Descend into a forgotten gorge to fight against - and alongside - its powerful guardians in this classic dungeon crawler with a modern twist. Build a team of fighters using powerful synergies and complex formations within a simple set of DRPG mechanics.

Made in 7 days for Dungeon Crawler Jam 2023. The theme of the jam was Duality, which I chose to interpret in the form of nature vs. technology, and life versus decay - here represented by the two very different sides of the eponymous gorge.

Features

• Seek out the Guardians of Jade Gorge to protect you as you explore.
• Form a team of four of your favourites, and equip them with powerful weapons using a system that adds new strategy to party formations and equipment management.
• Fight 11 different types of enemies - including powerful bosses - all of whom are recruitable as party members!

Controls

Mouse and keyboard required. All important keyboard controls can be reassigned from the pause menu (accessed by pressing escape). Unfortunately key rebinding seems to be broken on the jam build, so until uploads are unlocked the only working control schemes are WASDQE and numpad (or the dark horse option: controller and mouse).

Key	Action
W	Step Forward
S	Step Backward
A	Step Left
D	Step Right
Q	Turn Left
E	Turn Right
I	Toggle Inventory
1, 2, 3, 4	Attack with the party member in that slot.

FAQ

• Q: How long is this game?
  
• A: A full playthrough is expected to take most players less than half an hour. If you die in the jam build you'll restart from the beginning, though, so that may make things take longer.
• Q: How do I attack?
• A: To attack with a party member you can click on their portrait in-game, or press an attack key to attack with the party member in that slot (counted left-to-right). By default these keys are 1, 2, 3, 4, but they can be rebound.
• Q: What's my goal?
• A: As the opening text says, your (self-appointed) mission is to collect one of every Guardian in Jade Gorge. There are 12 in total; some will be found by defeating specific Guardians, others are more hidden.
• Q: It seems like some routes are one-way; can I miss out on collecting some Guardians?
• A: It should always remain possible to complete your objective regardless of what you do in the game (as long as you don't die, of course). It is possible to miss out on collecting 100% of all items, but the game doesn't track that.
• Q: Does the current build have any known bugs I should be aware of?
• A: A couple, unfortunately. One: As mentioned above, control rebinding doesn't work on the jam build so you have to use one of the three default control schemes. Two: If you drag an item from the world directly onto a grid slot that already has an item, your old item will be lost rather than sent to the inventory. This won't break completion progress, but could still be annoying.

Credits

Game Design, Character Design, Level Layout, Coding and Sound Design by Thomas Morley.

Some environment and audio assets are used under Creative Commons licenses, or occasionally paid licenses.

Music is from the back catalogue of the ever-indispensable Kevin MacLeod; full attribution details may be found in game.

If you would like to play the original jam build, please use the itch app's "switch to another version" option to select "version 7". Unfortunately itch do not allow downloads of specific older versions via the website, so the app is required.