Dig down. It gets worse. That's the point.
Dig a dungeon out of living rock, raise its halls and a Host to guard them. Then step into any creature in first person, lead your champion down the stairs and delve into a Deep with no bottom.
Every Warden's first launch opens with this tapestry, whichever of the four peoples you choose. Press play and hear it in the Dungeon Spirit's own voice.
There is no sky here. There never was, for us.
We came down because the stone was the only thing that would have us, and we found the others already here.
The dwarfs, counting. The elves, listening. The goblins, everywhere. And the dead… for any reason but their own.
Nobody shares a tunnel willingly. Every wall is an argument. Every seam of ore is somebody's grievance, held over from a war nobody alive remembers starting.
And underneath all of it, the story. That the world has a heart, and it is down, and whoever reaches it stops being one thing… and starts becoming something else.
Maybe it is true. Every generation digs a little further, a little deeper. Those that do… do not come back to tell us.
So dig. Hold what you take. And do not listen too closely to what the dark says back.
An unseen lord of the deep, bound to a heart of stone and fire. You never walk the tunnels yourself: your workers carve the dungeon out of living rock, claim it tile by tile and haul its stone home.
Each of the four peoples keeps its dungeon its own way, with its own heart, rooms, creatures, champions and talent trees.
Stern and industrious, counting and building. Picks, hammers, ingots and cogs.
Silent and watchful, listening at the walls, half in shadow.
A swarming, chaotic crowd. Clubs, torches, bombs and ladders. Never in ranks.
Orderly and patient, in ranks and processions. They did not come down here. They were already here.
Champions: the Hollow Knight, the Pale Lich, the Gravesinger.
Each of the four peoples will open its dungeon with a tapestry of its own. The Undead's is the first: the Dungeon Spirit telling a new Warden what they have taken on.
Listen, Warden. Below the last root and the last stone there beats a heart of bone and ember. It has chosen you to keep it.
That is the Core. While it burns, your halls live. Let it be battered, and every room you raised falls silent, until you mend it.
Your hands are many, and none of them are your own. Mark the earth, and your workers will dig it out, claim the floor, and raise the walls in your colour. Ground you claim is ground you see.
But a Warden cannot walk the tunnels alone. For that, you have the Champion. Step into its bones. See with its eyes. Strike with its hands.
So go down for power, and come home to hold it. Because whatever you carry up that stair, something will follow you, to take it back.
A dungeon builder in the line of the old Keeper games, with a first-person action RPG underneath it.
Drop into any body you own and fight in first person: directional sword cuts, shield blocks and parries, and spells you hold to charge (and sometimes overcharge).
Command your squad RTS-style from inside any body, then leave it and take the next one.
Your champion is the Warden made flesh: a hero with a talent tree, evolutions and gear of its own. When it falls, you raise another. Every people has three champions of its own.
Behind it marches the Host, the army your people raises. The Undead summon theirs from the corpses of everything they have met: skeletons, ghouls, wraiths, plague heralds, bone colossi and vampire thralls.
Rarities, unidentified finds, runes, sockets, runewords and sets. Smith your own gear at the forge through hands-on crafting games, research lost lore in the library, and read the books you find in the deep, narrated by the Dungeon Spirit who guides you.
Up to four Wardens can descend side by side in online co-op, each bringing their own champion, sharing one band of workers and rolling for the spoils.
Captured in the current build, playing the Undead, the first of the four peoples to open.
Wardens of the Deep is built around a living dungeon and a Deep that never ends, and that kind of game gets better the more players dig in it.
Wishlist Wardens of the Deep on Steam and you will hear the moment the stair opens.
