Locals call it the Slumbering Mine, an 1800s coal pit that should have stayed sealed. A discreet research team went down anyway, chasing strange heat, odd pulses, and a glowing mineral vein in the rock - something not quite of this world.

They named the dark chromatic flora Erebora, after Erebus. Alive and inert at once. Growing, and somehow still.

The collapse

The work was to understand it, then to control it. That did not last. The mine went under quarantine as The Cascade unfolded - a chain of events leading to the mine’s destructive destiny. Stone and debris came tumbling down. Anyone still inside was left to fend for themselves in the pitch black.

The protagonist

As the mine slowly collapses, something awakens the dormant systems of a decommissioned service robot, long since stowed away and forgotten in an abandoned cabin.

Then, from beyond the damp walls, comes a deep, beastly screech.

What lurks in the depths? Why has it awakened now? And what is the purpose of this awakening?

The adventure begins.

Down in the dark

What remains is ten themed levels stacked into the earth, each a knot of sublevels the player walks, climbs, and doubles back through as keys and tools open new paths to explore.

“Light here is not a mood. Candles and lanterns are how you orient the mine.”

Buried scrap, stalking things, and traps that sit quiet until you step too close. Camps can be scratched out as a place to patch up, breathe, gear up, and then go back to the wild.

The cast

The mine, before The Cascade, was a homestead for specialized AGI units simply called Service Robots. They lived among humans to execute orders of The Erebus Directorate.

Each level holds its own cast: a scientist still searching the research center for a serum, a soldier caught in the militarized zone defending something holy, a dying bot trapped in an excavated hollow - and more.

Erebora

Erebora evolved beyond the vein it slumbered in for eons. It eats stone, metal, and flesh, and the things that hunt you take on more of it the farther the outbreak runs. The only way out is up, through the Prime Erebora, the source of the rot.