- Thank you for 300 downloads! - 18 September 2026
Tetrogue just crossed 300 downloads. Thank you, genuinely, to everyone who gave it a shot, left feedback, or just clicked download on a solo dev's weird little falling-block roguelike. It's been about a month since the 200 downloads post, and the game has grown a lot since then. Since 200 downloads, Tetrogue has picked up: Asymmetric Multiplayer, a whole second way to play: one player defends a run as the hero, the other attacks from the shadows with their own budget and abilities, decided by a rock-paper-scissors role draft Steam and Discord Rich Presence, so your friends can see exactly which boss is currently ruining your day A full Enemy HUD redesign and a combat hit-feel overhaul: slow-mo on big hits, controller rumble, knockback, the works 6 new relics, including Targeting System, Gem Madness, Spiked Armor, Fan Favorites, Blind Swordsman, and Counterspell A reworked Gem Vendor wit…
- Tetrogue 1.3.9 — Patch Notes - 18 September 2026
New Features New Options > Display > HUD section (checkboxes for Player Stats, Stats Panel, and DPS, all on by default) lets you hide individual battle HUD elements. Turning off Stats Panel extends the enemy area and battle background all the way to the edge of the screen. 3 new relics: Fan Favorites (the I, J, L, and O pieces appear more often), Blind Swordsman (hides the enemy's stats and turns them into silhouettes, but slows every enemy's attacks by 25%), and Counterspell (status effects can no longer be cleared early with a line clear, but the enemy that cast one is frozen for 5 seconds when it expires naturally). New "Zen" difficulty tier, one step below Novice: pieces never fall on their own, only your own moves and gravity move them. New Reddit button on the start screen next to the Discord button, linking to r/Tetrogue. 4 new start screen taglines, including 3 clickable ones li…
- Tetrogue 1.3.8 — Patch Notes - 16 September 2026
New Features New live DPS readout in the piece-drop stats sidebar. Shows your average damage per second this battle to 2 decimal places, updates several times a second, and grows bigger, jitters more, and eventually catches fire the higher your output climbs relative to a basic enemy's health at your current stage and difficulty. Also fixed the piece-count numbers and both section headers not actually being centered in that sidebar. Victory and Game Over screens now show 4 more run stats: total damage dealt, total armor gained, total gold gained, and your average DPS across the whole run. Balance Changes Base line-clear damage: 3-line clears now deal 6 damage (up from 5), 4-line clears deal 9 (down from 10). 1-line (1) and 2-line (3) unchanged. Applies to Gold Round payouts too. Raw Gem: flat damage per line raised by 1 at every tier (2/3/4/5/6, was 1/2/3/4/5). Cursed Gem: flat damage p…
- Tetrogue 1.3.7 — Patch Notes - 13 September 2026
New Features Exiting a run now goes straight to your Upgrades tab if you can afford one: pressing Exit (Game Over) or Back to Menu (Victory) skips the Start Screen, with a note next to the Upgrades button explaining why and your Shard counter animating up to the new total. New Tier 2 relic: Targeting System. Line-clear damage always hits whichever enemy you've selected instead of the frontmost one, at 25% less damage as the tradeoff. Switch targets with new Direct Relic Control keys (Options, Controls), defaulting to Q/E or LB/RB. The selected enemy is marked with a small triangle overhead. New Tier 2 relic: Gem Madness. Your equipped gems and gem bag shuffle together at the start of every battle, and at the end of each battle a random gem is upgraded a tier while a different one is destroyed. New Tier 1 relic: Spiked Armor. Any enemy that attacks you takes damage equal to your current…
- Tetrogue 1.3.6 — Patch Notes - 11 September 2026
New Features Tetrédex gains two new sections: Heroes and Status Effects. Heroes start blacked out until unlocked, then show a full mechanic writeup and their three Boss Upgrade options with the real numbers. Status Effects work the same way, revealing an icon and description the first time you're hit by or enter that effect in battle. New "Test Controls" button on Options → Gameplay opens a small practice board so you can feel out DAS, ARR, soft-drop speed, the rotation system, and lock delay without starting a real battle. Changes Gold Gem reworked: its in-combat payout is now a fixed amount per clear size (single/double/triple/tetris) instead of scaling off damage dealt, which used to produce absurd gold totals on high-damage builds. The "deal half damage" drawback is unchanged. The Difficulty-select screen's locked-tier hint now names the actual tier you need to beat and the one it u…
