Beneath the ruins of Karnhollow, a vein of gold runs through black stone. The miners called it the Blacklode, and they stopped digging long before they hit the end of it, because something down there started digging back. Now the gate stands open, and anyone with a blade and a bad idea can walk through it.

Blacklode is a first-person dungeon extraction game for parties of one to three. Every expedition is the same wager. The deeper you push, the richer the seams get, and the further you are from the only way out. There are no checkpoints and no respawns. What you drag back to the surface is banked forever. What you leave down there belongs to whoever was willing to kill you for it.

Three steps. The third one is the hard one.

Descend. Kit out at the surface camp, pick a gate, and step through. Every raid drops you into hand-built halls with a different set of doors unlocked. The place is familiar. The route through it never is.

Survive. Torch in one hand, steel in the other. The dark holds skeleton wardens and worse, but the thing most likely to kill you is another party who heard your boots two rooms back. Fight them, avoid them, or strike a deal you will both break.

Extract. Gold is worth nothing until it's above ground. Find an extraction point before the gates seal, hold it long enough for the ritual to take, and pull your party through. Everything that comes out with you is yours. Everything else stays.

• Full-loot PvPvE. Every raid puts your whole kit on the line. Kill a knight in gilded plate and you walk out wearing it. Die in the same corridor and somebody else does.

• Combat with weight. Directional melee where spacing, timing and stamina decide the fight, not who clicks faster. Every class handles its weapons differently and has its own perk tree.

• Light is a resource. Torches burn down. Lanterns give your position away. Darkness is real cover and a real hazard, and every party has to decide how much of it it can afford.

• Loot you have to carry. Everything has weight and takes up space. Your bag fills fast, and choosing what to abandon at the extraction point is its own small agony.

• Traders and a living market. Sell your haul to surface merchants, commission the gear you can't find, and watch prices slide as the whole server floods the market with the same drop.

• Solo, duo or three. Queue however you like. Matchmaking reads your gear score, so a runner in rags never loads into a lobby full of full-plate veterans.

Every class can carry a raid. None of them can carry it alone.

• Fighter — frontline. A wall of shield and steel who wins by refusing to give ground. Second Wind · Shield Wall · Riposte

• Rogue — ambusher. Picks the locks, picks the pockets, picks the moment. Hide · Backstab · Pick Lock

• Cleric — support. Keeps the party upright, and consecrates the ground where they fall. Mend · Smite · Sanctuary

• Ranger — skirmisher. Ends fights from across the hall, ideally before they start. Quickshot · Snare · Beastsense

• Barbarian — bruiser. Carries more, hits harder, and thinks about it afterwards. Rage · Cleave · Break Door

• Wizard — control. Fragile, slow to cast, and able to delete an entire corridor. In development; abilities not announced.

Blacklode is in pre-alpha, in development for PC by a very small team. Every image on this page is captured in-engine, and it's all subject to change.

The route from here, in order: closed playtests on Steam, then public stress-test weekends, then an open beta with a persistent stash and the full class roster, then a paid Early Access release. Progress wipes between test sessions and keeps wiping until open beta, and that's the point — the tests are for the loop, not for your stash.

Dates move. When they do, they move in the Discord first.

Wishlist Blacklode to hear when the first test opens.

Patch notes, playtest announcements, squad-finding and the bug reports that shape the next build all happen in the Blacklode Discord, and the people making the game are in the same channels reading them.

The invite and the site are in the links beside this page.