You went in to stop it. You failed.

The Ninth Choir holds the roads south. The people living along them have started to change: some come back violent, some lose whole days, and some walk south together and do not answer when their families call after them.

You went into the Choir's sanctuary to end the ritual behind it. You got as far as the Archivist. Three binding pillars came up out of the floor, and the Choir sentenced you to the Cinder Pit for life.

Now you get out, get armed, and find out what carried on out there without you.

Current features (Constantly growing):

Combat

• Five ability slots, ten abilities, two choices for every slot: rifle or laser rifle, arc strike or backstab, ward pulse or time bubble, evade or sprint, hide or blessed ground.
  
• Firearms, blades and ward work in the same fight. Interrupt a cast, break a charge, read a marked strike and get off it.
  
• Enemies telegraph. Ground markers, volleys and sweeps all show before they land, and standing still is punished.
  
• Stealth for when a straight fight is a bad idea. Cover and sight lines count, but crouching in shadow is not invisibility and a guard at close range will still see you.

Character building

• Level 1 to 50.
  
• 270 talents. From level 10, every fifth level puts one question to each of your ten abilities and you answer one of three.
  
• Not one of those answers is a flat damage number. Each changes what the ability does, charges you something for it, or wires it into a different ability.
  
• Eighteen talent points by level 50, so a build is the handful of questions you chose to answer. Changing an answer is free and takes effect immediately.
  
• Permanent masteries from a shrine keeper who has only so many charges to give, deepened afterwards at an anvil. Those cannot be taken back.
  
• Multiple characters, each with its own level, gear and journey.

Loot and crafting

• Nine equipment slots and a field pack.
  
• Five rarities from common to mythical, with rolled affixes and powers stacked on top.
  
• Every piece is assembled from a make, a cloth and a metal, and all three are painted onto your character in eight directions and every animation. Four makes per slot before anything else is rolled.
  
• Named pieces are rare and never turn up twice in the same run.
  
• Six materials to gather in the world, and a workbench that turns them into healing charges, wraps, boots, coats, carbines, rings and greaves.
  
• Mark gear as trash and reclaim the whole lot into materials in one pass.

The world

• Seventeen areas: a sealed sanctuary, a prison and its morgue, a guarded service yard, wild road, three Choir ruins, a refugee harbour, dead farmland, and places the old builders cut that were never meant to be found again.
  
• Over a dozen named bosses, each with its own attack set.
  
• Waystones and fast travel between any two you have touched.
  
• Quests tracked wherever you are, with steps that tick off as you do them, and a journal that keeps every quest and every record you have read.
  
• Dimetric pixel art painted in code on a fixed grid, with a light pass over the whole game that you can switch off.

Pre-release

Cinderbound is in pre-release and still in development for Windows. Everything above is in the build and playable now. More of the world, more of the campaign, and the thing it is all building toward are still to come.