Ink drawing of a boomtown of tents and scaffolds crowded around the lip of a vast black sinkhole

LABYRINTH: THE DESCENT

"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. A permadeath dungeon crawler where the dungeon is keeping score: ten floors, one rogue, turn-based tactics on a grid.

Download the playtest Watch the trailer This Week's Descent

Explore, interact, fight. Eighty-eight seconds, every frame captured from the game.

Ink drawing of a pickaxe and an overturned pan of nuggets abandoned at the mouth of a dark tunnel

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.

You play one rogue on one descent. Levels are generated from your run's seed, and the same seed always builds the same dungeon — that's why the weekly challenge and the leaderboards actually work. Ten floors. Depth 10 has a boss and no stairs back up.

The Mood

There's a single word on the HUD that tracks how the Labyrinth 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.

Eight fights, five tilesets, three bosses. The Tarasque, the Scylla, and the Basilisk, in that order.

Ink drawing of a hand writing in a ledger by the light of a guttering candle

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 — Aldric's strength, someone's ward against poison — and the way down gets a little easier because of everyone who didn't make it.

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, 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.

Seeded, certifiable runs

A run is fully described by its seed plus the commands you entered. Submitted leaderboard runs get replayed server-side and the final state re-derived, so nobody's taking your word for anything.

Ink drawing of a cloaked old man reaching toward a lantern hanging in the dark

The named things below

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 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.

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. Click a shot for the full 1080p frame.

Gameplay on depth 2: the hero in a doorway with three jackals leaping in, the turn-order bar across the top and the Labyrinth's caption above the room — Depth 2. You open the door. Three jackals were waiting for exactly that.

Gameplay on depth 4, the catacombs: hobgoblin archers and swordsmen closing on the hero at a doorway, a treasure chest across the room — Depth 4, the catacombs. Hobgoblins on both sides of a doorway you'd rather hold.

Gameplay on depth 6, the caverns: bright green oozes splitting apart beside a crocodile as the hero fights from a doorway — Depth 6. Every ooze you cut splits in two. Plan accordingly.

Gameplay on depth 8, the drowned halls: a harpy leaping at the hero across mire tiles, a spider and a dire wolf behind it — Depth 8, the drowned halls. The mire slows you. The harpy is not in the mire.

Gameplay on depth 10, the emberworks: the inventory panel open on eight potions while the Chimera and a hydra close on the poisoned hero — Depth 10, poisoned, with the Chimera closing. Eight potions. One of them is the antidote.

The boss-encounter banner: an ink portrait of the Chimera over the caption 'So you reached it after all. The thing in the dark ahead is mine, and it is hungry.' — The Chimera wakes, and the Labyrinth introduces it personally.

A memory fragment page titled 'One More Haul, Then Home' with an ink drawing of a homestead and washing line above the First Seeker's journal entry — A memory fragment, found on depth 5. One page of the First Seeker's ledger per floor.

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.

Talk builds, compare runs, and hear about new builds first on the Discord. The game lives on itch.io and right here.

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