Flask preview: Darkest Dungeon meets late-stage capitalism

Within the confines of its general framework, the roguelike deckbuilding genre is a major hub of innovation and evolution, churning out one refreshing spin on the recipe after another. Flask, the upcoming game from Chop Chop Games, perfectly encapsulates this spirit.

At Gamescom 2025, I sat down with Dario Rahimic and Michael Kruse, the co-founders of the studio, as well as John Kenn Mortensen, who serves as artist and narrative lead, to speak with them about the game, which was unannounced at the time.

Flask’s art style practically jumps at you. It’s all drawn by hand and done in a style Mortensen has developed for nearly 20 years. Where Darkest Dungeon plays with the orange glow of fire, Flask has this bleached, toxic green in the background that seeps into everything else, filtering into the space between the fine, black lineart that defines the game’s characters and scenery. It feels almost grimy, which is perfectly appropriate for the setting.

Portals leading into another world have appeared in Flask, comparable to Solo Leveling — and just like in that story, it turns out that this other world is full of valuable materials. In Flask, it’s the blood of the monsters themselves that’s precious. But there’s a problem: Anyone going into the other world starts to mutate and die after a while. The ingenious – and also ridiculously dumb – solution? Alchemists venture into the new world, enclosed in isolated, mobile towers drawn by homunculi, artificial beings created for this purpose.

But these towers are expensive, so alchemists are forced to take immense risks to pay their debts and actually make a return on their investments — forget Eldritch horrors: Chop Chop Games has understood that crippling debt is what makes a world truly grimdark.

Mortensen’s art brings that world alive, portraying both the macabre and goofy aspects inherent in it. His experience working on comic books and cartoons helped nail this vibe mix.

“It’s about going into unknown territory, pillaging, killing monsters, and stealing their blood,” Rahimic explains.

Flask works like so many other roguelike deckbuilders. You have a world map with a couple of different routes containing encounters or events, along which you advance. However, Flask mixes things up with the way combat works. Homunculi are basically flesh robots, which must be “programmed” for combat ahead of time. You do this by equipping your homunculi with flasks – your card equivalent – that correspond to specific actions in combat. Your puppets will always go through these motions, meaning you mastermind their entire battleplan beforehand.

Naturally, this makes Flask an auto-battler — remember, you can’t actually leave your tower, so any fighting falls to your homunculi, which you can’t actively oversee in action.

“It’s turn-based, so your homunculi use their first flask, then enemies use their first one, and so on,” Rahimic says. “And if you reach the end, it just loops around and restarts at the beginning.”

While it’s impossible to intercede manually and make moment-to-moment decisions, this makes the strategy and decision making outside of combat so important in Flask — battles are literally won before first blood is drawn. A comprehensive combat log provides you with all the intel you could desire, showing you exactly how well your plans are working out in practice.

With different homunculi, elements, mutations, and items being at the player’s disposal, there are a massive number of potential combinations and synergies. Elements function a bit like piece categories in auto-chess: The more you have of a certain type, the more potent the entire group will be. While every homunculus has its own line-up of unique flasks, elements are shared and contribute to the same overall pool.

But here’s a crucial innovation Flask makes: It’s not just monsters you need to fight. After every third area, you will encounter other alchemists and fight their homunculi — I mean, who’s going to tell you off for getting rid of a competitor on this side of the portal, right? But these battles are pretty special. “The actual bosses in this world are other players,” Rahimic reveals. Your foes in these fights are based on other human players at the same point on a run.

“We record everyone’s builds as they are playing and send those builds out against you, so you have to prove yourself against other alchemists,” Rahimic continues. To ensure fairness, there’s some matchmaking involved. Some especially broken builds will also be filtered out, so players needn’t worry about facing any shenanigans that have been min-maxed to death.

Following a player encounter, you advance into the next biome, of which there will be seven in total, each providing different monsters, events, and environments. Every second player battle gives you the opportunity to recruit that player’s homunculus to add it to your forces, making for a very interesting method of team-building.

“You never know what your final team will be,” Rahimic says. “So you have to adapt a little bit and no run will be the same.”

He continues: “What we like to stress with this type of game is that it’s a drafting game. Often people play an auto-chess game and go into it like ‘Okay, this time I’ll use this build’ and they know what before they start the game, but you can’t do that in our game, because you don’t know what you’ll get. You always have to adapt and be creative and keep thinking about how to defeat the next enemy. That’s what we’re trying to promote.”

“To think on your feet,” Kruse adds.

It innovates in other areas as well, emphasizing the player’s decision making by always giving you a choice between fighting a normal encounter or an elite encounter. Since beelining for all elite encounters under the sun is usually the optimal way of playing these games, eliminating them as a separate type of node actually frees up your route planning. But it’s also a thematic coup, since taking that extra risk will help you get out of debt more quickly.

“You can always choose depending on how confident you are in your build,” Rahimic explains. Naturally, that can bite you in the butt. In the demo, Kruse opts for several flasks that are a bit heavy on the RNG and chooses to risk it against an elite early on, leading to a knock-out.

“But it’s okay,” Rahimic comes to the rescue. “You don’t lose the first time you’re defeated. What happens is that your tower loses health.” Basically, you get a couple of chances before having to retreat with your crumbling tower, as you can’t risk being mutated from the toxic fog seeping in.

While you plan your moves and equip your homunculi, your screen shows the cozy interior of your tower, where a three-eyed cat keeps you company. “Every tower comes with a cat,” Mortensen says. “It will be talking and you can have a bit of back and forth with it.”

“It’s also a spy from the Alchemist’s Guild,” Rahimic throws in. “They’re keeping an eye on you.”

The cat, among other things, is also key to the game’s underlying story. Mortensen, who’s got plenty of experience working on linear storytelling for TV, tells me that being able to create more subtle stories that rely on players noticing little clues here and there is one of the most exciting things about working on video games.

Naturally, there is a meta progression element, allowing players to unlock tower upgrades or see new events on future runs. Players also need to encounter and recruit a homunculus before they can choose it as their starting character on the next run. The developers want to kick things off with five homunculi to begin with, but there are ideas for many more.

“As an artist, it’s just super, super fun to come up with these characters,” Mortensen says. He’s been having fun throwing designs at the programmers, who then come back to him with a list of alternate poses they need drawn to stitch together the animations, he adds.

Aside from higher difficulty modes, the developers are planning for a ranked mode, which replaces all encounters with player battles. Despite the integration of other people’s builds into every run, you can play the game offline — in this case, the game pulls the builds you face from a downloaded library. 

“We really want you to be able to play on the go, like on a Steam Deck, without any internet,” Rahimic says.

Flask is targeting a release on PC in 2026.

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