Echoes of Agony is a dark turn-based roguelite built around a single provocative question: how much suffering will you tolerate in exchange for power? You play as a character hunted by inner demons, pushing through increasingly hostile levels where greed and caution sit on opposite ends of a razor. Accumulate too much and the world punishes you for it. Hold back and you starve yourself of the strength needed to survive what comes next.
The combat system abandons the conventional one-action-per-turn structure in favour of a dynamic turn economy governed by stamina. When your stamina pool fills completely your turn begins and all stamina regeneration pauses across the board. From that point you can perform as many actions as your remaining stamina allows before choosing to end your turn, resuming regeneration for everyone. Spend less stamina and your next turn arrives sooner. Spend more and you wait longer. This creates a constant tension between doing everything you can right now and preserving tempo for what follows, turning each encounter into a negotiation between aggression and restraint.
Greed functions as the difficulty slider. As you accumulate Echoes, the game's core currency, stronger enemies begin to spawn and existing ones gain damage multipliers. The world scales against your wealth in real time, meaning the richer you become the more dangerous every encounter gets. Characters also gain a stat called Agony whenever they fail actions. Agony reduces their effectiveness across the board but simultaneously multiplies drop rates, creating a feedback loop where failure breeds opportunity and opportunity breeds further risk. You can reduce your Agony, tactically outwit enemies who outscale you, or simply overwhelm them once you've gathered enough raw power to brute force the problem.
Level progression offers its own layer of calculated risk. When moving forward you choose from a selection of levels, weighing whether you want easier layouts or more forgiving modifiers. At the midpoint of each level you have the option to extract your Echoes early, banking what you've earned so far — but extraction comes at a cost. You're taxed for your caution, penalised for playing it safe. Clear the entire level and you keep everything, though the more Echoes you carry the heavier the burden becomes. This structure forces a recurring decision point that mirrors the game's central philosophy: the safe path always costs something and the dangerous path always promises more.
Between levels an NPC allows you to trade, respec your character, and reshape your build. Gear can be enchanted with affixes that scale in both power and cost, letting you fine-tune your loadout around specific strategies. Unwanted items can be disenchanted and converted into Echoes, feeding back into the cycle of accumulation and escalation. Alternatively you can gamble, rolling for the chance to drop items suited to your character rather than crafting incrementally toward them.
Echoes of Agony is still in development. What's visible so far suggests a roguelite that refuses to let players coast: one where the difficulty you face is largely the difficulty you chose by reaching for more than you could safely carry.