It has been an unusually fire (pun intended) couple of weeks for dragon game lovers! New projects have been popping up, with several early build/tech demo drops as we start the year. Today I’ve taken a look at several of these as well as a demo for a recent full release. Most of these, per usual, are still early on in development, but I’m feeling quite positive about the state of dragon centric games right now.
None Shall Intrude
Starting off with the most atypical game on this list (at least in terms of this blog’s content): None Shall Intrude is a strategic rougelite deckbuilder where you play as a the big bad raid boss: a large fire-breathing dragon. Bands of heroes will continuously attempt to slay you as you work to claim sections of the world for yourself. I quite like the idea, but there’s also not necessarily a ton of dragonish stuff going on other than breathing fire and using magic.
I gave the free demo a shot and wasn’t overly impressed, to be honest. There’s a lot of interactions between different elements on tiles of the playing board which could create some interesting gameplay, but most of the mechanics in the game, at least in the demo, are not very well explained. I also ended up running into a bug where an event popup got stuck on the screen and prevented me from doing anything else which killed most of my motivation to play much more. Otherwise, the art is great and the music is a bit overbearing. Steam reviews of the full game echo some of my own sentiments and add that it’s overall a bit of a short and repetitive experience. I’ll likely end up picking this one up on sale if bugs are fixed and a little more content is added.
Primal Hunger
Primal Hunger is a bit of a stretch to include, but the demo just showed up on Steam amidst all the other recent drops so I tried it out today as well. It’s an interesting battle royale game based on defeating other players to collect enough of their essence to evolve your creature. I’m pretty much a complete newb to the genre so I don’t have much of a perspective to offer, but the base idea here seems interesting enough and I’d be curious to try it out more. Dragon gameplay is pretty minimal; the dragon is one of the “final evolutions” that you can reach and it does certainly feel powerful in that way, with some impressive flame attacks. But there’s not much in the way of flight mechanics or other more dragony things, and overall it’s definitely not a large part of the game.
I ended up only playing through the tutorial and couldn’t get queued into a match, likely just due to a lower playerbase. Controller support isn’t well integrated yet, at least in menus, but it played fine enough. My biggest complaint would be that there’s quite a large number and assortment of animals/creatures, so much so that it feels rather unfocused and scattershot. I fought against everything from a rhino to an alien creature to a mummy (???). Personally I think some more cohesive choices might make for a tighter experience.
Dragon’s Veil
The next couple entries on today’s list are both very preliminary builds, more like tech demos that show off some flight systems and light combat. First up is Dragon’s Veil, yet another upcoming entry in the open-world survival dragon game genre. This one appears to have just popped up in late 2024 so development is still in the very early stages, but this first prototype feels pretty good. It’s a bit sluggish but I’m sure things just aren’t optimized to any degree yet. The dragon looks great, with decent animations and physics. I think the wing downbeats are particularly effective at conveying the weight and size of your beast. I enjoyed flying around for a bit and look forward to trying it out when it’s a little more polished. You can find the prototype download on their Discord server (download at your own risk, of course!).
One random thought I had while trying out all these games today is how many currently released and upcoming dragon or dragon riding games have wyvern (two legged and two winged) designs. Where’s our four legged Western dragons? Where’s the snakey, undulating Eastern dragons? Of course there’s some out there, and Dragon’s Veil looks to have some concept art for a European dragon, but it’s just interesting to me how dominating wyverns have become, despite many in the dragon-lovers community often looking down on them as lesser or not true dragons. Side note ended.
Portal World
Portal World has me feeling very conflicted. I had the most fun playing around with this little tech demo today, but the overall description of what’s planned for the game leaves me a bit nervous. The dev describes Portal World as a “solo-developed third-person survival open-world sandbox action RPG” with some very ambitious sounding goals like a large range of playable races in a dynamic, living world where individual creatures have distinct personalities and interactions. That’s a lot for a solo dev to tackle.
The demo includes two playable races: werewolves and dragons. I puttered about only briefly with the werewolf so I won’t discuss it, but the dragon was the highlight of my demo play day. The dragon feels great to to fly around as, with a pleasant undulation of the body and tail and a lot of satisfying banking and diving. There’s a dedicated flap button that actually does something (gives you a bit of height) which I love. There’s the right blend of speed and weightiness. I think the wings feel a bit stiff towards the tips when compared to the animations in Dragon’s Veil but I do love the diving and dashing animations. There’s definitely a bit of a learning curve with the flight mechanics and, judging by the footage posted by the dev, there’s a lot of maneuverability once you’ve mastered it. In a perfect world, I’d see these mechanics dialed in and applied to a solid, focused single player game instead of another open-world sandbox. Maybe one day we’ll see the popularity of that genre finally fade.
Check out the demo download on the Portal World Patreon page.
Several other small projects have started popping up recently, but I’ll wait until things are a little further along before I talk about some of those. Regardless, the state of dragon games is looking pretty good as we start off 2025, even if we’re still encountering a bit of genre oversaturation. As always, please reach out if you stumble on something I might not have heard about!