'Dungeon Settlers,' currently in development by the Korean indie team CanOpener, made an appearance at BIC 2026 ahead of its September 4th release.

'Dungeon Settlers' is set in a desolate land isolated from the outside world by magical erosion. As the leader of an expedition dispatched by a guild, the player must build a settlement—a forward base for clearing and destroying the dungeons that serve as the source of the disaster. Featuring a high-freedom base-building system reminiscent of RimWorld, the game offers robust simulation elements: you place walls and doors, manage the needs of your members by setting up bedrooms and dining halls, and construct forges, furnaces, and farms to produce the food and camping supplies essential for dungeon exploration.

Once you finish preparing at the settlement, you assemble a four-person party to head into the perilous dungeon. Each explorer possesses unique traits, including six major stats, talents, race, and background, along with randomly combined skill trees featuring swords, blunt weapons, bows, and magic. There is a distinct joy in carefully vetting candidates, recruiting the right ones, and crafting your own strategic synergies. However, as is typical for this genre, once a carefully nurtured member falls, they are gone forever. This forces you to proceed with extreme tension at every moment. In short, it is a fusion of the intricate detail of a colony simulation and the unforgiving tension of a hardcore dungeon crawler.

Combat is top-down, where you can move units as a group or control them individually for active engagement. The game introduces a new element: 'Real-Time with Pause.' This system allows you to stop time at any moment during a chaotic melee to analyze the battlefield. You can use this to catch your breath, then deploy skills and adjust positioning to account for a rich variety of status effects—such as stun, bleed, burn, taunt, vulnerability, charge, and summon—offering the tactical satisfaction of overcoming disadvantageous battles.

The randomness within the dungeon also heightens the fun of exploration. The floor layout and environmental effects change with every entry. As you delve deeper, lethal enemies like giant golems or acid monsters appear, but they are balanced by enticing encounters, such as rare resources, mandrakes, or mysterious ancient trees that demand blood as a sacrifice. The core loop—using resources gathered from exploration to develop your settlement and research new technologies to reach deeper levels—is tightly and densely integrated.

Of course, with such threats lurking everywhere, you must be fully prepared from the very beginning. Players who haven't played RimWorld or similar titles might find the detailed interface or small UI elements challenging; if you don't carefully equip your gear and plan your party composition from the start, you risk being wiped out right at the entrance. While it may feel unfamiliar at first, the strategic depth and meticulous design become apparent as you scour the UI and read the various descriptions. It is a pity that the demo time was too short to read through all the text, but fortunately, a demo has been released alongside the BIC 2026 showcase. I highly recommend that those who couldn't fully enjoy it at the event or couldn't attend in person try the demo for themselves.