Screenshots
Watch trailer on Steam ↗Heroes Suck
Dawning Light · Published by Dawning Light · Official site ↗
Mixed — 69% positive (13 reviews)
Last updated 27 Sept 2026
A physics-driven tower defense where you play the dungeon. Lay out traps and launch waves of invading "heroes" who are, charitably, bad at their job. They walk into every snare, complain about their knees, ask where the restroom is, and leave with the cheese wheels.
Indie, RPG, Strategy · 2026 · More free games
In Heroes Suck, you become the dungeon, setting traps for poorly equipped heroes who complain loudly. Strategize your defenses to keep them at bay and secure the cheese wheels.
About this game
You are the Keeper. A dwarf named Kaelviir bought a mountain, opened a dungeon under it, and hired you to handle the part where the people who walk in do not walk out. The heroes call it a daily. Kaelviir calls it trespassing. You call it a floor plan.
Nothing in here simply falls over. Every trap fires into a live physics sim, so heroes get launched, set on fire, and bowled into whoever was standing behind them. They take it about as well as you would expect. "Ow! My knee!" "This is going in my review." "Tell my guild I soloed it."
Build the walk
Your treasure sits at the far end. Reaching it is their whole plan. Deciding how long that takes is yours, one tile at a time, and the distance between the door and the gold is where you put everything sharp.
Seven traps, none of them polite
Hidden Spears through the floor. A Pendulum Axe the width of the hall. A Wall Crusher that simply leaves the wall, and takes the front rank with it. Flame Jet, which keeps burning after they run. A Lightning Pylon that arcs into the nearest hero, then jumps from him to the next, and the next, until the charge runs out. Arrow Rain, which is precisely what it sounds like. And the Time Warper, which deals no damage whatsoever. It slows everything inside its radius, which is a polite way of saying it holds them still for the other six.
Five grades apiece, upgrade lines on every one of them, and a Forge back in town that triples the damage of everything you own.
Seven powers, four slots
Throw a crowd across the room. Reset a trap mid-cooldown so it fires twice. Shut off the healer. Strip the buffs they walked in with. Then drop something enormous on whatever is still upright. Seven of them, four slots. Every stage starts by deciding which three you can do without.
Take all of it
Gold, gear, treasure chests, and all the arcane knowledge they will not be needing any more. It piles up fast and it stays yours. Build the Storehouse and it stays yours even on the nights that go badly.
Persistent progression, no resets
Three mastery trees, paid for in knowledge taken off the fallen. Every node you buy and every trap grade you unlock is permanent, and carries into every stage after it. You come back to each fight stronger than you left it, forever, until the heroes are the ones filing complaints.
Rebuild the town they ransacked
A forge, a shop, a scriptorium, a storehouse and a town hall. All upgradeable, all permanent, all of them quietly making your dungeon a worse place to visit. The Town Hall collects taxes while the game is closed, so the valley keeps paying you for a job you are not currently doing.
The campaign ends, the heroes do not
A prologue and four chapters, 45 stages, each with optional challenges for anyone who wants to prove a point. After that, Kaelviir starts posting fake quests to bring more of them in. They accept without reading a word of it, all the way up through Brutal and into Abyss, which is named accurately.
So, the cheese
The Shadow Guild used to be noble. Now it is cornering the world's cheese market on the Guild Master's written order, for reasons nobody will explain, and the Mayor is taking it extremely personally.
Working out why takes the entire campaign. Working out why the Mayor loves cheese this much takes longer. He has been asked. He does not know either.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel i5
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: GeForce GTX 970
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 11
- Processor: Intel i7
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: RTX 3060
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Supported Languages
*languages with full audio support
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
Patch Notes: 1.0.1
A quick update ahead of the September 15th launch. No new content this time, just some fixes and an audio pass. Bug fixes Fixed several town NPCs slowly drifting from their spot during long play sessions. Kaelviir, Remi, Hilda, Logan, and Mayor Perceval could inch away from where they belong the longer you stayed in the world. They now stay put. Fixed the town interface sometimes disappearing after leaving a building. Exiting somewhere like the Storehouse right after entering could rarely leave the town UI gone. Raised the character limit on the in-game feedback form from 1,000 to 2,000. Room for longer bug reports and suggestions. Content Renamed the Chapter 4 stages. Audio Added hover sounds to: traps, ability selection, and town building buttons. Added dedicated sounds for entering the Shop, Scriptorium, Town Hall, and Storehouse. Each building now has its own sound instead of a generic one. The Mastery window now plays its own distinct sound when opened, instead of the generic sound. Made several rounds of audio mixing adjustments across sound effects and music. Regards, KalradiaRead full article on Community Announcements (Kalradia)Patch NotesOfficial
Patch Notes: 1.0
