The gaming industry kicked off 2025 with an unexpected and exciting announcement from Markus “Notch” Persson, the creator of Minecraft, who revealed his intention to develop a spiritual successor to Minecraft, which he described as “basically Minecraft 2.”
Less than a week later, however, the excitement was snuffed out when Notch abruptly canceled his plans, stating that he and his team at Bitshift Entertainment would instead continue focusing on Levers and Chests, a retro-style first-person roguelike announced alongside the studio itself in 2024. To prove that he is “100% serious” this time, the developer recently posted a series of screenshots offering a sneak peek at the early iterations of some of L&C’s features.
Shared over on Twitter, the screenshots offer a look at the roguelike’s voxel graphics, inventory UI, and newly designed portraits for in-game characters Mark and Reverie, which differ from the placeholder AI-generated portraits demonstrated by Notch last year. The images also feature several mobs, who heavily resemble upgraded and more detailed versions of Minecraft zombies, and highlight some procedural world generation explorations.
Additionally, the developer showcased a couple of cool-looking glitches in the game’s raytraced voxel renderer, which appeared when “changing it to be rendered from the back-facing faces instead of the front.” Based on all the screenshots released by Notch, Levers and Chests is currently in its pre-alpha stage, and if Minecraft’s history is anything to go by, it’s not out of the question that the first versions of L&C could be publicly released as early as this year – provided pre-alpha aligns with Minecraft’s Indev phase.
Follow Notch on Twitter for more updates and don’t forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
