Shogun Showdown

The battles in Shogun Showdown are fought on a one-dimensional track of 5 to 9 spaces. Each turn, the player may perform one of several actions: moving forward one square, turning around to face the other direction, using a skill, preparing an attack or action, or using the queued attacks and actions (a maximum of 3). Some attacks and actions do not use up the player's turn, and attacks and actions can be freely organized or removed from the queue.

After the player acts, the enemies act on their turns. Enemies can also move one square, turn around, prepare an attack or action, or use queued attacks and actions. The strategy for the game comes about by players knowing ahead of time what the enemy will do on their next turn. In its simplest form, if an enemy plans to use a spear to attack the two tiles in front of it in the next turn, and the player character is two spaces in front of the enemy, the player may choose to move backward one space to avoid the attack.

Shogun Showdown was developed by Roboatino, which is a solo game developer named Mirko. In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Mirko taught himself Unity and began prototyping a deck-building game. Over the next year, he developed the left-right movement scheme of Shogun and posted an alpha build of the game to itch.io in May 2022, hoping to receive some useful feedback. The YouTube content creator Retromation became a fan of the early build, and his videos helped popularize Shogun early in its development.

Around this time, Mirko was still working full-time as a software developer and designing Shogun in his spare time. Goblinz Studio signed Roboatino, which allowed Mirko to switch to part-time, and then full-time, development on the game. Signing with the publisher allowed Roboatino to hire Oscar di Mondogemello to write the score, while additional pixel art was drawn by Brandon Schenk, who did character and enemy animations, and Camille Blinot, who worked on background art. Gamera Games also joined the team as publishers to the Chinese market.

Shogun Showdown received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. 94% of critics recommended the game on OpenCritic.

In its review, PC Gamer praised the combat which "feels like directing the coolest samurai movie you've ever seen" and lauded the game as a compelling roguelike in the genre's golden age. In awarding Shogun with its Bestest Best award, Rock Paper Shotgun lauded the "exceptional turn-based combat, gorgeous visuals, and refreshingly simple mechanics".