- Tetrogue 1.3.5 — Patch Notes - 9 September 2026
New Features Rich Presence on Steam and Discord: your friends can now see what you are doing in Tetrogue straight from their friends list or your Discord profile, whether you are in a menu, choosing a path on the map, in a battle or boss fight, in an Endless run, or in a Versus match. Fully translated into all five languages. On Discord it also shows a session timer, the Tetrogue logo, a hero icon during battles, and buttons to open the store page or join the Discord server, and both Steam and Discord group the two players of a Versus match together. New Game Over sequence: instead of an instant cut to the Game Over screen, your hero's eyes go to X's and the board crumbles and falls apart first, matching the collapse of the stone wall behind the enemies. New cheat code: entering STACKR in the seed code field on the Difficulty-select screen instantly unlocks the next difficulty tier and…
- Tetrogue 1.3.4 — Patch Notes - 8 September 2026
Accessibility New Grid Visibility slider (Options → Accessibility) lets you brighten or fade the board's grid lines, from fully invisible up to twice as bright as before. New Thick Grid Lines toggle doubles the grid line width, for players who still find it hard to see even at maximum Grid Visibility. New Ghost Piece Opacity slider lets you adjust how visible the falling piece's landing preview is, from fully invisible to fully opaque. New Ghost Outline toggle adds a bordered outline around the ghost piece for extra contrast. A live preview on the Accessibility tab shows the effect of all of the above in real time, without needing to start a battle to check. New Lock Delay slider (Custom Difficulty) lets you tune how tightly a piece's lock delay is tied to its fall speed, instead of a fixed ratio. Multiplayer The Attacker's board now respects your Color Scheme, Grid Visibility, Ghost Pi…
- Tetrogue 1.3.3 — Patch Notes - 6 September 2026
New Features Each multiplayer player can now set their own personal difficulty the first time they play as Attacker, applied whenever they're later the Defender, so two players of different skill levels can each get the challenge that's right for them instead of sharing one difficulty for the whole run. The Attacker can now spend their upgrade budget directly on the Stage 1, 2, or 3 boss itself, not just on regular minions. The Attacker can now re-pick their full ability loadout at every stage advance, instead of it being locked in for the whole run. Each ability on the Attacker's ability-selection screen now shows a short description of what it does. A 3-2-1 countdown now plays before every multiplayer battle starts, so the Defender isn't thrown straight into a falling piece the instant setup finishes. The "Multiplayer save detected" popup can now be closed with an X button, instead of…
- Tetrogue 1.3.2 — Patch Notes - 3 September 2026
Quality of Life Every focusable button, card, and selector now gets a clear "corner brackets" highlight when you move to it with a controller or keyboard, or hover it with the mouse — replacing the old, easy-to-miss pulsing scale effect. Rolled out across every menu, overlay, and screen in the game. Fixes Fixed a controller's Rotate input being read as a tutorial card's confirm/skip button, which could accidentally skip a tutorial message while you were just trying to rotate your piece. Fixed the Options screen's tab headers (Sound, Accessibility, Gameplay, Display, Controls) and the Map screen's gem-bag button not showing the new focus highlight. Fixed a multiplayer bug where a piece on the Attacker's or Defender's board could get pushed in a direction nobody pressed, then rapidly flicker left and right when the real direction was pressed. Most noticeable over Steam Remote Play Togethe…
- 1.3.1 — Patch Notes - 31 August 2026
Fixes Steam Cloud now keeps your progress in sync across more than one device, including moving a save between a PC and a Steam Deck. Before this fix a second device could fail to pull your progress down, and in some cases replaced your cloud save with a fresh one. If your progress looks out of date, open the game once on the device that has your latest save before playing elsewhere, and it will upload correctly from there. Localization Fixed several German spelling and grammar mistakes, including the First Blood and Patience relic descriptions, the sound effects volume label in Options, and the name of the "Hard Victor" achievement. Unified inconsistent wording in the German and Spanish translations, which had drifted into using several different terms for a garbage line. Translated the multiplayer and Forge interface into German, French, Spanish, and Turkish. Menus, the prepare-the-en…
