Solace/Reverie - Quest Into The Dreamscape

Havenbrook has fallen asleep, and it won't wake up.

You're found on the road at the end of a long night and carted into a town where people have been falling asleep one by one and not waking. With a Dreamcatcher in hand, you step into the sleepers' dreams to find out why and bring them back.

Solace/Reverie: Quest into the Dreamscape is a top-down pixel-art action RPG set in the Hollowmarch. It takes you through forests, swamps, mines, crypts, a frozen north and a palace of brimstone. Beneath it all lies the Reverie, a dream world that's different every night. Play alone, online with up to three friends, or with a second player on the couch.

Features

• Four callings:
  • the Lucid Knight (heavy melee);
  • the Shade Ranger (bow and blade);
  • the Dreamweaver (ranged magic);
  • the Lantern Warden (a mace and a lit lantern that guards like a shield, and heals and wards those nearby).
  Each has its own skill tree. Then choose your hero's hair, skin and clothes.
• Combat with weight:
  • three-hit chains, charged heavy swings and weapon combos;
  • parries, blocks and rolls, plus lock-on;
  • bows that loose real arrows, and throwing knives.
  Bosses glow before their big moves, so learn to step out of the light.
• Six schools of magic: fire, water, earth, air, lightning and an ancient magic taught at the College. There are 48 spells, and staves, wands, grimoires and orbs each reach different spells in every element.
• Old-school skilling: 17 skills that level to 99.
  • Gather: mine, chop, fish and forage.
  • Make: smith, craft, tan, weave, brew, cook and enchant.
  Gear comes in twelve tiers, from wood to enchanted. Fishing is a real reel-it-in minigame.
• A living world: day and night, passing showers, dawn fog and wildlife that bolts when you come near. Some monsters only come out after dark. Sleep at the inn or choose to dream: the Reverie goes deeper level by level, and nothing in a dream can kill you.
• Plenty to chase:
  • the Guild's ledger of seventeen named beasts to hunt;
  • the Guild's Charter, which sends you to the edges of the map;
  • nine questlines that hand you from one region to the next;
  • dozens of side quests;
  • boss boons and trophy totems.
• Co-op your way: up to four players online, or two at one PC in split screen. Everyone keeps their own character, and a dedicated server is included for an always-on world.
• Play how you like: keyboard or controller, with every control rebindable. There are two art styles (Cozy and Classic) and interface scaling for small screens.

Early Access

This build has the prologue, Act I and Act II of the story, and the whole Hollowmarch to explore, over a hundred maps. More of the story is on the way. Your saves live in your Windows profile, not the game folder, so updating, moving or deleting the game never touches them.

Found a bug or got stuck somewhere? Leave a comment, it really helps.

Installing

Windows, 64-bit. Unzip anywhere and run DreamQuest.exe (the game's working name). Windows may say "Windows protected your PC" because the game isn't signed. Click More info, then Run anyway; you only have to do this once.

Online co-op runs over Tailscale (free), so nobody has to set up router ports. PLAY.txt in the zip has the full controls and how to host.

For the "How this was made" note, change only its first line: "Solace/Reverie is made by one person, me, working with an AI (Anthropic's Claude)." Its line about no image generator now holds for everything in the game, because the new cover was made the same way as the rest of the art.

For the page's cover image, upload docs/itch/cover.png. It's 630×500, which as far as I know is the size itch.io recommends.

The full self-test is still running, and I'll commit, push and package as soon as it passes.

How this was made

Solace/Reverie: Quest into the Dreamscape is made by one person, me, working with an AI (Anthropic's Claude).

What's mine:

• The story: the prologue and both acts are built from scripts I wrote.
• The design: the four callings, the systems, where things go and how it should all feel.
• Layouts: I drew the layouts for some areas myself.
• Testing: I play it, find what's broken or off, and send it back until it's right.

What the AI did: it wrote the code. It also wrote much of the in-game text beyond the main story (side quests, dialogue, item descriptions). It made the music and sound too, composed note by note in code that the game plays live.

The art wasn't made with an image generator. Every character, monster and prop is a 3D model, built from simple shapes by a script the AI wrote. The model is rendered in Blender and shrunk down to pixel art. The cover and the logo are made the same way: the logo's letters were drawn pixel by pixel in code, not typed in a font. None of it is traced or copied from anyone else's work.

Every change has to pass the game's own self-test, over 84,000 checks, before a build goes out.

If AI-made games aren't for you, that's fair, and I'd rather you know up front.