Sci-fi pinball roguelite Appulse hits Steam in November with a demo

Publisher Raw Fury and French developer Le Rado have scheduled their sci-fi pinball roguelite shooter Appulse for release on November 26, 2026, on PC via Steam. A playable demo is also live on the storefront alongside the date announcement made during the Galaxies Autumn Showcase on October 15.

While the full release date is new, the project itself has been in the public eye for a bit. Raw Fury first revealed the publishing partnership during the Future Games Showcase on June 6, 2026, though the game's roots go back even further to an early one-month proof-of-concept prototype that Le Rado uploaded to itch.io in 2024.

Steering with shotgun recoil

Appulse puts players in control of a spherical combat unit called the T1LT-UNIT, tasked with defending the Vektor Dynamics fleet and its mothership from an invading robotic faction known as the Iron Accord. Instead of relying on standard directional movement, you launch the ball into enemy spaceships with an ejection cannon and keep it in play using traditional bottom-mounted flippers.

Once the ball is airborne, steering comes down to weapon recoil. Firing your equipped guns pushes the T1LT-UNIT in the opposite direction, letting you nudge your trajectory mid-flight, dodge hazards, or line up high-speed collisions to ram enemies directly. (Using shotgun blast physics to avoid draining down the center gutter feels like a very natural evolution of tilting the cabinet when the arcade operator isn't looking.)

The roguelite and RPG-style progression layers sit on top of that arcade loop. Between waves and boarding actions across different shuttles, players collect upgrades and perks to assemble specific builds. You can spec into bouncing SMG rounds to clear robots from a distance, crank up weapon knockback for heavier propulsion, boost close-range ramming damage, or trigger time-slowing abilities to chain combos together. I'm curious to see whether the board layouts stay readable once the screen fills up with enemy projectiles and ricocheting bullets, because precision flipper aiming gets chaotic fast when the table itself is shooting back.

From Nantes prototype to full release

Le Rado is a three-person independent studio based in Nantes, France, founded in 2024. Before locking in the concept for Appulse, the trio experimented with short prototypes on itch.io, including an earlier project titled Seagull's Revenge. Strong player feedback on the original 10-to-15-minute Appulse prototype convinced the team in early 2025 to expand the concept into a full commercial game, which later gained backing from France's Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) and a publishing deal with Stockholm-based Raw Fury.

Raw Fury has spent the last decade picking up strange mechanical hybrids like Cassette Beasts and Kingdom Two Crowns, and a top-down shooter spliced with 3D Pinball: Space Cadet fits right into that catalog. According to the game's press materials, the November 26 launch is strictly for PC via Steam, with no console ports announced so far. Anyone who wants to test how the recoil physics actually feel on a mouse and keyboard or controller can grab the Steam demo right now.