“And then one day you find ten years have got behind you – no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun,” sing David Gilmour and Richard Wright in Pink Floyd’s “Time”. I once thought that song was about mortality and the necessity of carpeing that diem, but it turns out Pink Floyd were stealthily pitching the core concept for Erosion, an open world roguelike shooter from Plot Twist in which the world advances one decade when you die.
The core mechanics are all there in the song: running, gunning, time-shifting, the lack of explicit hand-holding expected of an open worldo. The pitch has evolved over the (argh) half-century since “Time”, admittedly. Pink Floyd make no mention of the post-apocalyptic wild west in their lyrics, for example, nor do they pack in any high stakes poker games or the prospect of being eaten by sandworms.
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“Journey across time to save your daughter from a ruthless warlord, where failure means another chance, but at a devastating cost,” explains the Erosion announcement blurb. “Explore a faction-divided wasteland to build your arsenal and reshape the fates of its eccentric inhabitants across shifting timelines. Join a chicken cult, steal a slick new ride, race it to earn Cheddar, then gamble it all away in the Al Cashino. Descend into the mysterious Pillar to battle through chaotic, destructible dungeons, fighting to get one step closer to saving your daughter or losing her entirely to time itself.”
Look forward to “100+ skills and modifiers to create absurd synergies”, like deploying cat armies reinforced by orbital beam cannons. “The build possibilities are endless,” the press bulletin promises, but alas, your time is not. Interactions with NPCs may reshape the landscape dramatically, with humble shopkeepers founding business empires, but I’m not clear on whether you’ll need to die repeatedly to link your choices to those consequences.
Putting aside the prog rock, three videogame comparisons that spring to mind are: Weird West, the immersive sim from Wolfeye; Rogue Legacy, in which you become your own child when you die; and Sifu, in which respawns add wrinkles and grey hairs to your enduringly sprightly kung fu frame. I’m mixed on Erosion’s ‘3D pixelart’ visuals, which remind me of Minecraft Legends, but I like that it does the classique RPG villager thing of having characters bounce on the spot like they’re road-testing their underpants elastic.
Anyway, you can read more about Erosion on Steam. It’s out spring 2026 in early access. Oh, and if you need a pick-me-up after listening to “Time”, may I recommend the subsequent “Great Gig In The Sky”. I can play the piano bit. I can’t do the glass-shattering vocals though.
