Meet Willem Dafoe and other animals in 100 tiny free worlds created by brilliant game developers

Source: Rock Paper Shotgun
Category: Games
Originally Published: 2025-12-03
Curated: 2025-12-03 16:22

The Soulslike is dead. The age of the Souplike has begun. Indie developer Kite Line has just published Soup Rooms - a sequel of sorts to dong yarhalla's videogame concept album from 2007, in which you visit small square rooms with feverdream aesthetics and a peculiar entity in the middle.

What was I doing back in 2007? Alas, I was not playing Soup. There's a high probability that I cooked soup in 2007, but it wouldn't have been very interesting soup. It would not have featured any spirit wolves, whiny fallen clouds, consumptive Casio men, "boinglers", or Willem Dafoes.

Available for free on Itch, Soup Rooms features contributions from such leftfield big bananas as Mike Klubnika (Buckshot Roulette), Modus Interactive (Armored Shell Nightjar), and scumhead (Franzen). The new rooms were created using Kira's tool Bapalon, which lets even people with no gamedev or programming experience (hello!) devise their "own small walkable spaces that link together to showcase different art, atmospheres, and music".

There's nothing to do in the rooms save orbiting the central sprite, sizing up the inevitably mind-boingling decor, and listening to the audio, which varies from vapourwave licks to DECtalk bedtime stories about wireframe dogs. I say "nothing to do" but I have spent 30 minutes in the room with Willem Dafoe doing the splits while gazing at you intently. It is hard to leave a room in which Willem Dafoe is doing the splits while gazing at you intently. Those thighs... they refuse to let go.

I had no idea about Soup Rooms before catching Kite Line's Bluesky announcement post. I may never need another game. Disappointed by a room? Simply drift through the wall to the next. Weary of soup? Perhaps you will prefer exploring an endless museum generated from Wikipedia entries. See if you can find the entry for Soup Rooms, even. There's probably a lot of fascinating development history I'm missing.

This article was curated from Rock Paper Shotgun. All rights belong to the original publisher.