Real estate these days! No matter where you look, there’s never enough space any more. I imagine this was the impetus for designing Packed Lair, a dungeony fusion of base building, auto battling, roguelikes and Tetris where you play as an evil lord who is trying to cram an entire empire into an incredibly cramped lair that’s out today.

There’s a lot going on here, obviously, so let’s start with the literal building blocks. In a run of Packed Lair, you start off with a very tiny space where various constructions can be placed across a grid-based space. Enter the Tetris elements, which are less about expertly placing falling blocks and more about deftly deciding where they should be put, rotating them as needed in order to maximise on the little room you have. These buildings have different effects, the bulkiest adding to the count of your army, others increasing their strength of HP if placed in close proximity.

In between battles, you spend coin to slowly dig more and more space for your lair, allowing you to place and unlock more buildings. Buildings get drafted randomly, offering you a choice of three to add to your lair, which is where those pesky roguelike elements come in. Essentially the name of the game is optimising the space of your lair as best as possible, not just in terms of fitting pieces in, but aligning pieces together so that they synergise. Do all of that well, and your army goes out and wins the day for you!

The army does most of the work for you, but you do have a few abilities you can use yourself. A lot of moving parts here, to be sure, but conceptually it seems like they work! And you can find out for yourself if they do, at the cost of your own money, if you’re already convinced enough, or at the cost of your hard drive space, as there’s a free demo you can try out too on Steam right now.