Full disclosure up front, because this one needs it: this is not a retro story. There is no cartridge, no FPGA core, and nothing here boots on a CRT. Necromancer: Undead Legion RPG is a mobile-only game, still in development, with no playable build or demo you can download today. We are covering it anyway — as an indie-developer spotlight — because the story behind it is the kind this desk cannot leave alone: a dentist in South Korea taught himself to code, built an undead-army RPG by himself, and is now rebuilding the whole thing from scratch because the first version was not good enough for him.
At a glance: Developer — Ingyoon An (Ancoach Studio, South Korea), solo developer · Platforms — Android and iOS only · Status — in development; Google Play pre-registration open, App Store pre-order open · iOS price — $5.99 one-time purchase, premium, no ads, expected January 14, 2027 per the App Store listing · Android price — UNCONFIRMED: Google Play lists no price yet and carries an in-app-purchases label (see the pricing section below before you assume anything).
What Necromancer Undead Legion actually is
The pitch, stripped of adjectives: a dark-fantasy action RPG with roguelite runs, viewed from above, in which every enemy you kill leaves a corpse — and the corpse is the resource. You have three things you can do with it. Raise it, and it joins your army. Detonate it, and it damages everything still standing nearby. Absorb it, and it feeds your transformation into a Reaper form. Kill, raise, command, detonate, repeat. That loop is the entire game, and honestly, it is a good loop. Most necromancer games let you summon help and then stand at the back looking decorative. This one puts you in the fight — moving, striking, teleporting out of trouble — while you decide, corpse by corpse, whether you need another soldier, an explosion, or power for later.
The scale, per the store listings, is not small for a one-person project: 36 undead types to command, built from six base skeletons and six base zombies that each branch into two elite forms; a 200-stage labyrinth across 11 zones; 19 runes and 10 runewords to hunt, with socketed gear, a blacksmith for reforging, and a reincarnation system that lets you start a new life stronger when you choose to, rather than when the game decides you have died enough. There is also a separate bridge-defense mode, an optional auto-hunt for farming, and support for 15 languages. Fifteen. One developer. We will come back to that.
Raise them, or blow them up
The design decision worth paying attention to is that the three corpse options compete. A body spent on an explosion is a body that is not marching beside you. A body absorbed for the Reaper gauge is neither. In his interview with devplaymedia, An describes thinking about the choice in terms of what the next moment of combat needs — another ally, immediate damage, or a transformation you are building toward — and not wanting one answer to be right every time. That is a healthier design instinct than most multi-person studios manage, and it came, by his account, directly from returning players of his earlier game testing the rebuild and telling him when something felt wrong. One tester sent over a thousand pieces of feedback. One thousand. From one player.
The boss fights, at least on paper, ask for actual play rather than stat checks: attacks are telegraphed on the ground before they land, and your grade rewards clearing stages faster and cleaner. Whether two thumbs on a phone screen can carry all of this — movement on the left, attack, teleport and skills on the right, plus army management — is the open question, and An seems to know it. Testing produced three control-layout presets, including a left-handed one, after players pointed out that the comfortable spot for a button is different for every pair of hands. One tester caught that a preset put the teleport button where lifting your movement thumb would drop your direction input. That bug does not get found by a spreadsheet. It gets found by someone playing your game for a long time and caring enough to report it.
The dentist, the search bar, and the rebuild
Now the part that got this game onto a retro site’s news desk. Ingyoon An is a dentist. Not was — is. Ancoach Studio is his one-person studio in South Korea, and game development is the thing he taught himself around the day job. Precision matters here, so let us be precise: 2022 is the year An began learning to code — teaching himself through Google searches, by his own account in the devplaymedia interview — and his earlier game, Necromancer RPG, grew out of that period of learning. You will see 2022 attached to the earlier game in various places, including the store copy itself, but An has explicitly clarified that 2022 marks when he started learning, and should not be treated as a confirmed release date for that first game. We are printing his version, because he is the source.
That first game found an audience anyway. Google Play Korea featured the original Necromancer RPG as a recommended new game of the week, and players stuck with it — stuck with it hard enough that, years later, they came back to test the rebuild. An’s verdict on his own first attempt is the interesting part: rather than patch its weaknesses one by one, he spent more than two years rebuilding it from scratch as Undead Legion, with refreshed visuals, the necromancer moved into the fight, and systems like reincarnation rethought so that starting again keeps the legion and equipment you are attached to instead of discarding them. Solo developers abandoning a working game to rebuild it properly, because the idea deserved better execution than their beginner skills allowed, is not a common story. It is a good one.
Even the localization is a one-man engineering story. Supporting 15 languages solo is a lot; supporting Hindi and Thai properly is a different problem entirely, because rendering the characters correctly is not the same as having them in a font. An built his own editor tool to shape the Hindi text and bake it into a form the game can display correctly, rather than shipping a language option that looks broken. That is the opposite of checkbox localization, and it tells you a fair amount about how this whole project has been run.
Price, dates, and the part where we do not guess
Here is what is confirmed, and only what is confirmed. The App Store listing is live for pre-order at $5.99 — a one-time purchase for a premium game with no ads — with an expected release date of January 14, 2027. Treat that date as Apple’s listing date, not a promise carved into a tombstone; expected dates on pre-order pages move. Pre-ordering on iOS, or pre-registering on Google Play, currently comes with a 600 Gems reward on each platform, per the listings and coverage.
Android is where you need to read carefully. Google Play pre-registration is open, but the Play listing shows no price yet, and it carries an in-app-purchases label — which sits oddly next to the iOS listing’s clean one-time purchase. So: the Android price is unconfirmed, full stop. It may land at the same $5.99. It may not. Anyone who tells you the Android price today is guessing, and this site is not going to guess on a solo developer’s behalf or yours. When the Play listing prints a number, that is when the number exists.
One developer, one day job, two years of rebuilding — and every corpse on the battlefield is a decision. That is the whole story, and it needs no hype added.
So where does that leave Necromancer Undead Legion — the game itself, separate from the story around it? On our watch list, with the caveats printed in the same size type as the praise: mobile-only, unfinished, nothing playable yet, and an Android price still to be confirmed. What exists today is a strong core idea, an unusually transparent solo developer, a player base loyal enough to file a thousand bug reports for free, and a pair of store listings you can act on if pre-registering is your thing. We will check back when there is a build to judge. Games, in the end, get judged as games — even when the dentist who made them taught himself to code to do it.
Necromancer: Undead Legion is expected on January 14, 2027, per the App Store listing — pre-order it on the App Store or pre-register on Google Play.