Into the Depths

🙋 Solo
🃏Deck of cards required
📝 Pen and paper (or digital notes) to track your score
🖨️🚫 No printer required

Into the Depths is a solo, push-your-luck, campaign card game. It’s analog, meaning you’ll need a surface and a standard deck of cards to play. Something to write with and on is needed, too, but you can use a digital notepad or Google Doc or whatever.

Do You Dare Enter the Depths?

As shopkeeper and owner of The Summit Shop, at the foot of the Mountainy mountains, you struggle to earn enough to survive. One day, you discover an old mine that’s full of trinkets and goodies.

After earning enough to comfortably make it through the week, you discover a crack that leads deeper.

Over the weeks, you find new, mysterious ways to go deeper into the mines. With each new depth comes more valuable trinkets, but also a shadowy figure determined to make you leave. And a drill-powered crystal of darkness. Then a hammer made of pure shadow, visible only by the space where no light exists… CAN exist. Is it… talking to you?

Mysteries surround you, but all you care about is that you get MORE…

Ludum Dare 57

This game was made in 72 hours for the "jam" portion of Ludum Dare 57. It was as much of a race as ever lol: the official Ludum Dare file is FORTY pages long. It's about 2/3 narrative (story, events occurring, etc.) and 1/3 rules for play. 

At 40 pages, this is the longest game we've ever made. It's also the most artistic and narrative-heavy game we've ever made: it took a lot more fiddling with, editing, and combining Canva assets than ever before, across far more pages. And, while I'm not happy with how the story of the game ends (I discovered a better narrative for it the second edit, but didn't have time to rewrite the ending part because we got the game uploaded FOUR MINUTES before the deadline 😅), I am proud as HECK of what we made here.

If you're a fellow Ludum Dare creator and looking to rate this game, please know this is a 2-3 hour (or more) game, and it's analog so you need a playing surface and a deck of cards. To make the game shorter, you may treat each chapter as if you lost it as many times as necessary to fully upgrade your boon. For example, in chapter one, failing once allows you to set aside the A, 2, and 3 of spades when drawn. This helps the game a lot, but narratively forcing you to wait until you fail for this bonus makes sense: you've gained experience with the mine and are able to handle your pickaxe better.

This is also set up on purpose in the game: it mimics the repetitive nature of the mines, and shows you how casual life is when you're in chapter one, but how much more stressful it is deeper. While you'll miss these aspects of the game this way, it'll cut the amount of time playing the game down by like 30-60 minutes. And since most Ludum Dare games can be rated in a matter of minutes, I think it's only fair to offer that :D

Oh, and in case the Itch link to the Ludum Dare page isn't working, you can rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/into-the-depths-6

Previous Ludum Dare Creations

You can check out all of our games here, and our previous Ludum Dare titles below:

Find Out More

Learn more about Into the Depths on our Patreon (when the post is written). Or come chat about it on our Discord server!

All of our posts are free aside from some exclusive polls. We share news, updates, behind-the-scenes design stuff, and more. Plus, each of our releases is either free for a limited time or has community copies; if you become a free member of our Patreon, you’ll get an email when we release something, and if you’re quick enough you can get everything free! 

Paid members help fund our creations and can get all of them as they come out, answer polls to help shape our future creations, and even get games and zines printed and mailed to you monthly.