Planned Release Date: Q1 2027

About This Game

The maze is alive. The gold is bait. You're the meal.

They told you the hole was a gold mine. There is gold down there, plenty of it, sitting on the bones of everyone who went for it.

Labyrinth: The Descent is a permadeath dungeon crawler where the dungeon is keeping score. You play one rogue on one descent. Ten floors. Depth 10 has a boss and no stairs back up.

What is Labyrinth?

A mining town dug into something alive. The Labyrinth eats life-force, and it uses treasure the way an angler fish uses its lure. The deeper you go, the more it gets to know you.

There's a single word on the HUD that tracks how it feels about you: Curious, Watchful, Annoyed, Angry, Furious. Killing things feeds it, and it never cools off on its own. Boss kills reset it. Some players sneak the whole way down and win at Curious, which we consider showing off.

The floor fights back

Combat is turn-based on a grid, and the grid does most of the deciding.

• Doors matter. A held doorway is worth more than any armor you'll find, at least until the garrison sends the Breacher it keeps in reserve. Every alerted garrison has one.
  
• Flanking and attack arcs. Where you stand decides what you can hit and what can hit you. Getting surrounded usually settles the question.
  
• Wary enemies. Once alerted, they take cover, form up, and advance together instead of trickling into your sword one at a time.
  
• Braced spears. A set spear arrests a charge. Run at the wrong formation and you impale yourself for free.
  
• Terrain with opinions. Cover, chasms, hazards, mire: every room is an argument about where you should not be standing.

One rogue, not a roster

You pick a starting art at the naming screen. Potions, wands, scrolls, and rings are unidentified until you test them, 20 rings and 19 scrolls with none of them labelled, which usually goes badly at least once per run. A wandering Trainer and Merchant sell upgrades if you've got the gold. There's no class menu; your build is whatever the run gave you.

Depths five through ten each get one guardian from a pool of twenty-one, pulled from myth and old sword-and-sorcery: The Minotaur, The Nidhogg, The Charybdis, The Tarasque. Capital "The" means there's only one of it. The Labyrinth itself talks to you while you play; it's petty, jealous, and mostly just wants to watch you fail. If you beat it (this has happened), it says one quiet thing before the end.

Permadeath, and graves

When you die, that's it for the run. But your body leaves a grave at your death-depth, and the next hero who finds it gets healed to full, plus a note about how you went out. Over time the dungeon fills up with named dead, and the way down gets a little easier because of everyone who didn't make it.

In the tunnels

Top-down and torchlit. All five dungeon tilesets are painted, every creature and boss has its own hand-drawn sprite, and the shadows come from real light sources, so a wall stops the light instead of letting it bleed into the room you haven't seen yet. The props and story screens are in and the UI wears its final skin.

Seeded, certified, on the record

Every level is generated deterministically from your run's seed, so the same seed always builds the same dungeon. There's a weekly challenge everyone plays on one shared seed, and submitted leaderboard runs get replayed server-side with the final state re-derived, so nobody's taking your word for anything.

From the dev

Hi. I'm David. I've been a professional developer for the better part of 25 years. I cut my teeth on games like Rogue and Nethack. And I've been talking about building one of my own for some time. So in June of 2026, I finally started. I knew I wanted better than ascii graphics, a story, and something simpler, yet more tactical, than the games that came before. I've played most of the popular stuff. I'm a big Dwarf Fortress fan. But I don't have 1000 hours to get really good at it. So I designed this game with a low barrier to entry and simple play components. Try it! I think you'll like it.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

This game includes AI-assisted, human-curated and edited artwork (tile art, actor sprites, and other visual assets). All AI-generated art was reviewed, edited, and approved by the developer before being included. An LLM was used to co-author most code changes. An LLM was used to proof and ideate some of the dialog in the game. All dialog was curated and approved by a human.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Labyrinth: The Descent is a dark fantasy dungeon crawler with a grim, atmospheric tone. Combat involves killing monsters; blood and gore are shown as stylized color accents rather than realistic depictions. The game deals with mature themes of death and loss: it uses permadeath, and fallen heroes leave graves for future runs.