- Tetrogue 1.3.0 — Patch Notes - 28 August 2026
New Features Asymmetric Multiplayer has arrived. Play a full run against a second player instead of the AI. One player is the Defender: they play a completely normal single-player run, picking a hero, difficulty, and relics like always. The other is the Attacker: they never touch a real board of their own to fight, but before every battle they spend a budget upgrading the Defender's enemies, and during the fight they spend mana on abilities to make life harder. Play together on the same PC (each player gets their own keyboard/controller) or online through Steam. Not available in the free Demo. A Rock-Paper-Scissors draft at the start of a multiplayer run decides who begins as which role. The first time you reach your role, a short explainer introduces the Defender and Attacker, the budget, and how role-switching works, with a "Don't show this again" option. Prepare the Enemy: before eac…
- Tetrogue 1.2.2 — Patch Notes - 19 August 2026
Quality of Life Starting a run with unlocked but unequipped Starting Relic slots now shows a warning before you begin, mirroring the existing gem-loadout warning: "Start!" / "Open Loadout" / "Don't show again". The Difficulty-select screen's Start button can now be navigated away from with Left/Right on keyboard or controller, jumping to the hero column. Previously it was a dead end. Fixes Reworded the "Your Health" battle tutorial card: it now leads with the fact that the heart isn't a separate health stat, since players were missing that HP just is empty rows remaining. Fixed the Tetrédex not always scrolling far enough to fully reveal a focused tile at the bottom of a section, most noticeable in the Relics section. Fixed the Progress screen's shard counter showing a duplicate icon next to the ◈ symbol. Fixed the Discord button linking to an expired invite.
- Thank you for 200 downloads! - 17 August 2026
Tetrogue just crossed 200 downloads. Doubling up feels like it should be less exciting than the first 100, but somehow it isn't, so thank you, genuinely, to everyone who gave it a shot. It's been about a month since that first thank-you post, and looking back, the game has evolved a lot. Since 100 downloads, Tetrogue has picked up: 7 playable Heroes, each with a real ability and their own unlock chain (the whole reason this graphic isn't slimes anymore) Endless Mode, for when three stages and a final boss just isn't enough punishment A full Rotation System selector, so the SRS purists and the ARS/TRS diehards can both be happy The Heat mechanic and a proper Custom Difficulty slider for tuning your own suffering A full piece-rendering overhaul, tiles now connect and bevel like one solid shape instead of separate bricks Shareable run-summary cards and seed codes, so you can brag about a r…
- Tetrogue 1.2.1 — Patch Notes - 16 August 2026
Quality of Life The in-battle Controls tutorial now ends with a Sonic Drop / Hard Drop choice instead of a plain acknowledgement — pick which one your drop key uses right there, with a reminder that it's changeable anytime in Options → Controls. Fixes Fixed the Game Over and Victory screens accepting Restart/Share/Exit/Back/Endless input for the first 0.3 seconds after appearing, letting a player still mashing keys at the moment of death or victory dismiss the screen before seeing their run stats. Fixed a falling piece's spawn row (the row just above the visible board) getting sliced by the danger border, which rendered in front of it instead of behind it. Fixed a Cursed Chest's poison/bewitched/blinded/frenzy curse lasting for the rest of the run instead of just the one battle it was meant for, matching how curses from The Shrine already worked. Fixed the hero avatar in the battle side…
- Tetrogue 1.2.0 — Patch Notes - 14 August 2026
New Features Heroes are here. Pick a hero on the Difficulty-select screen via a new browsable carousel — 7 heroes (Ivy, Olaf, Jonas, Link, Turner, Zoro, Sabrina), each with a unique animated avatar and a real, gameplay-changing passive ability. Only Ivy starts unlocked; winning a run with your currently-highest-unlocked hero unlocks the next one in the chain — but any hero can be freely browsed and previewed even while locked. Ivy: whenever your board has a real Tetris well open, your next piece is guaranteed to be a long piece, and Quad clears deal +50% bonus damage. Olaf: fusing 4 pieces into a perfect 4x4 square deals bonus damage — a x4 gold bonus if all 4 pieces matched, x2 silver if mixed. Jonas — Hotlines: 2 rows are marked as targets at the start of battle; clearing a Hotline row deals +75% bonus damage and immediately marks 2 new rows elsewhere. Link: consecutive line clears bu…
