The team behind Shotgun King is back with another genre mashup. Hot Wax, their newly revealed indie puzzle game, sends players descending into a deep, unlit dungeon where the only light source is fire — and the only fuel is the falling blocks themselves.

The hook, as Kotaku describes it, is carefully igniting tetrominoes to survive. Every classic Tetris-style piece doubles as a candle: burn it and you can see, but you're also consuming the very material you'd normally be stacking. Kotaku's framing — a game that burns Tetris at both ends — captures the tension at the core of the design, where illumination and resource management pull against each other.

It's a familiar formula for this studio. Shotgun King earned its cult following by welding chess to a boomstick, turning a staid classic into something tense and slightly unhinged. Hot Wax looks to run the same play on falling-block puzzlers: take a ruleset everyone knows, introduce one destructive new verb, and let the friction generate the game.

No firm release details were included in the initial coverage, but the melty dungeon-crawling premise alone should put Hot Wax on indie watchlists.