Winnie's Hole News

DEMO v0.7.25 - Steam Next Fest!

[h2]💪 New Mutations Actions and Perks[/h2]
Lots of new community suggested Actions and Perks! In particular - Spike, Counter and Lock have received the blessing of content as directed by our community ⁠events!

[h2]⭕ Level Generation Adjustments[/h2]
New exit types and events, weird shaped rooms, randomised pickups, MORE pickups!

[h2]⚖️ Combat Rewards and Progression Overhaul[/h2]
Mutation and Perk rewards now need to be HARVESTED from your FOES.
Different enemies give different rewards, which can be previewed in their profiles in combat, or Exit Hole tooltips when exploring.

[h2]🦠 Reworked Virus Strain Setups[/h2]
With the rebalance to progression comes a pass on the demo Virus Strains.
We're shifting away from deck hoarding and towards more curated decks in general. We've trimmed down the starter decks to give them more flavour and less bloat, making new additions more meaningful.

[h2]↕️ Random Spread Token Modifiers[/h2]
Your Virus Blocks can now get Spread tokens which act as modifier to make a block capture extra adjacent tiles.

In combat, these randomly captured actions aren't previewed and happen after the captured actions, so you can influence the order of actions by using these strategically... Or with a bit of luck.

[h2]🎮 CONTROLLER SUPPORT![/h2]
Our first pass of controller support is in the game! Hello Steam Deck.
We'll be doing more testing but it's very much playable!

[h2]🎆 New Visual FX, Art, UI Improvements[/h2]
Road to Juicy Boy. The game is gradually getting spiced up with extra polish.

Thank you all for trying our demo and your interest in our game.

[h3]If you liked this demo, try Ring of Pain![/h3]
As a studio we really want to innovate with fresh genre-blending formats!
Our goal is to make games you haven't played before.

If you want to be involved in WInnie's Hole, we'll continue running content design events and also run playtesting in the future on our Discord.

Thank you!
Twice Different

Jump back into Winnie’s Hole with a fresh and expanded demo for this unique genre-blending roguelite

Oh bother! The virus has returned in the refreshed and expanded demo for the roguelite Winnie’s Hole the viral dungeon crawling roguelite.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/10/jump-back-into-winnies-hole-with-a-fresh-and-expanded-demo-for-this-unique-genre-blending-roguelite/

DEMO v0.6.96 Beta

[h2]Build notes Demo v0.6.96 Beta:[/h2][p]Since releasing the demo we've been thinking a lot about progression and build-crafting during a run, and these new changes we're trying out are intended to help give you more of the ingredients for a fun build.[/p][p][/p][p]We've been making some significant changes to the game flow and are keen for feedback, we'd love to hear your thoughts on Discord.[/p][p][/p][h3]Combining Perks with Mutations[/h3][p]The biggest feature is now Perk rewards from Combat all come with an Action for your deck which will help activate the Perk, so whichever Perk you choose will be usable in a combo right away! [/p][p]Then becoming even more powerful when building in a certain direction.[/p][p][/p][h3]New Perks and Mutations[/h3][p]We've been gradually adding more community suggested content! [/p][p][/p][h3]New Elite Encounters[/h3][p]We haven't put in the narrative or fully balanced these, but now you can try your build against Elites other than Honey Badger.[/p][p][/p][h3]Combat loot and reward screen redesign[/h3][p]One of the goals of this iteration is to be able to make combats more strategic... and challenging... [/p][p]Enemies now drop specific loot which gets collected, so you need to knockout ones which carry the loot you want. At the moment it's just a Perk and resources... and to increase the tension we're trying a new tool, the Ink Spray ability. [/p][p][/p][p]This will allow you to force regular enemies to nope out of a combat, and having such a strong ability means as we add higher difficulties, players will still have a way to mitigate the encounters if your build is struggling a bit... The cost of doing so is not getting the combat reward. [/p][p][/p][p]We've added more useful information to the Reward screen to help show this, with a list of the enemies knocked out and their loot, as well as labelling the rarity tier. More improvements to come![/p][p][/p][p]There are also a ton of bug fixes and general adjustments in this new version, including more access to Action removal.[/p][p][/p][p]If you'd like to try out our Demo Beta it's public on Steam, you just need to set the game version - here's how:[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]If you liked this demo, try Ring of Pain![/h3][p]As a studio we really want to innovate with fresh genre-blending formats!
Our goal is to make games you haven't played before.

If you want to be involved in WInnie's Hole, we'll continue running content design events and also run playtesting in the future on our Discord.

