Walls Were Built to Fall Hits 13,000 Steam Wishlists Before 2027 Launch
A prototype clip and a store page carried the project to five figures of wishlists before any playtest, which puts the developer's small-scale test and optimization work on a compressed timetable against a 2027 release window.
Key Facts
- Zoomy Cat Games published the Steam store page for Walls Were Built to Fall on September 10, 2026.
- Walls Were Built to Fall passed 13,000 Steam wishlists by September 23, 2026, about two weeks after the store page went live.
- Walls Were Built to Fall is scheduled for release on PC via Steam in the second quarter of 2027.
- A prototype video for Walls Were Built to Fall drew about 350,000 views and 8,500 likes on Instagram before the game had a title.
- On beginner difficulty, Walls Were Built to Fall sends 200,000 enemies at the player rather than the full one million.
Reporting from 2 sources: Automaton, Game Spark.
Zoomy Cat Games published the Steam store page for Walls Were Built to Fall on September 10. By September 23, the defense roguelite FPS had passed 13,000 wishlists. The game puts the player in the role of an apprentice mage who must protect a magic spring from a pixel-art horde that can reach one million enemies at once. Players fight from atop a wall in a canyon, or descend to the ground, using rapid-fire, explosive, and ice-spike magic. Roguelite and incremental upgrades let them build walls, lay traps, and hire mages and archers between attempts. A prototype video posted about a month before the store page went live drew around 350,000 views and 8,500 likes, before the project had a title. The developer has said a small-scale playtest is planned for one or two months out, and the game is scheduled for release on PC via Steam in the second quarter of 2027.
The store page lists modest minimum specs for a game built around a million simultaneous enemies: Windows 10 64-bit, an Intel Core i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600, 8 GB RAM, and a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or AMD RX 580, with 2 GB of storage. In the developer's own tests, an RTX 3070 had considerable headroom.
Zoomy Cat Games got there by moving the horde off the CPU. The enemies are sprites rather than 3D models, which is lighter to render, and the army's physics run as a semi-fluid simulation with adjustments such as enemies climbing over one another. Most of that processing stays on the GPU, with only the representation passed to the CPU. An earlier attempt in Godot as a top-down tower defense with 5 million enemies did not go well, because driving that many enemies through nodes overloaded the CPU.
The project began after the developer was influenced by the incremental tower defense game 'Commander, It's an Orc Horde!', released in July, and the pivot to first-person came from recalling the battle at Helm's Deep in "The Lord of the Rings."
Indie Game Joe and other well-known influencers introduced the game in the two weeks after the page went live. The store page currently does not support Japanese. On beginner difficulty, 200,000 enemies come at once.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 2 cited sources below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.