Gotching

A creature with a brain of its own

Your creature is not a sprite following a script. It has seventeen instincts that decide how it weighs a golden chest against the risk of an ambush, senses that mutate from one run to the next, and a lifelong memory that turns what it survived into intuition.

Two creatures born with different instincts play differently — and read differently. The log is the game: it never invents personality, it reports it. When an instinct beat cold reasoning, the log tells you which one and why.

It only learns when you play it

• By hand — every decision you make teaches it. Its character, its habits and its senses are shaped by how you play.
  
• On its own — let it go and watch it use everything it already knows. It will not improve down there. To make it grow, you have to play it.

A dungeon with no bottom

Every floor is generated from scratch. Items arrive unidentified — that fungus may heal you or blind you. Chests come in four colours, and the golden one is almost always an ambush: the greedy creature opens it anyway, the cautious one walks past. There is no floor cap. What stops the run is its body, or its own decision to go home.

Offer the loot to its god

When the expedition ends you choose, item by item, what to offer and what to leave it. Offerings become coins, and coins buy runes from a tree of twenty-six that make every future run stronger. Give it the good sword and it gets tougher; offer it and you get further next time.

It never dies

It falls, it comes home hurt, it takes time to recover — and it comes back braver or more careful for it. Nothing is lost forever except what it was carrying.

14 playable races. 381 monsters and items. Five languages. One ending, and it takes a long way down to reach it.