VAEL press kit

About the game

VAEL is a low-poly, multiplayer dark fantasy extraction dungeon crawler made in the Godot Engine. Alone or with up to three friends, you leave the Sanctuary, enter a cursed forest and descend through four procedurally generated depths: the Cursed Forest, the Hollow Ruins, the Forgotten Crypt and the Catacombs of Vael. Everything you carry is at risk until you reach a way out. Push deeper for better loot, or turn back while you still can.

Enter the cursed forest. Descend into forgotten places. Take what you can carry. Decide how far you're willing to go. Escape before the darkness takes you.

How it's made

VAEL is made by a solo developer using AI-assisted development: AI tools help write the code and optimise performance, while the design decisions, direction and playtesting are the developer's own.

Features

• Extraction runs: everything you carry is at risk until you reach a waystone, gate or altar
• Four procedurally generated depths, new every run, from one seed
• Online co-op for up to four players, hosted from your own Sanctuary; graves hold a fallen friend's loot
• Daggers, longswords, staves, bows and flintlock muskets, plus rings and necklaces
• Six loot rarities up to one-of-a-kind Mythics
• Skeletons, ghouls, knights, wraiths, spiders, zombies, goblins, wendigos, drakes and mimics
• Drakes that take to the sky and rain fire down, setting the ground alight; bring them down with bow, musket or spell
• Bosses: the Broodmother in her silk-strung lair, the Drake Matriarch on her nest of eggs, three guardians and the Bone Warden
• Weather rolled per run: rain with lightning, settling snow, the Blood Moon and blood rain
• Puzzle rooms and deadly obstacle courses in the deeper tiers, guarding vault chests
• A full fishing game: 30 species, two waters, rods, fishmongers and the Blood Mere
• Nine skills that level by use, up to eight characters and a detailed character editor
• The Sanctuary: four traders with trust levels, contracts, a stash, a casino, a chessboard, a timed climb, a trophy wall and a training yard
• The Ivory Pocket: pool and snooker with real ball physics, against friends or skeleton hustlers, for gold
• Poker in the Gilded Ossuary: no-limit hold'em against your party or skeleton card sharps
• Chess on a stone board in the courtyard, against friends or four rated skeleton opponents
• A pouch for your gold and every material, with gold you can see piling up and drop by the handful
• Glowing mushrooms in the Cursed Forest that heal you, then make the whole world breathe
• Traps, corruption and a deepening danger the longer you stay below
• Built for low-end PCs: a Potato preset and a Compatibility renderer

The four depths

I The Cursed Forest

Rolling hills, a winding river and a dark lake, all grown from one seed. Clearings hide camps, a cemetery, a stone circle and caches. Deep in the trees the Broodmother waits in a lair strung with silk, and in some forests a Drake Matriarch broods over her eggs in a nest of burnt branches.

II The Hollow Ruins

Roofless courts on the edge of sheer cliffs. A river of blood springs from the rock, winds between the ruins under arched stone bridges and pools in the Blood Mere, where a skeletal fishmonger keeps a shack on the shore.

III The Forgotten Crypt

The crypt is booby-trapped: spike plates inside doorways, dart passages and pendulum blades in the corridors. Every trap clicks or whooshes before it strikes, a roll beats all of them, and they hurt the dead as much as you.

IV The Catacombs of Vael

The deepest tier. Seventeen rooms, a chasm with no floor crossed on narrow bridges, a Reliquary behind an abyssal lock, and the Bone Warden waiting in the farthest hall.