Game file / ROGUE BY ROGUECavity Busters
Cavity Busters is a roguelite toothpunk bullet hell where you bite and chomp cavity infested enemies. Run on the walls, dodge through bullet filled rooms and stomp baddies. Collect power ups, contract powerful diseases, and carve your way through a bloated body kingdom.
Our score
Eligible for ranking after all five dimensions are reviewed
Game filed. Review coming soon.
This game has not yet completed our five-dimension review. Explore its details and external material in the meantime.
Video reviews
Reviews and deep dives from YouTube and Bilibili, in every language. Open the original video to watch.
Other voices, for reference.
Archived third-party reviews and community material may refer to different versions. External opinions and ratings are presented separately; consult the original videos for their full context.
Community discussion
A solo-developed toothpunk roguelite bullet hell in which you play a single tooth (Gummy The Soft) who shoots and recalls himself as a boomerang, dashes, parries, and runs along walls through a bloated body kingdom.
Players receive it warmly: Steam shows Very Positive at roughly 96% across about 125 reviews, and several reviewers call it underrated and say they prefer it to The Binding of Isaac. Critical coverage is thin, with one OpenCritic review (6.1/10, Nindie Spotlight) and two Metacritic-listed reviews (80 and 75), which is too few for Metacritic to show a score. The recurring themes are inventive movement and mechanics plus a large item pool, set against a steep, overwhelming start and poor item readability. It began Early Access on Steam in August 2020, went 1.0 on 18 March 2022, and reached Xbox, PlayStation and Switch in April 2023 via JanduSoft. The dev keeps updating it, and the Steam page cites ongoing content updates.
What players praise
- Movement and skill expression: dash with i-frames, bullet parry, wall-running and sliding, stomping enemies from above, all chainable
- Tooth-as-weapon boomerang: shooting the tooth and recalling it deals damage both ways, making gunplay feel inventive and satisfying
- Large item pool (Steam lists 317 upgrades; console listings say 280) that can make a run wildly strong, weak or both, with diseased upgrades as risk/reward
- Playable characters feel mechanically different rather than like stat-modifier reskins
- Wall-digging mechanic adds risk/reward and is seen as well balanced: helpful but not a cheat button
- Reviewers praise boss and enemy design and the amount of content for the price ($14.99)
- Music and gross-but-funny audio/art style praised, including many tooth puns
- Steady post-launch content updates; reviewers say each update brings new content; runs well on Steam Deck
What players criticize
- Overwhelming onboarding: many mechanics are thrown at the player at once, and key information gets lost in rapid-fire tutorials
- Item descriptions are hidden or vague; some items are unidentified and some set HP to 1, which can unknowingly end a run
- Stability complaints: crashes, freezes and audio bugs reported on Windows and under Proton/Linux (Windows-only on Steam)
- Clunky feel to some early weapons: one requires picking up the ammo you fire, the other auto-aims
- Samey colour palette makes enemies, items and props hard to tell apart (IndieGameFans review)
- No autosave mid-run reported by a player, so a crash costs the whole run
- Critics and some players see it as a close Isaac/Gungeon derivative that does not surpass them
Distinctive features
- You are a tooth: a boomerang-style shoot-and-recall attack that damages enemies on the way out and back
- Wall-run and wall-dig mechanic adds a second traversal layer unusual for top-down shooters
- Disease upgrades you can contract and cure to keep the good effects, as a risk/reward item twist
- Mouse-and-keyboard-first design with bullet parry and i-frame dash, more fast-paced than tank or twin-stick Isaac clones
- Dental/body-horror toothpunk theme with pun-heavy humour and a 'bloated body kingdom' that changes each run
Divided opinions
- Mechanical density: some see layered systems as deep skill expression, others say less would have been more
- Bullet-hell vs roguelike identity: praised as fast and skill-based by some, disliked as too dodge-focused by others
- Isaac/Gungeon comparison: several players say it beats Isaac, while one critic says it fails to meet the legend that inspired it
