
Decrepit begins in a random prison cell in the castle’s basement vaults. From there, we fight our way towards the exit, but the path is blocked by undead prisoners, servants, and castle guards.
We seem to be fighting mainly zombies, but they use different weapons and tactics. Some of them wear armor, but in the trailer we also see a monster made up of several undead creatures fused together, or a gardener who attacks with his wheelbarrow:
We equip ourselves with loot we find: our inventory can hold one weapon, one staff, and one piece of armor. The combination of equipment determines our build. If we find a weapon and a staff that belong to one of the four classes (mage, warrior, rogue, or shaman), we unlock bonuses or special abilities.
If we lose a battle, however, all our equipment is lost and we only keep the permanent bonuses that we discovered while exploring attentively. We then start again in a random cell and have to find our way through the castle. The positions of the enemies have also changed, which can lead to nasty surprises.
What always remains the same, however, is the castle itself: it is not a labyrinth of randomly arranged set pieces, but a completely hand-built, huge dungeon. That’s why the experience gained is so important for Decrepit.
While the castle may seem endless and confusing during our first attempts, we gradually find our way around the corridors, halls, and courtyards of the dungeon. We then complete familiar sections much faster than at the beginning, partly because we gain permanent advantages: unlocked elevators, shortcuts, and secrets remain even after we die.
So while buffs and our equipment also give us an advantage, our strongest weapon should be the experience we have gained from previous attempts. We know exactly where we need to go next and are familiar with our opponents’ attack patterns. And maybe then we will actually manage to escape from our terrible prison at some point.
