Neverhollow - bullet hell ARPG

Neverhollow is a dark-fantasy action roguelite/like.
Everything that falls into the Hollow comes back: grain as harvest, the dead as the walking dead, lost blades with someone else's strength. You are an exile who was thrown in and survived. From the roots of a strange Tree you climb down for power and loot, and only the careful ones climb back up.

Cut through endless hordes in five-minute stages, dash out of red zones, take one of three cards on every level-up, inscribe runes into the seals of your gear, and decide when to extract with your loot… or go deeper.

BUG REPORT and YOUR IDEAS : https://discord.gg/fdn55AKrR

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⚔️ Features

• 50 stages and an endless Hollow. Five areas of ten stages: the Cursed Wood, the Ashlands, the Frost Ruins, the Bitter Field and the Roots, each with its own monsters and its own lord. Past stage 50 lies the Hollow itself: it sinks a layer deeper every minute. How long can you last?
• Checkpoints at stages 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50: once reached, you can always start there. Extract alive and you pick up exactly where you left off.
• 7 classes built on Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence: the axe-swinging Marauder, the Ranger with her bow, the Witch with her wand and four more, each with a story of why they were exiled. Choose a subclass after your first lord.
• 82 skills and 66 supports. Supports socket right into the skill: more projectiles, chains, echoes, damage conversion. Skills gain sockets at levels 10 and 20. Up to five skills, each on its own key and its own cooldown, or on auto-cast.
• Hands-on combat: a dash with invulnerability, heavy wind-ups you can cancel, and enemy attacks marked by red zones before they land. Cold freezes, fire burns, poison stacks.
• A horde with roles: swarming chasers, cleaving brutes, archers, casters that drop pools under your feet, magic packs and named rare leaders with modifiers, minibosses and two-phase lords: wardens of an old order, each with words of their own.
• Seals and runes. Every item has 1–6 colored seals: bronze, silver, gold, blood. A rune of the seal's color inscribes a property into an empty seal or reforges it: pick one of three. A Void Tear corrupts a blood seal: void, nothing or a tier lower. No all-or-nothing rerolls.
• 51 uniques in ten tiers. Tier I drops often; tier X is twenty times rarer and breaks a rule of the game: steal the modifiers of slain rares, keep shrine blessings for the whole run, make every projectile return, mirror your other ring.
• Tree of Covenants: your class's own tree in the centre, ringed by 12 covenants: Ether, Frost, Storms, Hunt, Shade, Blight, Legion, Iron, Blood, Blade, Flame and Sorcery. 484 nodes per hero, 70 notables and 28 keystones that bend the rules. Allocate every notable of a covenant to claim its Crown.
• Real numbers, not guesswork: every item, card and subclass shows how your effective life and damage per second change. No level or attribute requirements: wear what you find.
• Know your build: a live damage meter, a breakdown of what each skill, support and item contributed after every run, and a cause-of-death screen with tips.
• Loot that respects your time: beams that grow with an item's seals, a detailed loot filter (seal color and count, unique tier, bases as icons: bows only in one click), a pickup feed, three backpack tabs, item locks and buyback for anything salvaged by mistake.

🌑 An expedition

1. At the Descent Root, pick a stage and area modifiers: each one adds danger and a reward.
2. Survive five-minute stages. Every level-up offers three cards: new skills, skill levels, supports and buffs. Reroll or skip what you don't need.
3. Hunt magic packs, rare leaders and minibosses, open chests, touch shrines, start rituals and defend the Pear Tree for a fountain of loot.
4. Enter the lord's lair when you are ready. Wait too long, and the Swarm comes for you.
5. Slay the lord and an exit portal opens where it fell: extract with everything you found, go deeper for better loot, or stay and fight the Swarm.

Death is costly: your hero loses their gear, skills, card buffs, subclass and the run's currency, and falls back to the last checkpoint. Their level, passive trees and everything stored in the Refuge stay.

The Hollow always offers three. Take one and don't look back.

🏰 The Exiles' Refuge

A ledge on the wall of the Hollow, with a quiet waltz by the fire. Grow the Tree of Covenants, inscribe runes at the Forge, keep loot in the shared stash, test builds on the training yard (the lord dummy strikes with red zones: practise your dash) and hang the helms of fallen wardens on the trophy wall. The Mentor teaches by doing, not by reading, and speaks in strange hollow syllables.

The Hearth by the fire is a tree shared by all your exiles: more rerolls and skips, a wider starting choice, golden cards, loot leaning toward your attributes, forge upgrades, more area modifiers and new classes. You start with three classes; the Hearth opens the rest. Several exiles can share one Refuge.

🎮 Controls

• WASD or arrows: move
• LMB / RMB / Q / E / R (or 1–5): skills
• Space: dash
• F: interact, inspect loot, talk, read gravestones
• I: inventory · C: character · P: passive tree · Tab: map · G: damage meter
• Esc: pause · F11: fullscreen / window
• Shift + click a skill slot: auto-cast for that skill · Shift + Ctrl + click: auto-aim · drag slots to swap skills
• Loot on the ground: F to inspect, then E equip · F to backpack · X salvage
• Inventory: drag items to equip, RMB or double-click to equip / unequip, X salvage for runes, L lock an item, Shift + X salvage everything unlocked on the open tab
• Passive tree: click a covenant in the overview to glide to it, click a far node to take the whole path, RMB refunds a node (at the Exile Tree), wheel to zoom, Home back to your hero
• Forge: 1–3 pick an action or one of three properties

Assists are on by default for an easy start: auto-attack, auto-aim, free skills (no mana costs) and infinite card rerolls and skips. Turn them off in Settings for a harder game. Settings also include auto-loot, the loot filter, damage numbers, an FPS counter and frame limit, interface size, minimap transparency, screen shake, flashes, separate music and effects volume, and English or Russian. Every key can be rebound.

💾 Install

Windows, 64-bit. Download the zip, unpack it and run Neverhollow.exe. It's a single file with no installer. Windows SmartScreen may warn about an unknown publisher: click More info → Run anyway.

Saves are kept in %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\Neverhollow.

🛠️ About

An early build in active development. Balance changes often, and the in-game What's new window lists every update.

Made with Godot 4. The pixel art, sound effects and music were made with AI assistance (Claude), drawn and synthesized entirely from code: no image generators, no stock assets.

Bugs, feedback and build ideas are very welcome in the comments below!