Chainwatch: Descent is a first-person dungeon crawler set in a world held together by divine chains - and those chains are breaking.

You play as an adventurer descending into the Shifting Warrens, living labyrinths torn open where the Covenant Chains have shattered. The Void Below seeps through the cracks, warping stone into impossible shapes and birthing nightmares from the Nightfall Depths. At the bottom of each Warren lies a Broken Link - a fragment of the god who forged it. Recover enough, and the Chains can be reforged. But the moment you cross the threshold, the Chain brands your soul - you are immortal now, bound to an endless cycle of death and resurrection. The Warren reshapes itself with every death. The only escape is to break the Chain itself.

The Game

  • Old-style fantasy FPS with real-time melee combat
  • Procedurally generated dungeons that shift and never repeat
  • Three races - Humans, Elves, Dwarves - each with their own reasons to descend
  • Four classes - Warrior, Thief, Mage, Cleric - with distinct playstyles
  • Stamina-driven combat with weapon weight, attack cooldowns, and shield parrying
  • Monsters with personality: goblins that flee, skeletons that don’t
  • Persistent characters that grow through action - death resets the dungeon, never your progress
  • Immortality as a curse - the Chain binds your soul, forcing resurrection after every death
  • Fog-of-war exploration and atmospheric music that reacts to danger
  • Vendors and survivors trapped by the same curse, found in rare stable zones within the Warrens

Built With

The game runs on MonoGame with a custom engine called Solo. The rendering uses software raycasting - column-by-column, like the classics - with SIMD acceleration for modern hardware.

This is a solo passion project. One developer, building the engine and the game from scratch in C#. The devlog on this site tracks progress as features land and the Warrens grow deeper.

Source Code

The engine and game are open source on GitHub.