Dreamwave Labs is building a space roguelite where projectiles inherit your ship’s velocity and gravity bends their path. It is due on Steam in 2027, and playable builds are already reaching press.
Perihelion begins from a rule that reorganises everything around it. Projectiles inherit your ship’s velocity, and once they are travelling, gravity acts on them. Dreamwave Labs is building a top-down space combat roguelite on that idea, due on Steam in 2027.
Lead developer TREXJET has summed up the design philosophy by saying that gravity should shape every fight.
Fighting Inside a Gravity Well
In practice that means planets pull on your ship and on everything you fire. Dreamwave describes slingshotting around planets for speed, curving projectiles along orbital paths, and using momentum itself as a weapon. A poor manoeuvre can leave a ship drifting toward a hazard.
Aiming becomes a matter of leading a target through a field that is acting on both of you. Dreamwave describes its encounters as constantly shifting orbital puzzles, which is a fair description of an arena where nothing travels in a straight line.
How clearly all that reads in the middle of a fight is the thing to watch between now and release, and it is the part no trailer can really show.
Runs, Upgrades and a Missing Sister Ship
The structure around the combat is familiar roguelite shape. You launch sorties from a carrier onto branching maps, with more than 13 mission types spread across asteroid fields, nebulae and planetary gravity wells. Upgrades chosen between missions change how the ship handles as well as how it shoots. Mission rewards unlock fire rates, projectile behaviours and status effects.
Failed runs are not wasted. They feed persistent skill trees split across survivability, offence and tactics.
The story sits on the carrier between runs. The crew is trying to work out what happened to a sister ship, piecing it together from corrupted black boxes and fragments of transmission. Conversations with the crew unlock as you go and shape how things turn out, and Steam lists the game under Choices Matter and Character Customization. Using the gaps between runs for character work rather than only a shop screen is a good instinct for the genre.
The Co-op Idea Is the Smartest Thing Here
Up to four pilots can fly together online, with LAN and cross-platform play listed as well, and enemy numbers scale to the size of the squad. The detail worth pulling out is that each pilot keeps their own campaign and their own rewards.
That is a thoughtful piece of design. An experienced player and a newcomer can fly the same mission and each come away having advanced their own run, rather than one pulling the other along. It will not make a trailer, but it is the sort of thing that keeps a group playing together.
What Is Still Unknown
Quite a lot, which is reasonable for a game targeting 2027. There is no price yet. The Steam page lists English only for interface, audio and subtitles, with full audio. Windows 11 64-bit, macOS on Apple Silicon, Steam Deck, and SteamOS with Linux are all listed, though Vulkan support has not been confirmed.
There is no public demo on Steam, though Dreamwave is sending playable builds to press.
Perihelion is still some way from release, and the idea at its centre is an unusual one for the genre. If the gravity reads clearly in the middle of a fight, there is a well-assembled roguelite built around it, and on what has been shown so far that looks like a reasonable bet.
The Facts
| Field | Detail |
| Developer and publisher | Dreamwave Labs |
| Genre | Physics-based space combat roguelite, top-down |
| Release | Planned for 2027, Steam |
| Platforms | Windows 11 64-bit, macOS on Apple Silicon, SteamOS, Steam Deck and Linux |
| Players | Single-player, online co-op to 4, LAN co-op, cross-platform |
| Languages | English, with full audio and subtitles |
| Demo | None public on Steam; builds going to press |
| Price | Not announced |