- Difficulty: some find it hard to master but rewarding, others find it tough and cruel, though accessibility options soften it
Repetition and friction
- Steep learning curve and a punishing early game; one reviewer took several attempts to beat the first boss
- Too many systems to juggle at once (parry, roll, wall-run, ammo pickup, stomp) feels cumbersome to some players
- Constant dodging, rolling and wall-running reads as more bullet hell than roguelike to players who expected an item-driven game
- Decoding unidentified items by trial and error is frustrating
- Technical crashes interrupt long runs
Hoped-for improvements
- Introduce mechanics gradually with a better tutorial or pacing, so runs start simple like Isaac and complexity builds through items
- Make item descriptions clear and show what items do, especially HP-altering ones, instead of hiding them
- Improve visual clarity and colour differentiation between enemies, pickups and environment
- Fix crashes and freezes and improve Proton/Linux compatibility (no native Mac or Linux build)
- Add a mid-run save or resume safety for crash cases
Early Access on Steam from 12 Aug 2020, full release 18 Mar 2022 at $14.99; Xbox One/Series, PS4/PS5 and Switch versions launched 20 Apr 2023, published by JanduSoft, with Steam left as SpaceMyFriend. Launch-era Steam negatives (2022-23) focus on overwhelming pacing, hidden item text and crashes; more recent reviews (2025-26) are largely positive and call it underrated, though Linux/Proton crashes are still mentioned. The Steam page still cites active dev updates. Metacritic has no score yet (2 critic reviews, needs 4) and OpenCritic has a single review, so critical consensus is essentially unavailable. SteamSpy estimates 0-20k owners, and the revenue estimate site shows $0 (no usable data). Steam is Windows only.
Community sources
- Top helpful positive and negative English Steam reviews (local file) ↗
- Steam store page: features, 317 upgrades, release history, review summary ↗
- Metacritic page: 2 critic reviews (80, 75), no Metascore or user score yet ↗
- OpenCritic: single review, 6.1/10 from Nindie Spotlight ↗
- IndieGameFans PC review: mobility praised, poor tutorialization and samey palette ↗
- Console launch info: 20 Apr 2023, JanduSoft, 280 upgrades ↗
- Developer itch.io page, inspirations and feature list ↗
- Developer devlog showing ongoing updates ↗
- Deku Deals listing: Metacritic tbd ↗
- Revenue estimate page (shows $0, not usable) ↗
- Publisher page for console versions ↗
Archived creator commentary 1
Third-party summaries based on automatic captions may contain transcription or interpretation errors.
Tier list Part 2 (2024)
Cavity Busters is a top-down bullet hell shooter roguelike where you play as a tooth with a huge pile of overlapping mechanics: throwing and recalling your tooth, a health-fuelled auto-shotgun, a zoomed-out jump, and wall-dashing with slow-mo. Items are plentiful, often carry big downsides, and you can spend health to dig new rooms and extend floors almost indefinitely. He finds it inventive, content-rich, funny and strong in its boss fights, but thinks the sheer chaos and mechanical overload drag it down. Verdict is a tier placement that sounds like 'high S' or 'high C' (the ASR says 'high SE'), which is ambiguous.
What the creator praises
- Boss fights are really cool and the boss designs are interesting
- Bullet hell gameplay feels great
- Many viable ways to approach any fight
- Huge amount of content and plenty of secrets
- Funny, fun story with lots of humor
- Passives that radically change how the character plays, with five to six found per floor
Issues raised by the creator
- Too many mechanics; takes forever to get comfortable and is overwhelming
- Because all options are viable and usable constantly, it is unclear what to do
- Overall chaos across gameplay, mechanics and run structure is too much
- Health-based digging can make a single floor last around 40 minutes
- Passives with massive downsides that you are pressured to take, and removing them is slow and not guaranteed
Design observations
- Tooth throw, recall, and mid-air recall with special effect, alongside jump, wall-dash and slow-mo
- Spending health to dig new rooms lets you expand floors nearly infinitely
- Items have upsides and heavy downsides, and skipping them triggers other negatives, echoing Blazing Beaks
