Shacknews previewed Studio Kobako’s Dungeon Treaders at the October 2026 Steam Next Fest

Shacknews previewed Studio Kobako’s Dungeon Treaders during the October 2026 Steam Next Fest, a role-playing game played from a first-person perspective with a planned 2027 release window for PC. Kotaku’s page, published February 5, 2026, describes the game as a classic-style 3D dungeon crawler mixing nostalgic challenge with modern comfort and built on streamlined, trial-and-error gameplay.

Studio Kobako put out the Dungeon Treaders demo on Steam for PC on September 23, 2026, with core mechanics and early gameplay set on the dungeon’s first floor. Gaming Route reports that the October 2026 fest lasted seven days, beginning October 19 at 17:00 UTC and ending October 26 at 17:00 UTC, and that its free demos of upcoming games ran on Steam alongside developer livestreams.

Shacknews and Kotaku describe character creation as following the Wizardry pattern: pick a name, choose a race, pick a class, then select portraits, the usual starting point before the quirks show through. RPGamer says a party can include up to six characters, with five races and eight classes to choose from, inspired by Goroku Takahashi’s web novel series Dungeon Settlers, which began in 2022 and continues, with characters from the series available to join as recruitable mercenaries. The game lets players swap in their own images for face icons and full-body portraits, along with their own sound effects and background effects.

Players can choose Cat as a playable race, and realistic cat drawings make up nearly half of the character portraits in the demo, part of the silly tone Shacknews’s preview credits with setting the game apart from close genre peers. Shacknews’s reviewer chose a cat thief for the October 2026 demo, since the cat’s stat spread looked like a fit for the class. Trap identification and disarming are chiefly a thief’s responsibility, but a cat thief can only respond with meows while the human party guesses and advises because cats cannot speak human language, so the player must trust the cat blindly. The preview says the outcomes were funny either way.

Right after character creation, the demo throws the player into a fight right away, battling rats alongside auto-controlled non-player characters, and Shacknews’s preview says that is when the game really pops off. An off-kilter camera angle changes how moving through the dungeon feels, even for series veterans, and serves as one of the contemporary mechanical decisions layered onto the traditional framework. Characters traveling with the player who never join the party provide a lot of chatter, part of the same mix of traditional framework and new mechanical decisions. The preview calls the demo just enough of a taste to leave the reader wanting more.

The post-fight healing and fatigue system lets players keep fighting without heading back to the surface to heal after every rough fight, which cuts down on trips to the surface and helps them keep moving through dungeon exploration. An emerging VTuber, a performer who uses a digital avatar, sings the original J-Pop battle music, with warbly English lyrics that satirize how heroes in dungeon role-playing games are selfishly perverted. Shacknews’s preview contrasts the track with typical dungeon-crawler ambiance and percussion, while a trailer offers an excerpt and lyrics of the song.

Players can upload custom assets including portraits and custom background music files, though the preview suggests custom music is probably best avoided. Shacknews’s preview says custom assets are fun if players have bandwidth to adjust dimensions. The demo’s harsh leveling limits keep players from exploring much of the skill system and from advancing faster than the enemy strength curve, which the preview calls the big drawback, and it leaves a hard post-boss section to deal with. After the boss, a difficult section comes before the demo cutoff, which arrives shortly after the player reaches the second area.

Games taking part had to launch after October 26, 2026, appear at only one Next Fest, and the following edition comes in February 2027, running from February 22 to March 1, 2027. No guarantee exists that Next Fest demos stay playable after October 26, 2026, so players should add games to their wishlists to get launch and sale notifications; developers decide whether demos stay up, Valve encourages developers to leave demos online, and wishlists matter greatly to small studios.