In Realm's Edge you are a sentient dungeon, creating and controlling hero characters to conquer other dungeons. Design-wise it is heavily influenced by action RPGs and rogue-lites.
This means you create a character, equip gear on it and take it into one of the infinitely scaling dungeons. Along the way your character grows in strength by gaining experience, new gear, new abilities and other types of upgrades. If your character dies, it is gone permanently and all of the items it was carrying are lost to the dungeon.
Various meta-progression systems allow you to create progressively more powerful characters on later runs so you can attempt to venture even deeper into the dungeons.
Dungeons
There are currently four infinite dungeons (and two static ones).
You traverse dungeons floor by floor. Each floor has a different objective, different reward types and a unique layout. For example, the first floor might require you to find three keys, guarded by minibosses, to open doors to the last room where you find a chest of weapons and a portal to travel to the next floor. Every time you enter a new floor, you get options on what mission type and reward type you’ll find. You also have the option to use challenge coins to further increase difficulty and rewards.
Every third floor will have a boss fight that offers unique rewards and the choice to leave the dungeon safely with all your loot or continue to the next floor.
The mid-game dungeons are themed around certain damage types and mechanics which means you can build characters specifically to go very deep in one of these dungeons and reap maximum rewards.
Classes
There are currently 14 classes, some of which are side-grades or strict upgrades over others: Imp, Warrior, Mage, Archer, Deadeye, Assassin, Barbarian, Druid, Geomancer, Necromancer, Runeblade, Archmage, Warlord and Huntmaster.
A character’s class defines the ability pool, base stats, look and possible traits it can be summoned with.
You start out with only the Imp class but unlock the three base classes (Warrior, Mage, Archer) very quickly. Over time you’ll get access to the more powerful classes which will require more resources to summon. One of those resources is a soul from a character of that class which you can obtain by defeating an adventurer of that class either in your dungeon or as a random encounter in other dungeons.
The abilities a character is summoned with are semi-random but all abilities available to that class can be unlocked over time.
Player Dungeon
The best way to get adventurer class souls is to lure adventurers into your dungeon and defeat them. To do this you set up dungeon monsters, traps and a boss for your dungeon. You then pick a reward level (requiring increasing amounts of rarer resources). The higher your reward level, the more powerful the adventurers you attract. Just make sure you are able to defeat them or you lose the resources!
You can learn to summon new dungeon monsters by absorbing defeated monsters out in the world or in other dungeons.
You can also run your own dungeon to test out new builds without the risk of losing your character.
Health, Defences and Challenge
Because the penalty for death is so harsh, it is important for deaths not to feel unfair. This means that a well geared character should never get one-shot by any mechanic in the game. To keep it challenging I opted not to have any reliable way of restoring health for the character. This means no health regeneration stat, no reusable health potions, no life leech etc.
Instead a character's survivability relies on having multiple layers of defences like armour, resistances or dodge chance. In addition proactive damage mitigation from abilities becomes crucial when you reach the deeper floors of a dungeon.
This way, once you reach a floor that is too difficult for your character, you’ll notice that you're losing sizable chunks of health and you’ll have the option to abandon the run (leaving your loot) or risk pushing on and potentially losing your character.
Items
There are four primary types of items: Equipment, Runebrands, Runeseals and Gems.
Equipment
Weapons, Helmets, Gloves etc. are physical items that can be equipped on only one character and can be lost in a dungeon when the character dies.
A piece of equipment has primary stats (like armour) that scales with the level of the item and random affixes from a pool based on the item type. The number of affixes and maximum tier of those affixes is limited by the rarity of the item.
Recovering Items
When an item drops in a dungeon, there is a small chance it will be an item you lost there previously. However, the dungeon might have tinkered with it by applying crafts or even adding an affix tag that does not naturally occur on that item type.
Uniques
For unique equipment the affixes on the item are always the same and include at least one affix not found on any other item. However, the tiers of those affixes are still randomly upgraded as the level of the item is upgraded. This means that future drops of the same unique always have the potential to turn into that perfectly rolled item everyone is looking for.
Runebrands
A runebrand modifies a character in a major way (e.g. giving it an aura or a large damage boost to a specific damage type). In addition it also has random affixes that grant additional smaller bonuses.
Unlike equipment, a runebrand isn’t equipped on the character. The character is branded with it. This “copies” the brand onto the character and leaves the runebrand to be reused on other characters. This also means it won’t be lost in a dungeon if the character dies.
Runeseals
A runeseal works similarly to a runebrand but is applied to a single ability on a character. It provides specific bonuses like making Fireball shoot multiple fireballs or increasing the area of Thunderstorm at the cost of decreasing the damage.
The number of runeseals that can be applied is limited by the level of the ability. When you level up your character you get ability points which you can spend on an ability to increase the level and unlock more runeseal slots.
Each runeseal increases the mana cost of the ability it is applied to. It has an affinity (symbol in the top left) and the runeseal slot can also have an affinity. The mana cost increase is cut in half if those affinities match but if they don't it is doubled.
There are currently 48 different runeseals and 95 unique abilities which allows for a wide variety of builds and playstyles.
Gems
Gems are used to customize your player dungeon beyond just monsters and traps. Some augment offensive or defensive stats of monsters or bosses. Others provide more niche bonuses for specialized dungeon builds.
Crafting
There are a lot of ways to modify items. The primary one being upgrading the level of an item (which also upgrades the tier of a random affix). This means low level items with the correct affixes have a lot of potential to become amazing items when upgraded.
Beyond that there are powerful crafts that reroll affixes, replace random ones or directly upgrade an affix tier. They can be found at high level floors of dungeons.
There are specialized versions of these crafts that increase the likelyhood of an affix with a certain tag being added. They can be found in the corresponding dungeons and require catalysts to craft. For example, in the Volcanic Fortress dungeon, you can find a craft that adds an affix with increased chance of adding a Fire affix.
Corruption
Crafting an item adds corruption to that item. When corruption reaches 100% the item becomes permanently corrupted and is no longer modifiable. This corruption can be cleansed using a Cleansing Shrine that is only found in dungeons which means you need to bring the item with you (and risk losing it) to unlock its full potential.
What is missing?
Story: Currently the game shows only a rough outline of the story. There is a quest system with a few quests that primarily exist to guide the player through the game systems.
Custom visuals: The game uses almost exclusively store-bought models and textures. It would be nice to have more custom visuals eventually but since that is not where my talents lie, it hasn’t been a focus so far.
Balancing: So far the time spent on balancing abilities, damage scaling and damage mitigation has been very limited. I’m sure there are some very overpowered builds to be found. There are a lot of knobs to turn built into the game. They just need to be adjusted.
Localization: Currently the game is English only. In the settings the option for German exists to test places where text comes from a localized source (about 70% of in-game text).