Order Automatica

What is Order Automatica

Order Automatica is a dark tactical roguelite auto-battler where the fight is won before it begins. Build deadly synergies on a small 3×3 ritual grid, position your units, manipulate tiles, and survive brutal encounters against demonic forces. Players take part in a demonic ritual they must stop at all costs — snuff out every candle and the enemies only grow stronger. Fans and the studio alike call it “chess with demons.”

Developed by New Beings (Mickey Sanchez's solo studio, Portland) and published by better. publishing, Comma 49 and New Beings. Battles resolve automatically on 3×3 boards; your job is choosing and positioning units so the right combinations, tactics and curses fire on cue. Source: Steam Store Page · New Beings · itch.io devlog.

Key Facts at a Glance

Core Loop: Battle & Ritual

The game alternates between battle and inter-battle management. The official dev blog frames this as the Core Loop: win fights to gather resources → spend them between battles through rituals and automation → enter the next fight stronger. See Game Systems and Unit Synergy for the mechanics behind it.

Read the studio's own write-ups: What Happens Between Battles? and The Ritual Is Ready!.

Key Systems

• Units & Builds — each unit fills a role (damage, control, production, support); your roster is your power ceiling. See Best Builds and the Unit Compendium.
• Difficulty curve — the ritual escalates as you progress; comps and resource planning are how you break through. See the Beginner’s Guide.
• The Ritual — the central progression mechanic the studio calls “The Ritual Is Ready!”

New Player Path

1. Start with the Beginner’s Guide to build a mental model.
2. Pick a roster with the Best Builds framework and the Unit Compendium.
3. Drill Synergy and Grid Placement to compound your board.
4. Track patches on the Release & Platforms page.

How Much Content Is Actually In the Box?

The studio’s own content announcement gives the official launch footprint, and the demo client lets us check part of it independently. Where the two disagree we say so rather than picking the nicer number:

Two honest caveats. First, our unit split comes from a reverse-engineered role flag that is unreliable for units appearing in both pools, so we defer to the studio’s 20/17 split and treat our compendium as “37 units recovered from the build” rather than a guaranteed roster breakdown. Second, every “recovered” figure is a floor: it counts entries we could decode from the demo, not necessarily everything the shipped game contains. Sources: Steam Community announcements (unit/item data) · demo client datamine (AppID 2577030).

The number that matters for replay value is the last one in the official column — 34 ability triggers is the combinatorial engines that makes a nine-cell board produce varied runs. See Unit Synergy for how they chain.

How It Compares to Its Influences

The studio names Super Auto Pets and Loot Rascals as touchstones, and the comparison is genuinely useful for deciding whether to buy:

• vs Super Auto Pets — the shared DNA is the small board, auto-resolved combat and the “position matters more than stats” principle. Order Automatica is darker in tone and adds a second axis: the candle race means a board that wins every fight slowly can still lose the run, which SAP’s pure-versus structure does not do.
• vs Loot Rascals — the kinship is the grid manipulation and the way tile effects rewrite what a unit does. Order Automatica pushes further on persistent modifiers: the Indulgences and Curses layer (24 buffs against 9 enemy debuffs) is a build axis most auto-battlers leave out.
• vs typical roguelite deckbuilders — the between-battles half of the loop is where this diverges. You are not drafting a deck so much as managing an economy and a ritual, per the studio’s own Core Loop write-up.

If you bounce off auto-battlers because they feel like they play themselves, that is a fair criticism of the genre and this game will not fully change your mind — almost all of your input happens before a fight starts. If you enjoy the puzzle of reading a board and committing, the 3×3 constraint is what makes it work. The free demo settles it better than any comparison.

Common Questions

Q: When did it release?
A: 2026-09-04, now available — see the OUT NOW announcement.

Q: What is the latest patch?
A: The newest is version 1.00.24 (2026-09-21) — a small balance change plus a few fixes, following 1.00.23, 1.00.22, 1.00.21 and an Overkill Hotfix. Track them on the News & Updates page, sourced live from the Steam news feed.

Q: Is it coming to Asia?
A: Yes — the studio announced an Asia expansion.