⚔️ You choose where to stand — nothing else

Move, and your weapon and every skill fire by themselves. That is the whole control scheme, on a keyboard, a gamepad or a thumb, and most of this game’s design follows from it: positioning is the skill, and a fight is a question about ground.

Every level-up you draft 1 of 3 cards — stats, a new auto-casting skill, a Passive Skill that changes how a build works, a permanent slot enchant, or talent points. Each level also grants a reroll (R) if the three on offer are not for you.

🌟 Merge everything

71 skills, and they are raw material. Take any two to rank 10 and Combine them into one auto-casting hybrid; merge three combos into a grand skill; Fuse two maxed Passive Skills into one amplified power; and evolve a pair into something with a new name and a new behaviour. A late build fires things that are not on any list.

Spend talent points in the Skill Tree (T), three arms per archetype.

💎 Loot, uniques and sets

Gear rolls from Common to Legendary, plus Uniques — 20 named per archetype, each pinned to the kind of thing its name says it is.

Twelve sets, one per tree arm, and they cannot be found at all — the Craftsman makes them, each from its own recipe, and the grade of the material you bring decides whether the piece comes out Plain, Fine or Masterwork. Two pieces pay a statistic, four grant a rule, and six switch on a mechanic that belongs to that specialisation: armour that builds while you stand your ground, a last quarter of your life where the blows come twice as fast, an execution that opens two seconds of guaranteed crits, a freeze that spreads to the neighbour, a share of the dead getting up on your side. That is the subclass: three ways to play each archetype, made rather than farmed.

Salvage what you do not want, upgrade at the Forge, enchant a slot so the bonus outlives the item in it, and repair what the depths wore down.

🗻 Six biomes, and getting back out

Six biomes open off the town square, and each one keeps its own depth: you go to the Forest for wood and to the Mines for stone, and how far you have driven that particular place is where you pick up next time. Clear a floor and the portal leads down, never home — it tells you the level, the resistances and what grows there before you step. Heroes cap at level 50; depth is what carries on.

Which is the whole tension: everything you are carrying is at risk. Call the caravan and a hand lifts you out with your haul; die, and the haul stays down there. The hero survives — the backpack does not.

⚠ And closing the tab is not a way out. Leave the game while you are underground — a refresh, a closed window, a dropped connection — and the hero is safe, but the backpack and everything gathered stay down there, exactly as if you had fallen. Two ways out, and a browser button is not one of them.

And the deeper you take it, the more it is worth. Every floor you descend without leaving adds +15% to what you gather, stacking to +150%, and each node also gives a double portion of the grade below. It is a stake, not a bonus: it grows only while you stay down, and it is gone the moment you stand in town — banked if the caravan brought you, lost with everything else if it did not.

🔥 How hard it gets is your call

• Depth is the dial. Every floor states the level it expects. Walking down one more than you should is the difficulty setting, and it is the honest one.
• Wager on a floor before you enter: four rungs, paid in gold, that make the floor genuinely worse and pay you back in loot and experience. You are buying a harder fight, never a stronger hero.
• ☠ Menace reads how you are doing and adapts within the floor, paying bonus XP and gold while it presses.
• Totems offer a challenge you can refuse — hold this ground, clear it without a potion, no gear above Rare — for a reward you can read beforehand.

🔥 The Cindergate

The gate in the square is being rebuilt, and it is being rebuilt out of what you bring home. Materials come up in five grades, plus an Ancient grade that only lords give up; the gate takes its tithe in Cinder, and Cinder is spent on a tree of permanent, account-wide improvements to how you gather, trade and craft.

Nothing on that tree makes a hero hit harder. Meta-progression here goes sideways.

🏆 What outlives a run

90 achievements, 65 hats (a third of which cannot be bought at any price), a Database that fills in as you meet things — 47 monsters, 17 lords, every item, set, skill and power you have discovered — and leaderboards that show what you did it with.

An account is free and entirely optional: your save code works without one. Sign in and your heroes are kept in the cloud, and friends’ fallen heroes start turning up as wraiths holding a floor against you.

🎵 Sound & credits

Most of what you hear is synthesised live in your browser — the ambient beds, every lord’s signature motif, and all the sound effects. No downloads, no samples. The music swells with the size of the fight rather than switching tracks.

The recorded music is all public domain (CC0), from OpenGameArt. Town and battle by cynicmusic (cynicmusic.com · pixelsphere.org); the boss theme Determined Pursuit by Emma_MA; and one piece per dungeon — congusbongus, Umplix, TinyWorlds, Centurion_of_war and yd. Thank you, all of you.