- Tetrogue 1.1.14 — Patch Notes - 8 August 2026
New Features Added a fully animated Tetrogue logo by the talented D.R. Ink to the title screen, replacing the old static "TETROGUE" text: letters fall into place left-to-right (each landing pushes the colored bar beneath it), then the tetromino pieces sitting on the wordmark drop into place in random order, with the I-piece saved for last for a special bounce into the U's cup. Default piece colors were also retuned to match their corresponding enemy sprites' hues while keeping each piece's traditional color family recognizable. Added a "Heroes — Coming Soon" preview to the Difficulty-select screen: a small animated, locked I-piece character (with blinking eyes, an idle sway, and a diagonal "Coming Soon" ribbon) teasing an upcoming Hero-selection feature. The whole Difficulty-select screen was reorganized into a 3-column layout to make room for it (Hero and Difficulty selectors on the le…
- Tetrogue 1.1.13 — Patch Notes - 2 August 2026
Visuals Pieces now render as one continuous beveled shape (light from the top-right) instead of a grid of separate bricks, with a subtle low-contrast seam kept between individual tiles so pieces still read as built from units. Applies everywhere a piece appears: the board, the falling piece, NEXT/Hold previews, the start-screen background, the level-transition wipe, weapon/attack shapes, and garbage debris. Fused gold/silver Perfect-Square blocks now render as one flat-center jewel instead of 16 separate bricks. Locked pieces on the board now gradually mute darker (blended toward the board's own background tone) once their lock flash finishes, so the actively-falling piece stands out more clearly against the settled stack. Controls Replaced the "Hard Drop Locks Instantly" option with two separate, always-available actions: Hard Drop (always locks instantly, unbound by default) and Sonic…
- Tetrogue 1.1.12 — Patch Notes - 1 August 2026
New Features Added a new Accessibility option, "Readable Font" (Options > Accessibility, below 4-Line Flash): when enabled, swaps small/body text (name labels, descriptions, tooltips, HUD numbers) to a plain cross-platform sans font, while headers, titles, and large display numbers keep the game's pixel font. Off by default. Balance 20G challenge's lock delay doubled (0.5s to 1.0s) to compensate for the removed falling-reaction window. The Chrono gem (halves fall/attack speed) now also doubles the lock-delay window while active, matching its "everything about this piece slows down" theme. Stacks multiplicatively with 20G. Quality of Life Added a visual lead-in to the piece lock flash: the falling piece now progressively brightens while grounded-but-not-yet-locked, so the flash reads as the culmination of a build-up instead of a sudden, disconnected cue. Reshaped the windowed-mode title…
- Tetrogue 1.1.11 — Patch Notes - 30 July 2026
New Features Added a Starting Loadout system: choose a specific relic to always start each run with, from the Difficulty-select screen (replaces the old random-offer-of-3 "Fortune's Eye" node). A second always-start slot unlocks via a new "Twin Fortunes" Meta-progression node. Only relics you've already discovered in a prior run are selectable. Added a post-run shareable card: a "Share" button on the Victory screen and Game Over overlay renders a PNG summarizing the run (score, difficulty, time, stats, seed, every enemy defeated as overlapping portrait art, relics and gems), saves it to your Pictures/Tetrogue folder, and copies it to the clipboard. The Victory and Game Over screens now show this same card live on-screen instead of their own separate stats layout. Run seeds are now a short 6-character code (e.g. "JF0Z5N") shown on the Difficulty-select screen and the run-summary card, an…
- Tetrogue 1.1.10 — Patch Notes - 29 July 2026
Gems Fixed Armor Gem's damage being calculated from the armor it granted instead of the clear's real (relic-scaled) damage, which silently flattened every Tetris it occupied to a tiny fixed number regardless of build strength. Now scales with real clear damage, same as the Gravity and Healing gems. Lowered Armor Gem's top-tier armor-per-trigger value (was 4, now 3). Armor now decays naturally over time instead of holding indefinitely, shown as a circular darkening creeping across the shield icon. Reworked Staggering Gem: delay is now a percentage of the target's own attack cooldown instead of a flat number of seconds (higher tiers used to do nothing once the flat delay saturated the enemy's cooldown at high attack speed). Also now hits multiple enemies at higher tiers — 1/1/2/2/all across tiers 1-5, with delay strength 50/75/75/100/100%. At tier 5, a Tetris delays every enemy's attack c…
