GrimKeep is a roguelite that replaces the genre’s usual deck of cards with a bag of dice, and its free Steam demo gives a deliberately narrow look at how that idea plays. Developer Resolution Games has spelled out exactly what the trial contains and what it reserves for the November 30 launch, which makes the demo easier to judge on its own terms than as a preview of the finished game.
Build the damage before you roll
GrimKeep’s fights are turn-based, but the damage is not decided by the roll alone. You collect items, and each item carries effects that your dice results trigger as bonuses and multipliers. The dice are tunable too: you can acquire dice with special abilities tied to poison, healing, or gold, then curate which dice stay in your bag so the combinations you want come up more often. The Steam listing frames it as “big damage isn’t rolled, it’s built.”
A run is shaped in two passes. Before a roll you decide which items and dice belong in the build and which combinations deserve your limited resources. After a roll you react when the result does not line up with the combo you hoped to trigger. Defense, stuns, and healing give you levers beyond raw output, and the branching route map lets you weigh risk against reward between fights.
What the demo includes
The trial covers a single area, the Outskirts, from the start of a run through its boss encounter. Two heroes are available immediately – The Huntress and The Beast – and a third, The Feral, unlocks as you progress. Upgrades you earn persist between journeys, so the demo does exercise the roguelite’s carry-over loop rather than resetting everything each run. The setting is a cursed city in a nightmare fairytale, with the player cutting through it to reach the Princess.
What waits for launch
Resolution Games’ announcement lists the full game’s scope as more than 200 items, over 60 monsters, seven playable heroes, and 30 hero skills, plus additional regions beyond the Outskirts. Three systems are launch content rather than demo content: the Crucible, which melts items and their abilities into new combinations; the Ritual, which adds new abilities to existing items; and map shortcuts. None of that is in the trial, so the demo is a proof of the base loop – build, roll, adapt, carry progress forward – rather than a sample of the full item and ability pool.
GrimKeep launches November 30, 2026 for $14.99 USD. The free demo is available now on Steam for PC and Mac and stays playable through Steam Next Fest until October 26.
