As long as I can remember, Barony have been loitering on the edges of mine Steam store page. It's one of those games that I kept thinking about buying and I found reasons not to; the retro, blocky art style did most of the bouncing; it reads as simple, almost disposable, the kind you flick past on your way to something shiny. That said, I finally ran out of excuses when the Steam Summer Sale came knocking Barony down to $2, and while I'm really late to the party, what a party it is.
Beneath the pixelated exterior was not the cute little dungeon that the screenshots promised. Barony is an expansive, punishing, system-obsessed roguelike that honors the most archaic corners of the RPG genre while feeling good to play in 2026. For $2, it might be the most game percentage I've ever bought, and I own Minecraft.
12 Best Free Co-op Games You Can Play on Steam
You don't have to spend money to play with your friends. Check out the very best free co-op games on Steam.
What $2 actually gets you with Barony
For context, Barony is an indie first-person roguelike RPG from Turning Wheel LLC, a small remote studio that launched it back in 2015 and has refused to stop working on it ever since. It actually passed over a million copies sold this year, and that kind of slow-burn success only happens when a game earns a cult following one dig at a time. And from what I can tell, eleven years of updates have turned a rough 2015 release into something much stranger and deeper than its current price tag suggests.
According to developer Sheridan Rathbun, Baronys list of inspirations is quite extensive, ranging from titles such as Spelunky to System shock 2. My personal elevator pitch is one Dungeons and dragons campaign filtered through the bones of early first person RPGs – think of the dungeon crawling DNA TES: Arena or Dagger case in a modern package, welded to the merciless logic Villain and NetHack (the latter is Baronys “biggest inspiration” according to Rathbun). In many ways, it's a love letter to an era of design that most studios have spent the last two decades grinding away at.
The narrative scheme hasn't been particularly relevant to my time with the game, but it's commendably thematically as a piece of pure mass fantasy: an undead lich named Baron Herx has cursed the town of Hamlet, and you descend into his dungeon to finish him off. Barony know what it is though; the story is a flimsy excuse to send you somewhere dark and dangerous. Most of what's fascinating about this game happens in its systems, not its script.
Barony involves very little hand-holding and fewer excuses
The first thing I noticed while playing Barony was that it has an eight-part tutorial that covers every part of the game, from the intricacies of slingshots to hunger and how to throw rocks; however clumsy it may have seemed at first, it was absolutely necessary in retrospect. No matter what class you choose, you will die in it Barony—a lot—but the game refuses to feel bad about it, so you shouldn't either. Permadeath is the backbone of the whole experience, and the dungeons are procedurally generated, so every run is a new set of traps, monsters and bad decisions waiting to be made; you can starve or eat rotten food, be flattened by a boulder, or lose everything by identifying a cursed potion with your taste buds rather than a scroll.
That last bit is where the archaic trait of all those old RPGs deserves its keep, because in much the same way, Baronys system does not flatten to be easily accessible. Items arrive unidentified, effects stack in ways that will either destroy or shake your afternoon, and part one of the latest Instruments of Destruction update rebuilt the entire magic system around three schools of magic and roughly eighty spells. Whether you're a human sword barbarian, a cursed, hungry vampire, or a duck-loving Myconid Hermit—Barony assuming you're smart enough to figure it all out, which is both a compliment and a threat.
Note: The second part of the Instruments of Destruction update launches later this year, along with two new biomes, new secret levels, new music and more.
Co-op, and a class for all types of masochists in Barony
As for the nitty-gritty, there are 13 classes in the vanilla game that are human-based, 26 spanning multiple races when all three DLCs are considered, and they all range from the soothingly normal to the wildly chaotic. You can roll a regular warrior, sorcerer, or villain if you want a softer landing, or you can choose the sexman, joker, or arcanist and accept that you've chosen violence. Each reshapes how a run actually plays, which is the big engine behind the game's replayability.
Who is that character?
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Start
Barony is unique in that, despite its intense systems, the game also supports four-player co-op – online, split-screen and crossplay – which turns the game on its head, making it feel even more hectic. Shared spaces and friendly fire means your party is just as likely to kill you as the monsters, but Baronythe pace really seems to smooth things out more than it doesn't. Still, it's a co-op roguelike, so the funnest deaths remain the ones your friends cause on purpose.
Barony's three quality, fully optional DLCs
Now, Barony has been out for over a decade, and it's still in live development, so it has paid DLC – three parts of it, to be exact – but they're modestly priced and quality in their own right. Myths and Outcasts and Legends and Pariahs add four new monster races and signature classes, from vampires and succubi to goblins and insectoids, while the newer Deserters and Disciples pile on five more each. They double the number of ways you can build and break a character, but they remain completely optional for those worried about missing out on the “core experience”.
Whether you're a human sword barbarian, a cursed, hungry vampire, or a duck-loving Myconid Hermit — Barony assumes you're smart enough to figure it all out, which is both a compliment and a threat.
The extensions add a meaningful layer of complexity, but in this particular case they also inflate the purchase over two bucks in a hurry. The ninety percent discount base game is the simple yes; a fuller experience with the add-ons climbs toward the cost of a regular indie game, sale or no sale. If you want the full monster race buffet, the math ends up being pretty absurdly in your favor, but again, it's not particularly necessary either way. In my case, Barony impressed me enough that I almost felt compelled to go into it – Turning Wheel LLC earned my money fairly, which in this industry feels surprisingly rare these days.
Barony is the easiest $2 you'll spend in the 2026 Steam Summer Sale
Ultimately, Barony at this price is a steal no matter who you are, but it must be said that this may not be a comfortable recommendation for everyone. The difficulty curve of this co-op title is huge, the interface is showing its age, and a bad early run can end you before you've learned anything useful. Barony is a game that requires patience and careful improvement of the player; if you need a game to meet you halfway, this will leave you standing in the lobby.
But the way I see it, that's exactly the point Barony do — and if you lean into it and start speaking the language of the game, it can be incredibly rewarding. But if you're already into all of this, Barony is the total package: a feature-dense, decade-refined RPG that asks for patience and rewards that patience with the kind of emergent gameplay that some titles charge $60 to fake. For the price of a gas station coffee, Barony is one of the most crooked deals I've done in years.
Barony is currently available for $2 during the Steam Summer Sale.
