Okay so I want to start this by being honest with you — I went into this video fully expecting to hate this game. Like I was ready to make fun of it. And then I played it and I don’t know, man, I was actually kind of surprised by how much I enjoyed it and that kind of messed with my head a little bit because you know I’ve been watching AI stuff for a couple years now and I’ve kind of gotten used to bracing for disappointment when someone says “this is 100% AI-generated” and then it turns out to be garbage.
But here’s the thing. The game we’re talking about is called Codeex Mortis, and it’s the first fully AI-generated game released on Steam, and I actually played through it and gave it a real shot. And I want to share my thoughts on it because I think it matters for where we’re all heading with this stuff.
What Even Is Codeex Mortis?
So Codeex Mortis is a necromancy-themed survival game that’s basically in the Vampire Survivors genre — you know, top-down, enemies coming from all sides, you level up your spells and abilities and try to survive as long as possible and etc etc. If you’ve ever played Vampire Survivors or Mega Bunk or anything like that, you’ll understand immediately what kind of game this is.
Now, what makes this one different is that it’s a demo right now, not the full release yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam. And the whole selling point is that the code, the sprites, the game design, all of it — supposedly 100% AI-generated. I mean I’m sure there’s some human doing some intervention somewhere, probably just using AI tools to do everything, but the marketing claim is 100% AI and for the purposes of this conversation we’re going to take that at face value.
You play as a necromancer. You start with bone spear — launches piercing bone projectiles at enemies — and you’ve got spells like life drain, soul burn, raise skeleton, and blood magic. There’s a progression system, achievements, multiple characters you can unlock, and co-op support. Like, it’s not a stripped-down tech demo. It’s an actual game with actual systems.
My First Impressions Actually Trying to Play It
Okay so I’m not going to sugarcoat it. My first run I died really fast. I dunno, I jumped in without reading anything and got wrecked almost immediately, which you know is kind of embarrassing to admit lol but it also kind of tells you something — the game has actual difficulty. It’s not just a walking simulator.
The second run I actually started figuring things out. You get upgrades as you level up, you’re picking between different tiers of abilities — common, epic, legendary — and I was always going for legendary because big dick energy, that’s the only strategy, you know. And honestly once I started building around soul burn and bone golems and started stacking cool down reductions, I was actually having fun. Like real fun, not charity fun.
Some things I noticed right away that are clearly AI limitations though. The character sprites — when they walk, there’s no walk animation. The character just kind of jigles and faces the direction it’s moving. Like, feet aren’t moving. It works, you get used to it quickly, but you notice it immediately. The good news is the spell effects and particle stuff actually looked pretty cool. The blood rain, the soul burn visual, the bone golems — those looked genuinely good, not placeholder-tier stuff.
There’s also a thing where I’m pretty sure the last level I played was the same map as the first level, and I mean I didn’t even notice until after I beat it so does it matter? I dunno. Maybe? It’s a demo. I’ll give it a pass for now.
Where AI Is at With Video Game Development Right Now
Here’s the part I actually want you to think about. And I always say this in my AI videos but I feel like it needs repeating every time because people keep forgetting — this is the worst AI is ever going to be at this. Ever. Like what you’re seeing in Codeex Mortis is the floor, not the ceiling.
I mean like just think about where we were even two or three years ago with AI-generated images. People were posting stuff with six fingers and melting faces and weird artifacts everywhere. And now? Like now you can generate photorealistic stuff that’s borderline indistinguishable from a real photo sometimes. The improvement curve on this stuff is not linear, it’s exponential and it’s happening faster than most people are tracking.
So yeah, Codeex Mortis has limitations. The sprite animations are basic. The level variety is limited, at least in the demo. Some of the item descriptions are a little generic. But the core gameplay loop works. It has a progression system. It has multiple build paths. It has boss encounters. It has co-op. Like this thing actually works as a game and that’s kind of wild when you think about it.
I also think about where this technology is heading specifically and I’ve been doing a lot of my own vibe coding using Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex and Gemini CLI for Streamliner.gg, my SaaS for content creators, and I’m telling you the rate at which AI can write, review, and iterate on code has gotten insane in the last year. Like genuinely insane. And once you get AI to a point where it can not only write code but review its own code and run itself continuously improving a game twenty-four seven, the output is going to be something else entirely.
Should You Actually Download It?
Okay so here’s my honest take. The game is fun. I would give it a solid six or seven out of ten. If it’s free to play or like 99 cents, yeah, go download it, mess around with it. I actually think if I put it on my son Tanner’s computer he’d have a blast with it for a while because he’s six and the necromancer stuff looks cool and kids love that kind of thing.
But would I recommend it over Vampire Survivors, which you can get on Steam for five bucks? Probably not. Vampire Survivors is more polished, has more variety, the difficulty curve is better tuned. Codeex Mortis at its current state is like a solid prototype of what an AI game engine could eventually produce, not a finished competitor to what’s already out there.
That said, comparison to existing polished games kind of misses the point. The relevant comparison is: where was AI at games twelve months ago versus today? And today a fully functional genre game with multiple systems and co-op support just shipped on Steam generated entirely by AI. That’s the headline. That’s what matters.
Where Video Game AI Goes From Here
And look, I know people have Feelings about this. There’s always two camps when you talk about AI and creative jobs and I get it. I do. The reality that AI is going to take over more and more development roles is genuinely uncomfortable for a lot of people who built careers as game developers and artists and coders and I’m not going to just wave that away.
But I also think about the other side of this. I imagine one day me and my friends load into some kind of digital hub and we have an idea for a game we want to play and we just describe it to an AI and it builds the whole thing in real time. Like we say hey we want purple and pink trees like Minecraft but like this specific vibe and it just generates this whole world that we can actually play in together. And anybody who has a good idea can suddenly make a game, not just people who already know how to code.
Because here’s what I actually think the truth is — everybody likes to say that coding and development are the skills that make humans valuable in creative work, but I dunno, I disagree with that. I think it’s the ideas. The imagination. The taste. And there are tons of people who probably have incredible ideas for games that would be fun and weird and unique that just don’t have the technical skills to build anything. AI is going to unlock those people. That’s actually exciting.
And I’m not saying this because I’m naive about the disruption that comes with it. I’m saying it because I genuinely believe we’re moving toward a world where the barrier between “I have a cool idea” and “I can play that idea” is going to get very, very thin. And that’s going to create more games, more variety, more niche stuff, more weird stuff, more of the games that never would have gotten made because no studio was willing to fund them.
The Bottom Line
So here’s where I land on all of this. Codeex Mortis is actually fun. It’s not going to replace your favorite polished games. The animations are basic, some of the systems are a little shallow, and yeah I’m pretty sure they reused the map. But it works. It’s a real game. And the fact that something like this exists right now in early 2026 should tell you something about what’s coming.
I was not expecting to enjoy this. And I did. And that matters more than whether the walk animation is smooth or whether the chests give you the same three options every time. The floor just raised. And the floor is going to keep raising, probably faster than most people are comfortable with.
If you’re into AI and what it’s doing in creative industries, go wishlist Codeex Mortis on Steam and check it out when the full version drops. And if you want to keep up with this kind of stuff — the honest take on what AI can actually do right now versus the hype — make sure you subscribe to the channel because we do a lot of this content here and I genuinely like finding this stuff and sharing what I actually think about it.
Let me know in the comments — have you tried the game? And what do you think, are you excited about where AI is going with games or does it make you nervous? I’m genuinely curious where people are landing on this one.