TL;DR: Free, ad-free incremental RPG where every death makes you permanently stronger. Solo dev, follow-up to last week's launch, shipped five more small updates and planning for much more. Come break it and yell at me in the comments. App Store Link
In the world of ELM Quest 2, portals have begun opening throughout the land, with elemental energy leaking out and infusing the local wildlife, transforming them into horrible creatures. The Guild was formed to combat this and you, a nameless Cataloguer, go out and take careful notes as you subdue hordes of enemies out to kill you.
That is my 15 second elevator pitch. You fight strange creatures, you study them, and eventually you die to one. Then you learn its habits, and it dies to you instead.
This is a follow-up to the launch post I put here last week, when only v1 was out. It has grown a lot since, from all of you trying it out and hoping on the discord for feedback. The origin of this was that I am an incremental fan who got bored waiting for a good new one to drop, so I did the reasonable, well-adjusted thing and spent months building my own instead of being patient. No studio or team. Just me with a core vision about my ideal game loop and some Matlab-honed coding skills (no the game is not made on Matlab - wouldn't that be something :D)
The hook here is that loss IS progress. Dying is not a punishment here. Every death hands you permanent bonuses that carry into the next run, almost like a rogue-like, but you'll die so often and so quickly that the loop is just baked into the game.
What makes it unique (according to our discord players):
- An active dev (ha, low bar, right?)
- Extremely deep lore (I wrote 16 parallel narrators, with an intersecting story that's doled out as you grab little journal pieces from each enemy - not a novel, but but maybe a small novela's worth of lore?). I aim for a naturalist documentary/system apocalypse vibe. More the former but it's been received so far.
- Completely free to play and beat, with everything obtainable through expected game play. Completed ad-free cause I HATE ads in games. I'm not looking for money (there's some optional tip IAPs that were added as an afterthought, but if anything in game makes you want to spend money, come complain on the discord -> means something needs to be re-balanced).
- Hundreds of foes and bosses with tactics, plus a collectible codex that rewards actually studying them to crack the hard fights.
- A real active-combat layer over the idle loop: castable active abilities, and unique auras for each character to passively combo damage on foes. Idle it or play it hands-on. Latest updates really fleshed out offline progression.
- Full VoiceOver support. Offline progress. Plays in short bursts or long grinds.
New since last week (I looked up and realized I had shipped from v1.0 to v1.2.x):
- Big mid-game expansion, raising hero tier caps with a full rebalance.
- Offline progress has been greatly expanded (unlocks with 5-10 minutes of play, and within a hour or two, you'll have access to the complete offline system).
- Adaptive floor + Portal picker: portals now scale to your codex progress and you can also pick the monster grades you summon to fight.
- Combat Rating (CR): one number comparing your effective level to the enemy's, for ease of comparisons so that you don't willingly need to bash your head against the wall (unless you want to)
- Skill overhaul, rebalancing the way both auras and actives work, with some visual SFX added.
- iCloud sync + save backup, Game Center leaderboards, an achievements system, and a pile of QoL (clearer combat readouts, mana tuning, codex favorites, more lore).
Nearly all of these came straight out of Discord feedback, which has been more helpful than I had any right to expect. People ask and I go watch youtube tutorials on complicated apple features to implement it.
On money: it is ad-free and genuinely free. No paywall, no wall between you and progress. The only IAPs are optional support-the-dev consumables you never need to buy to win. I do this as a side hobby because I want a game I enjoy playing. I'd rather have a community of friends than your money.
Discord: genuinely helpful community over here, and it shapes where we go next.
Screenshots and gameplay are on the store page. I am a solo dev and I will be in the comments all day, so tell me what is fun, what is broken, and what you want added next.
App Store: Incremental ELM Quest 2
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