Fact sheet
| Title | IMPETO |
|---|---|
| Developer | MadAxe Games |
| Publisher | MadAxe Games (self-published) |
| Release date | To be announced |
| Platforms | Windows, Linux, Steam Deck |
| Price | To be announced |
| Genre | Arcade roguelike, physics, top-down |
| Players | Single player |
| Input | Keyboard and mouse, full controller support |
| Languages | 14, text and interface |
| Engine | Godot 4 |
| Website | This site |
| Press contact | press@impetogame.com |
Description
Short, 263 characters.
Spinning tops that fight in a bowl. IMPETO is an arcade roguelike where you build a top from a blade, a ring and a tip, then send it into the bowl to crash into the others. Push enemies into bombs, slide across ice, and hit the boss so hard that a part falls off.
Longer.
IMPETO is a crash battle for spinning tops, seen from a fixed high angle over a bowl arena. You build your top from three parts, drop it in, and steer it into the other tops. Spin is your health bar: it drains while you fight, faster when you get hit, and when it runs out you fall over.
The damage rule is the whole game. The top that drives into a contact takes almost five times less damage than the top that gets hit. Spinning in a corner and waiting is the losing move, every time. Commit or lose.
A run is 12 rooms and then a boss. Every room is one fight, and the room itself has opinions: ice that takes your grip away, barrels of TNT, pillars to pin a rival against. Clear a room, take one of three cards — a skill, a stat, a relic — and walk into the next one. Go over the rim and the run is over, but the scrap comes home with you and pays for the next top.
Everything you see is drawn in the comic book style the game is built around: flat colour, hard light bands, black ink outlines and halftone dots, generated in code rather than imported as models.
Features
- Commit or lose. Driving into a hit does almost 5× the damage of taking one.
- 18 parts across blade, ring and tip. Each one changes the shape of the top on the floor, not only a stat.
- 12 rooms, then the boss. Duels, swarms of 20, elites, hold-outs, treasure rooms.
- The room fights too. Ice floors, TNT barrels, pillars, pits.
- 27 skills and relics, drawn three at a time, rerollable for coins.
- Hit hard enough and a part falls off — the burst, taken straight from the toy.
- 14 languages and full controller support, tuned for Steam Deck.
History
IMPETO started as a physics experiment: two points on a plane, hand-integrated, no rigid bodies, to see whether a spinning-top collision could be made to feel like the toy rather than like billiards. The asymmetric damage rule came out of that test and became the design.
It is built in Godot 4 at MadAxe Games. Almost every visual is generated at runtime — meshes, textures, effects — with hand-painted UI art over the top.
Images
Click any image for the full size. The ZIP holds all of them at 1280×720 PNG, plus the logo and key art.
Logo & key art
The logo is a transparent PNG. Do not recolour it, stretch it, or set it on a busy background.
Video
Trailers and clips are on YouTube and TikTok. Ask for a raw file at any resolution you need.
Video and streaming
You may record, stream and monetise any video of IMPETO, including full playthroughs, on any platform, forever. No claim will be made on your video. You do not need to ask.
Team
- MadAxe Games — design, code, art direction, everything else.
- Fonts: Bangers and Comic Neue, both under the SIL Open Font License.
- Engine: Godot 4.
Contact
- Press and business: press@impetogame.com
- Discord: discord.gg/eXhjfEAR6 — fastest way to reach us
- X: @madaxegames
- Bluesky: @madaxegames.bsky.social
- Instagram: @madaxegames
- TikTok: @impeto
- YouTube: @madaxegames