Heroes Suck 1.0 is coming September 15th Thanks for playing the demo and the beta! The full game launches on Steam on September 15th at 11:00 AM ET. Chapters 3 and 4, the ending, and the rest of the campaign are all on the way. Your existing demo and beta saves carry over, so nothing you've built gets left behind. In the meantime, here's everything that's changed since the last demo build. New in the full release Steam Achievements. 35 of them, covering traps, town buildings, mastery trees, combat and more. Most unlock right away based on your existing save. Lifetime kill-count achievements are the exception, since that wasn't tracked before now, so those start counting from today. Steam Cloud saves. Your saves now sync automatically, so you can pick up on another PC where you left off. New splash screen. Traps Flame Jet's burn now scales with the trap. It used to stay flat no matter how much you upgraded or forged the trap, so it fell behind the further you progressed. Now it's a share of Flame Jet's own damage and keeps pace at every grade and forge level. A new upgrade line pushes that share even higher. Overlapping Flame Jets now stack their burn duration instead of resetting each other's timer. Loot Fixed Glorious Chests paying out the same loot as Grand Chests. The rarest chest tier now actually outshines the one below it. Opening a Glorious Chest now has its own sound effect. Quality of life New inventory hotkey. Press I to open your inventory without hunting for the button, or rebind it in Settings. New screenshot hotkey. Press H to hide the UI for a clean shot of your dungeon, also rebindable in Settings. Trap unlock cards now show stats on hover, before you commit. Credits now scroll on their own and include some additional attributions. Bug fixes Fixed some older mastery nodes being purchasable before you'd reached their intended dungeon level. Fixed trap upgrades quietly losing sell value when you took an upgrade-cost mastery. Taking one now refunds the ...Read full article on Community Announcements (Kalradia)Patch NotesOfficial
Demo Update 0.21
Two months of work since the last demo build. Most of it went into the save system, plus a round of performance work aimed at the later-game waves, preparing for release, and a handful of real balance changes. Your existing demo saves carry over. The beta is open The closed beta is live as of today, August 11, and runs through August 25. It covers the Prologue through Chapter 2 and is distributed through Steam Playtest. Chapters 3 and 4 are being built separately and aren't part of it. The first wave of invites has gone out to creators, press, and newsletter subscribers, and there's still room. I'll be sending more batches before the window closes. If you want in, join the newsletter at dawninglight.gg/newsletter and you'll be in the pool for the next one. Balance Aero Blast hits dramatically harder. Its damage was well below where it needed to be, so rank I now deals 60 damage, up from 15. Hidden Spears' knockback doubled. Spears now actually shove things once fortitude is broken. Hidden Spears' sixth Base Damage upgrade now requires a higher trap grade. It was purchasable out of order, skipping ahead of the ranks meant to come before it. Saves Older saves load and upgrade automatically, so your demo progress carries forward. Automatic rotating backups. If your save is damaged, the game falls back to the newest healthy backup instead of failing. Fixed the game hanging on the Load screen when a save file had been cut short mid-write. Damaged saves now tell you what was lost and load the rest, instead of erroring out or, worse, breaking later mid-run. Bug fixes Fixed enemies getting permanently stuck on the field at 0 HP. An Arrow Rain bolt hitting an enemy that was already dying could break every despawn that followed for the rest of the session. Fixed gold being spent without the tile being placed. This traced back to a startup crash on unusual window sizes, which also stopped the analytics consent prompt from ever appearing. Fixed a trap cooldown icon staying stuc...Read full article on Community Announcements (Kalradia)Patch NotesOfficial
Demo Update - v0.19
SummaryQoL patch: improvements, optimizations, and bug fixes.ImprovementsNew and improved camera system. The pillars in the dungeon will no longer get in your view and will be occluded when they get in your way.Introduced a new font for text-heavy areas of the game to improve readability.Redesigned the pause menu to improve functionality and allow movement around the map.Story replay - view story cutscenes again from the 'Defend' menu.New 'potential loot' UI element - this shows all the possible loot that can be dropped from each stage.Made the dungeon entrance more spacious and freed up 2 more tiles for dungeon building.The physics system has undergone heavy optimizations, more than doubling FPS in some situations.Updated various icon visuals.Lighting tweaks and improvements.Some music tracks have been improved.Bug fixesVarious save data issues resolved. Particularly saving and loading files in the same session was causing some data to initialize improperly.More Kaelviir dialogue interjection subtitle mismatches have been fixed.ClosingHeroes Suck will be participating in Steam Next Fest, starting June 15! Look forward to beta and the full release this summer. Be sure to sign up for the newsletter if you'd like to receive beta news and access: https://heroessuck.com/newsletter/Regards- KalradiaRead full article on Community Announcements (Kalradia)Patch NotesOfficial
Demo Update (Graphical Overhaul) - v0.18
After a bout with burnout - I'm back and at it. In this patch you can expect a whole visual overhaul (including optimizations), as well as an overhauled loot chest experience! I updated the game engine to utilize the latest that Unity has to offer, and also enabled DX12 by default.In my tests, I was able to achieve around a 35-40% increase in frame rate, while also improving the fidelity of the visuals. There's still more to be done, but this is a great starting point.Here's a preview of the new loot chest opening experience:In addition to these changes, there are numerous bug fixes and QoL adjustments. The coming patches will address the current features of the game, as well as potentially overhauling more aspects of the experience to further refine the gameplay and make it as fun as possible. Please submit your feedback if you've had time to play the demo - your opinions are valued!Additionally, Heroes Suck will be in the Tower Defense Festival starting on Monday, so tell your friends or your favourite content creator about the game, and maybe they'll check it out!Regards, KalradiaRead full article on Community Announcements (Kalradia)