Thank you!
ːRoPFrogː Twice Different[/p]

DEMO v0.6.90 - Major update

[h2]We launched our new demo![/h2][p]Hi all, we've just released our first update to the new demo so I'm going to catch you all up on everything![/p][p][/p][p]Thank you to everyone who gave feedback and sent bug reports. Much appreciation to our community - this update includes community suggested content! [/p][h3]If you'd like to get involved in our community events, join us on Discord.[/h3][p][/p][h2]And a new trailer! ːFrogChampː[/h2][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]
[/p][h2]What's new in Demo v0.6.90:[/h2][p]Here's the belated update summary from our demo release this month, for anyone who played previously: [/p]

[p]Exiting a level triggers an Event! When travelling deeper you get to evolve the virus, improve your deck, grow mutations and more. [/p]
[p]New ways to get buff! You can add Traits to Actions now, which act like modifiers. Only have a few currently, and one is overpowered...[/p]
[p]Unlockables and virus selection! 2 Virus Strains can be unlocked in the demo. [/p]
[p]Tons of community suggested content from our #events is now in the demo! [/p]
[p]Art visual improvements - the fog looks like stylised guts now! We're makin' a spicy meat-a-hole.[/p]
[p]UI improvements and new screens - virus selection, gameover, redesign of the game layout so the player deck is on the left[/p]
[p]The random event collectable has a different events now.[/p]
[p]The map has currency instead of Mutations, and shops can be accessed via Exits.[/p]
[p]Enemies and tutorial streamlining - we've been iterating on the way we design content to help new players learn the game. (An ongoing endeavour)[/p]
[p]Animals have flavour text during combat[/p]
[p]More quality of life settings options like game speed, skipping cutscenes, changing the dialogue skip button...[/p]
[p]More encounters and rework of level generation [/p]

[p][/p][h2]Implementing feedback - Demo Update v0.6.92:[/h2][p]After a lot of consideration we've decided to simplify the exploration so you can better focus on collecting pickups. [/p]

[p]The virus auto-exits after placing all blocks. It will move towards the exit which is closest to your last placed block, and then go straight into the event queue and encounters. [/p]

[p]Exiting will consume any remaining blocks in your inventory, so in each level it's best to just use blocks to collect pickups. You don't need to spread onto an exit, and it will skip to the next depth each time you use all inventory blocks.[/p]
[p]Levels have been redesigned to better work with these changes. There's more water tiles to help traverse through levels, and 'loot areas' are more condensed into the same type of loot, so the choice between getting currency or healing is a bit more distinct.
[/p]

[p]I'm also making my way through rebalancing the later demo encounters as well, and addressing balance feedback or mechanics confusion. Here are some of the changes are in the build:[/p]

[p]Brain Abilities now have a label on the UI, hopefully this will make it clearer how to counter Slow Loris. Currently the only Brain Ability is Redraw. We'll have tooltips and a tutorial soon as well.[/p]
[p]Deer's Perk will only gain Adrenaline for captured Heal tiles in the Brain, not any healing.[/p]
[p]Snowy Owl is simplified more into a spawning type enemy, with no offensive actions.[/p]
[p]Arctic Fox is no longer Piercing, and has reduced based attack but Sniper gives him +3.[/p]
[p]Shrew removed from late-game encounters (temporarily, until we fix his Perk).[/p]
[p]Riot Shield and Quaking Defense now synergise.[/p]
[p]Lots of fixes for translated text.[/p]
[p]Some missing art and general bug fixing[/p][p]
...and more!

Thank you all for trying our demo and your interest in our game.

[/p]

[h2]If you liked this demo, try Ring of Pain![/h2][p]As a studio we really want to innovate with fresh genre-blending formats!
Our goal is to make games you haven't played before.

If you want to be involved in WInnie's Hole, we'll continue running content design events and also run playtesting in the future on our Discord.

Thank you!
ːRoPFrogː Twice Different[/p]

Cronenbergian bear mutator Winnie's Hole gets a Steam demo

You may remember that in January of 2022, A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-pooh stories entered the public domain, inspiring deeply crap ideas like "what if children's character but knives?" in the case of Blood And Honey , and "what if children's character but mildly naughty word?", in the case of smirking billboardian human doppelganger Ryan Reynolds. Videogames were not immune. "What if children's character but Cronenbergian body horror?" asked the developers of Winnie's Hole when they announced a roguelike dungeon crawler based on the bear in 2023, and there's now a Steam demo available, should you wish to scoop up honey with arms-where-no-arms-should-rightly-be.