Pebble Knights Review: Munching Tombstone and Tools

Pebble Knights is a top-down arena roguelite built around chaotic co-op survival and day/night defense cycles. It’s super fun with up to five players, especially when everyone is yelling over each other while trying to revive teammates mid-boss fight. Unfortunately, if you’re playing solo, you’re mostly stuck babysitting bots that are more likely to sabotage your run.

The game’s biggest gimmick, eating weapons and items to absorb their buffs, immediately makes it stand out from the usual survivor-style roguelites. During the day, you gather resources and upgrade your base. At night, everything turns into bullet hell as waves of enemies and oversized fungal horrors swarm your camp.

But what I really like about this indie game is that your dead teammates can be eaten back to life.

Tombstones and Weapons Make Surprisingly Good Meals

I’ve played plenty of survivor roguelites before, especially Brotato, and while Pebble Knights clearly shares some DNA with that genre, it feels far less passive. Instead of standing still and letting builds snowball automatically, there’s constant movement between gathering resources, defending the base, reviving teammates, and trying not to get flattened by bosses filling the screen with projectiles.

The revival system is definitely one of the game’s best mechanics. Whenever a teammate dies, they leave behind a tombstone that other players can eat to revive them. In organized lobbies, this creates some chaotic moments where everyone starts panicking the second somebody goes down. Half the time our Discord calls turned into people screaming for emergency revives while dodging boss attacks.

Dead players aren’t completely helpless. As a tombstone, you can still move around and reposition yourself to make revives easier. Though it sounds simple, there’s a surprising amount of teamwork coordination needed during hectic fights.

The problem is that the system completely falls apart with bots.

You can customize bot behavior to focus more on support or combat, but no matter what settings I used, the AI constantly made terrible decisions. Bots will sprint toward your tombstone even if a boss is charging a massive AoE attack directly on top of it, usually resulting in them dying beside you seconds later. Somehow, they also refuse to revive each other entirely, which means if multiple bots go down, it becomes your responsibility to save the entire team.

After a few hours, solo play started feeling like I was managing toddlers during a natural disaster.

The eating mechanic for upgrades is a much stronger mechanic. Instead of choosing buffs from traditional level-up menus, Pebble Knights ties progression directly to weapons and items you consume during a run. Some weapons come with passive buffs attached, and eating them permanently locks those bonuses into your build until the run ends.

But you lose the weapon after devouring it.

Alternatively, you can keep the weapon equipped and still benefit from the attached buff, which creates a nice risk/reward balance between immediate power and long-term build planning. It’s a clever system because even though it technically serves the same purpose as standard roguelite upgrades, it feels far more interactive.

Runs also stay interesting thanks to the RNG-heavy upgrade pool. Most buffs feel useful if you build around proper synergies, and every run pushed me toward experimenting with different setups.

Pebble Knights Clearly Wants You to Bring Friends

For this review, I tested Pebble Knights in private lobbies, public matchmaking, and fully bot-supported runs. After around four hours, it became obvious that this game is heavily designed around multiplayer chaos.

With actual players, the constant juggling between combat, revives, and base upgrades becomes hectic in a good way. During solo runs, however, the weak AI turns basic resource management into a chore. Even upgrading your base becomes frustrating because bots rarely prioritize objectives intelligently enough to keep progression moving efficiently.

For comparison, in multiplayer sessions, we usually upgraded the base to Golden tier before reaching the second boss. With bots, I was barely reaching Blue tier after defeating the first one.

That imbalance hurts because the core gameplay loop is genuinely solid. The bosses are fun, the progression system works, and the eating mechanic gives Pebble Knights its own identity in an overcrowded roguelite genre. But the entire experience feels balanced around having competent teammates.

Unfortunately, multiplayer has its own problem as well… and that is the player population.

Since the game is still in Early Access, public matchmaking feels inconsistent outside peak hours. Most of the active lobbies I found appeared around 10 AM EST / 4 PM CEST, and even then, matches were usually filled with bots before reaching full player count.

Final Verdict: Above Average

Pebble Knights already has the foundation for an excellent co-op roguelite. The weapon-eating system is creative, the revival mechanic creates memorable moments, and the constant shift between daytime preparation and nighttime keeps runs engaging.

But right now, the experience depends too heavily on multiplayer while simultaneously lacking the player population and AI quality needed to support solo players consistently.

When played with friends, Pebble Knights becomes chaotic in exactly the right way. When played alone, it mostly becomes a battle against your own teammates.

FAQs