Nightbound

Nightbound

A Chinese folk horror idle turn-based game.

You don’t fight. You assemble the team.

Paper Effigy Village, the Ruined Temple of Fading Lanterns, the Rusted Graveyard, the Blood Well Grottoes… ten regions, each spanning ten levels, descending from the desolate village all the way to the Guixu Abyss. You are the leader of the night march—and the recorder of Nightbound.

The battle is decided before it begins

No real-time control, no interrupt cinematics, no frantic clicking.

What you see is a combat log unfolding one line per second, health bars dropping grid by grid, and the line: “The Gu Witch has fallen.”

Where you won and where you lost—it’s all written in the log.

Five skill slots, 20% each

Each mercenary has 5 active slots and 3 passive slots. On their turn, one of the 5 active slots is chosen uniformly at random; an empty slot means a basic attack.

So the fifth skill isn’t free—it trades 20% of your basic attacks for 20% of a new skill.

Fill every slot or leave one empty: that call is yours. This is the core trade-off of the game, and what sets it apart from other auto-battlers.

Gear decides how strong. Formation decides how you fight.

Gear quality isn’t a color—it’s the number of affixes: 1 affix is Common, 6 is Legendary.

10 tiers of named bases × 8 equipment slots; affixes roll between T1 and the item’s own tier—no two copies of the same base will ever be identical.

But good gear doesn’t guarantee a win. A bad skill setup in full god-tier gear will still get pinned to the ground by a lower-level team.

Gear is your power ceiling; your formation decides whether you can reach it.

A roster, not a gacha

Each refresh offers 6 candidates: rating (S–D), four stats, growth direction, and their own active and passive skills.

Recruits all start at Lv.1—level them up or dismiss them. Each has a name, a rating, and a full skill set of their own; they aren’t duplicates from a gacha pool.

Battles drop skill fragments that can be learned into empty slots. Forgotten skills can be farmed back.

It keeps fighting on its own

After a battle ends, the next one starts automatically in the current region after 5 seconds.

The top bar always shows the measured idle efficiency over the last 10 battles: how much EXP and silver you earn per hour. Watch it when you want; it grows stronger even when you don’t.

Content Overview

• 10 regions · 120 named folk-horror units · 6 enemy factions · Normal / Elite / Boss tiers

• 112 active skills · 20 passive skills · 24 starting skill templates

• 8 equipment slots · 10 tiers, 80 named bases · 24 affixes (including 10 dual-stat composite affixes) · 6 quality tiers

• Character cap Lv.100, skill cap Lv.20, characters and skills share combat EXP

• Single JSON save file, auto-save and auto-load

• Full Simplified Chinese / English interface, skills, and combat logs

You’ll like this if

• You like “build the team, then watch the result” rather than staring at skill bars the whole time;

• You’re willing to read logs and spot what your team lacks from a single line like “Dodged”;

• You enjoy farming affixes, chasing quality, and turning a ragtag team into one that can push into the Guixu Abyss;

• You like Chinese folk horror: paper effigies, red embroidered shoes, incense ash, bone lanterns, yin contracts, ghost markets.

Not for you if

• You want real-time control, positioning, and interrupts;

• You want story, dialogue, or an open world—the narrative here lives only in place names, monster names, and flavor text;

• You can’t accept that combat is watch-only.