MARBLE SOULS keeps every souls-like system and deletes the combat

You are a marble, and everything you do is rolling. Sprinting, jumping and climbing your way up something are all the same physics body being pushed around a world built to defeat it. There is no weapon and no attack button. What stands between you and the next area is a slope, a gap, a narrow ledge, or your own momentum arriving faster than you meant it to.

The souls-like half is not a coat of paint. You collect lost souls, you spend them to level up, and the game is explicit that you should make sure not to lose them. The developers are equally explicit that this is about exploration and experimentation rather than rage-inducing progression loss, which is a design position rather than a difficulty setting: the pressure is meant to come from a route you have not solved yet, not from being punished for failing it.

Levelling changes movement instead of damage. The stats feed sprinting, jumping and rolling, so a build is literally how your marble behaves — how fast it winds up, how far it launches, how much speed it keeps when it lands. Equipment layers on top of that and changes what the marble can do at all. The stated goal is ridiculous builds that break out in unintended ways, and that only works because the character is a physics object rather than a set of animation states with numbers attached.

The world is one interconnected space, not a level select. You map it as you go, open doors, and unlock shortcuts that turn the long way you learned first into a short drop. Some paths are hidden, and getting to them is mostly a question of whether you are willing to take a risk with a body that does not stop when you let go of the stick.

How Snake Pass Became a Platformer Without Jumping argues that taking away a genre’s most familiar verb is what makes a game new — Snake Pass wears the costume of a 3D platformer, deletes the jump, and turns climbing into a physical negotiation instead of a button press. MARBLE SOULS performs the same deletion one genre across. The familiar verb in a souls-like is the fight, and with it gone the difficulty has to live somewhere else: in reading terrain, in committing to a line, in knowing what your own weight is about to do to you.

The World Design of Hollow Knight is about a kingdom that opens many directions at once, lets you misplace yourself in it, and then pays you back with a door that opens from the wrong side. That is the loop MARBLE SOULS is leaning on, and it carries more weight here than usual. With no enemies to clear, an area is only ever solved by understanding its geometry, so every shortcut is a record of something you worked out rather than something you beat.

Redesigning Death makes the case that dying can cost you something real instead of simply rewinding you, and that what it costs is what decides how players behave afterwards. Souls you can drop is the oldest version of that idea, and it pulls against the experimentation the rest of this design is asking for. The tuning question is how much a lost run of souls stings: enough that a risky line is a real decision, not so much that anyone stops trying the stupid one.

MARBLE SOULS is credited to Fynn Levy, Rollin´Barrel, Stuffed Wombat, ThorHighHeels and girls@computers, published by Stuffed Wombat, and listed under Action, Indie and RPG. It is coming to Windows, Mac and Linux, with 2026 on the store page and no day attached to it. Steam bills it as coming from the creators of Mosa Lina and FALLSTRUKTUR, which is the most useful line there — those are games where the systems are allowed to misbehave, and a marble that can be built into something absurd is the same instinct.

It is single-player, with Steam achievements and full controller support including DualShock and DualSense pads. The store also lists camera comfort options and custom volume controls, and says it is playable without timed input. For a game that is entirely a rolling camera and a body with inertia, the first of those is not box-ticking.

If the appeal is a game that picks one verb and refuses to bolt a second one onto it, YOU ARE THE MONSTER is the other one on this list — a rampage game with no stealth layer and no resource to manage, which puts the entire budget into how the one thing you do feels. MARBLE SOULS is attempting the harder version of the same discipline, because it has to hold an RPG’s worth of systems up on top of it.