Abyssgate

The Abyssal Gate is open. Who's going in?

For generations the kingdom of Eunomia lived under the wings of its guardian dragon. When the dragon sickened and a black miasma began to spread from its lair, the crown sent an expedition to end the threat. The expedition succeeded.

The miasma did not stop. Where the dragon had lain, the Abyssal Gate now stands open, and what comes through it does not stop at the mountains. The crown is hiring anyone willing to go down.

A Wizardry-style dungeon crawler, made the old way.

First-person and grid-based. You move one square at a time and turn ninety degrees. Combat is turn-based. You give orders to all six, then the round plays out. No action elements and no quest markers. If someone dies you carry them back to the Temple and pay.

Build your own party of six.

• Five races (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Pipple) and four classes (Fighter, Mage, Priest, Thief). Roll them at the Training Grounds and pick a face from sixty portraits. Then decide who stands in the Front Row and who hides in the Back.
  
• Tactics. Give each character up to twenty rules like heal anyone under half HP, and the party fights on auto. Or take every turn by hand. You can switch any time.
  
• Dying is expensive. The Temple brings them back at 1 HP, and the price goes up with their level.

What you'll run into down there.

• Levers that open a door somewhere else on the floor. Pull it, then go find out where.
  
• Secret doors you only find by searching, or by noticing the hint right in front of you.
  
• Dark zones that eat your torchlight.
  
• Floor traps and teleporters that drop you somewhere you didn't plan on.
  
• Chests are worth opening, and most are trapped. If your Thief misreads the lock, it's a Poison Needle, a Bomb or an Alarm.
  
• Loot comes home unidentified. The Shop will tell you what that sword really is, for a fee.

Seven descents into the Abyss.

It starts in the Proving Grounds under the castle, goes on to the Flooded Mine where the miners went quiet, and then deeper than the maps go. Each audience with the king opens the next way down. The deeper you go, the closer you get to the Gate itself, and to a question nobody in Eunomia wants to ask. What did the expedition actually do?

The controls stay out of your way.

• A hand-drawn parchment automap that fills in as you walk.
  
• Full gamepad support from character creation to the last menu. Keyboard too, fully rebindable.
  
• Autosave plus three manual slots. Save at camp, quit, and come back to the same square.
  
• English and Japanese, switchable in-game.
  
• Original music for each dungeon and for battle.

Abyssgate is made by one person, in the open. Wishlist it to follow along.