Pocketpair Publishing Lead Calls Combolands a 2026 Indie Standout

Palworld’s 1.0 launch may be the headline-grabbing milestone associated with Pocketpair this year, but the company’s publishing lead, John Buckley, has used his platform to shine a light on a much smaller project: Combolands.

Buckley called the Steam game his clear indie pick of the year so far, saying he recommends it even to people who assume they will not enjoy it. He also compared the pull of its loop to Balatro, describing Combolands as the most addictive game he has played since that breakout card-focused roguelike. It is emphatic praise, particularly because Combolands comes from Crux Games, a development team of two people rather than a studio on Pocketpair’s scale.

That does not make Combolands a direct counterpart to Palworld. The games have radically different scopes and design goals. But Buckley’s endorsement is useful evidence of a familiar reality in the indie space: a small game with a sharply defined loop can build attention through player response and word of mouth instead of spectacle. In this case, the available Steam reception is striking. At the time of reporting, 97% of its user reviews were positive, putting it in Steam’s Overwhelmingly Positive category.

For players who have missed it in the flood of bigger releases, the premise is compact. Combolands presents itself as a mini citybuilding roguelike about placing buildings, finding synergies, building cascading combinations, unlocking guilds and developing a small settlement into a functioning economy. Crux Games frames those systems as strategic sessions that last around 30 minutes.

What Combolands is trying to combine

Combolands sits at the intersection of several familiar labels, and each one explains a different part of the pitch.

Citybuilder: The player constructs a settlement by placing buildings. Rather than focusing on one enormous, permanent city, the game’s stated goal is a tiny metropolis built through carefully chosen placements.
Roguelike: In broad game-design usage, this term usually signals repeatable runs, changing strategic circumstances and decisions that must be made with what a given attempt provides. The supplied description emphasizes short bursts, guild unlocks and variable advantages and disadvantages.
Deckbuilder: The game is described as drawing on deckbuilding conventions. In this context, the key idea is not necessarily traditional playing cards; it is the gradual shaping of a pool of options and the payoff that comes from combining them effectively.
Combo-driven strategy game: Buildings can unlock synergies and trigger cascades. A cascade is a chain reaction: one effective placement enables another benefit, which in turn helps create further gains.

The interesting part is how those pieces support one another. Citybuilding often asks players to make a plan at the scale of a map. Roguelike structures ask them to adapt when a plan is incomplete, risky or simply unavailable. Deckbuilding-style progression makes the available tools themselves part of the strategy. Combolands appears to shrink all of that into a more contained format: assess the available choices, place a building, search for a productive interaction, then decide whether a current advantage is worth pursuing further.

That is a recipe for the “number-go-up” feeling Crux Games highlights. The phrase is informal, but it describes a legitimate design appeal: a player takes an action, sees a resource total or economic output improve, and understands why it happened. When that improvement comes from a sequence the player arranged rather than a passive timer, it can feel especially rewarding.

Why short runs can make a strategic game easier to approach

Thirty-minute sessions are not inherently simple sessions. A compact run can still contain difficult tradeoffs. The difference is that the game can deliver a complete decision arc without demanding an entire evening or a multi-week commitment to a save file.

For Combolands, that structure could be especially important because its systems are built around combinations. Players can pursue a promising arrangement, watch it develop, and then begin another attempt with a different set of opportunities rather than being locked into one long-term urban plan. The result, at least in theory, is a game that supports experimentation: trying a building placement or leaning into a particular guild is less intimidating when an individual run is designed as a short burst.

Guilds are a major part of that variety. Combolands says they come with their own strengths and weaknesses, which means they are more than a simple reward track. A meaningful advantage is usually paired with a cost, restriction or altered priority. That is where strategic identity emerges. Instead of always chasing the same universally optimal layout, players are encouraged to weigh what their current guild makes easier against what it makes more difficult.

There is an important limit to what can be concluded from the available description. It establishes that guilds have distinct upsides and downsides, but it does not detail every guild, their precise rules, or the exact conditions for unlocking them. Prospective players should treat the broad structure—not unconfirmed specifics—as the central takeaway.

A recommendation aimed beyond genre regulars

Buckley’s recommendation carries an extra wrinkle because it directly reaches toward skeptics. Roguelikes and deckbuilders can be daunting labels for players who associate them with repeated failure, dense rules or runs that never develop beyond a string of resets. Combolands’ pitch offers a different entry point: city placement and a visibly expanding economy.

That does not guarantee that every citybuilder fan will enjoy a roguelike structure, or that every roguelike player wants to optimize urban layouts. But the overlap may be more natural than it first appears. Both genres ask players to work under constraints. A citybuilder can limit land, resources or the relationships between structures; a roguelike can limit the choices offered in a particular run. Both can make a single good decision feel consequential.

The “cascading combo” language suggests Combolands is pursuing immediate readability as well as long-term planning. Ideally, a player sees a building create a benefit, recognizes how another placement could amplify it, and then begins looking for a third piece that turns the small advantage into a larger economic engine. That feedback loop is the likely foundation of the addictive quality Buckley singled out.

There is also a practical distinction worth making. “Addictive” is frequently used as praise in game conversation, generally meaning a loop is compelling enough to inspire one-more-run behavior. It should not be read as a clinical claim. In this case, the concrete support is Buckley’s personal enthusiasm and the game’s strongly positive Steam user-review share, not a universal promise that the format will work for every player.

A small-team success story without a misleading comparison

It is tempting to frame every notable indie recommendation as a contest against the year’s larger independent hits. That would be misleading here. Pocketpair is an established developer and publisher, while Crux Games is a two-person team. Palworld and Combolands also operate at entirely different scales and occupy very different genres.

The more meaningful connection is that a publishing executive attached to a major success is publicly spotlighting a lower-profile project from a far smaller developer. That kind of attention does not replace the challenge of making games sustainably, a subject also relevant to the broader argument that games need more than the next big hit. Yet it can help players notice work that might otherwise remain limited to a niche audience.

Combolands’ Steam response suggests the game already has a substantial base of satisfied players. The 97% positive figure should still be understood correctly: it is a snapshot of user reviews at the time reported, not a permanent score and not an objective measurement of every aspect of the game. Review ratios can shift as more people play. Steam’s Overwhelmingly Positive label is nevertheless a meaningful signal that the game’s early or current audience has responded very favorably.

What prospective players should take from the praise

The strongest case for investigating Combolands is not that it will replace a sprawling city simulation, a dedicated deckbuilder or a massive creature-collecting release. It is that it may offer a focused version of several satisfying ideas at once. Place structures, discover interactions, make an economy grow and then take what was learned into another concise run.

Players who enjoy finding efficient systems, adapting to tradeoffs and watching a plan escalate through connected bonuses are the clearest audience. Players who normally avoid roguelikes may also find its citybuilding language more approachable than combat-first examples of the genre. Conversely, anyone seeking a long-form, persistent city project should recognize that the stated design centers on short roguelike sessions rather than an endlessly maintained metropolis.

Buckley’s 10/10 assessment is plainly personal opinion, not a universal verdict. Still, the combination of that high-profile enthusiasm, a two-person developer’s focused premise and an Overwhelmingly Positive Steam rating makes Combolands one of the more notable under-the-radar PC games in the current indie conversation. Sometimes the path to a thriving city is not a giant map, an army of systems or a hundred-hour campaign. Sometimes it is one more carefully placed building—and one more run.