Devour & Evolve

You are the bottom of this dungeon

You are born as something weak. Your sight is short. Your reach is shorter.
Whether the thing moving down the corridor outranks you or not — reading that, in the half second you get, is the only real skill here.

You don't kill it. You eat it

Weakened prey ends one of two ways.
Devour it — your wounds close, your hunger drops, and its blood is written into your record.
Bind it — no healing at all. Instead it stands in front of you from now on.
There is no taking it back. What you ate will never follow you; what you bound will never feed you. That single choice, made over and over, is the shape of a run.

What you eat is what you can become

Any species you have devoured even once can be born again as you, in a later life.
Pick a bloodline, start as a hatchling, and spend that whole life climbing its evolution tree.
The next branch always reads "???" until you reach it.

What you bind, you carry home

Mid-dive you can plant a nest — not at a checkpoint, but on the exact tile you are standing on. Four of them, at least five floors apart, and the deeper you build the more it costs.
Bound kindred move in. You build a hatchery, a warren, a palisade, a watch, and each one changes what the nest can hold and how well it survives being away from you.
Choosing where to sink one is the only decision in this game you make while something is still hunting you.

Pair them. That is where the blood thickens

Two kindred housed in the same nest can be paired, and the pairing lays an egg.
The egg carries a generation, a leaning, and a species — and the game shows you all three before you spend a shard on it.
Pair the same bloodline and the generation does not move. Thickening the line means bringing a root home that your clan does not already have, which means going back down. New blood only comes out of the labyrinth.

The egg is your next body

You do not breed. Your clan does — and when you die, you are born out of one of the eggs it laid.
So a life does not begin from nothing. It begins from whatever your line has become since the last one.
Die in a body that came from an egg and the blood does not thicken; that is what the pairing was for. Die in a feral body — one the labyrinth grew, before you had a nest — and it thickens the old way.

Retreat is not the same as dying

Die, and the body is gone, and so is every kindred that was walking with you — permanently.
Walk out alive and the body waits for you at the nest, at the level you grew it to, and you can take it straight back down.
Either way the kindred you left at home are still alive; pay in soul shards and they will sign on again.
And a nest can be raided while you are away. It loses integrity, and if it falls it takes the eggs and everyone living in it with it.

The deeper it runs, the higher the rank

Every tenth floor has a warden.
Floor 1, and every twentieth floor you have reached, is somewhere a new life can begin — which is not a shortcut. It is a bet that a bare hatchling can survive being born in the middle of things that outrank it.
There is a throne on floor 100. What sits on it is for whoever gets there to find out.
And the dungeon does not stop at 100.

Short to pick up. Long to run out of

• First-person grid crawling. Every step puts a wall, a fork, or a meal in front of you
  
• Range-and-rank command combat. Close the distance, hide behind your front row, or cut the range and run
  
• Perception grows. A hatchling sees the next tile. Something older feels what is breathing behind the wall
  
• 154 species on the board right now, each drawn as pixel art with walk, idle and facing, roaming the floors
  
• Organs torn out of what you ate. Embed one and your body changes. The blood remembers them past death
  
• A clan you keep between lives. Nests you plant at depth, kindred housed in them, facilities, pairings, eggs — and raids while you are away
  
• Two labyrinths. One fixed hundred floors everybody walks, so what you memorise is worth something; or a labyrinth generated for that save alone, which nobody has a map of

Who this is for

• You want to crawl a first-person grid again — Wizardry, Etrian Odyssey — without the graph paper
  
• You enjoy asking "is that thing above me or below me?" on every single step
  
• You like roguelites where dying is how you make progress
  
• You want a base that is a real place with real stakes, not a menu between runs
  
• You will go and fill in a bestiary's "???" entries yourself