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Watch trailer on Steam ↗Usurper Reborn
Binary Knight Labs · Published by Binary Knight Labs · Official site ↗
Content notice: Sexual Content The game includes consensual romance and intimacy between adults. Sexual encounters are described through text only—there are no images or animations. Scenes depict foreplay, sensuality, and implied sexual acts using suggestive but non-explicit language. A "Skip Intimate Scenes" option in game preferences replaces all detailed content with a brief "fade to black" summary. There is no depiction of sexual assault, non-consensual sex, or sexual content involving minors. All romantic and intimate interactions are between consenting adult characters. The game includes marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth as gameplay mechanics. Children in the game are never involved in any sexual or romantic content. Violence Combat is turn-based and described through text. Descriptions include blood, wounds, and death. Characters—including player companions—can die permanently. The game explores themes of grief, loss, and mourning when companions fall. Players can attack and kill NPCs. Some NPCs may betray or attack the player. Violence is a core gameplay mechanic but is not glorified or gratuitous. Other Mature Themes Alcohol: The Inn serves drinks; characters can become intoxicated Gambling: Casino-style gambling mechanics are present Religion: The game features fictional gods, some of whom are portrayed as corrupted or morally ambiguous Existential themes: The narrative explores identity crisis, cycles of suffering, and philosophical questions about reality Moral ambiguity: Some choices present ethical dilemmas with no clear right answer Permanent loss: Companion death is final and the game explores the emotional impact
Positive — 96% positive (25 reviews) · 79 achievements
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
Wake with no memory. Descend 100 dungeon floors. Build relationships, start a family, lose companions forever. A text-based RPG remake of the 1993 BBS classic—with a living world and multiple endings shaped by your choices.
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Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG, Casual · 2026 · More under £5 games
Navigate through 100 floors of darkness, build alliances, and face irreversible losses in Usurper Reborn, an action-adventure RPG from Binary Knight Labs.
About this game
Rise from nothing. Become everything. Or lose yourself trying.
Usurper Reborn is a text-based dungeon crawler you can play alone or in a shared persistent online world. You wake with no memory in a medieval realm of monsters, magic, and scheming NPCs. From there it's up to you. Descend a hundred floors. Build alliances. Start a family. Uncover what really happened to the old gods, or take their place.
A faithful remake of the cult classic 1993 BBS door game by Jakob Dangarden, expanded with deep narrative systems, a fully simulated town of autonomous NPCs, and a persistent online world. Play in the bundled desktop terminal, your web browser, any MUD client, or dial in from a BBS the way you used to.
Free and open source under the GPL. No microtransactions, no subscriptions, no catch.
What is this game?
A turn-based RPG that runs entirely in text. No graphics, just choices and your imagination. Play it solo as a single-player campaign, or join the shared online server where more than a hundred and fifty NPCs and other players already live. If you grew up on classic roguelikes, MUDs, or BBS doors, you'll recognize the shape of it immediately.
A Hundred Floors Down
Eight visually and thematically distinct dungeon zones, scaling from rats and bandits to the gods that made the world
Combat that actually wants you to think: backstab, power attack, taunt, disarm, hide, coat your blade with poison, rage out, run away
A hundred spells across eight casting traditions, from sun-priest exorcisms to abyssal voidstrikes
Class abilities for every build, including healing auras, blade chains, totem-summoning, and reality-bending prestige techniques
Secret rooms, lore fragments, riddle gates, lever puzzles, and bosses who remember you between encounters
Bring up to four companions or hired NPCs into the dungeon, with a fifth slot for tamed combat beasts
The World Lives Without You
More than a hundred and fifty NPCs go about their own lives whether you're online or not. They trade, fight, marry, have affairs, raise children, age, and eventually die. They remember who you are, hold grudges, fall in love, betray each other, and occasionally try to kill you in the street. Every one of them runs on a goal-driven brain, and many of them now have a painted portrait to put a face to the name.
Three factions to join. The Crown, the Shadows, and the Faith each have their own perks, rivalries, and grimy secrets
Become King. Run the treasury, hire guards, navigate court intrigue, and try not to get knifed in your sleep
Upgrade your home with better beds, herb gardens, a study, and servants who collect a daily stipend
World events that affect everyone: plagues drive NPCs indoors, festivals draw them out, wars rally them to your side or against it
Found a guild, pool resources, and reap a passive XP bonus while you're at it
The Wilderness Reborn
Outside the dungeon, four wilderness regions wait to be explored. Each has its own creatures, its own atmosphere, and its own shrine to one of the surviving Old Gods.
Make a daily pilgrimage to attune yourself to a shrine. Each god grants a different passive: regeneration, melee force, crit and backstab bonuses, holy proc damage, NPC charisma. Pick your patron carefully, since their alignment cost will follow you
Tame wild beasts. Eight unique creatures distributed across the regions, from forest hawks and storm eagles to bog wisps and cave spiders. Each one offers a different passive bonus
Build a roster of up to eight tamed beasts and rotate one into your active slot. Combat-role pets fight beside you in the dungeon as a full fifth party member, and they can't permadie
Companions Who Can Die
Five recruitable allies, each with their own personality, equipment, and personal questline. They speak between rooms, argue about your choices, get sick, fall in love. You equip them, train them, and they level up with you.
And when they fall, that's it. There is no resurrection, no respec, no quietly forgetting they existed. Grief follows you into combat afterward, and the game knows.
Your own death works the same way. Run out of lives and the character is gone for good. But the Hall of the Fallen keeps their name where anyone can read it, and whoever you roll next inherits what they earned. Nothing here is undone. It is just carried forward.
A Story Worth Uncovering
Seven ancient seals hidden in the depths, each one a piece of a memory the world has tried to forget. Seven Old Gods bound to their own tragedies, each one fightable but not necessarily killable. The dialogue choices you make in those fights matter. The artifacts you collect change how the next god receives you. Some of them can be saved.
Five endings shaped by your alignment, your alliances, and what you understood along the way. New Game Plus carries forward your endings as unlocks, and opens five prestige classes that twist your character build into something strange.
There's a question underneath all of it. I won't spoil what.
The Online Server
Connect to the shared server (or run your own) and the game becomes something else.
Form groups with other players and run dungeons cooperatively, with everyone controlling their own character in turn-based combat
World Bosses spawn periodically and need multiple players to defeat. Damage contribution determines your share of the loot
PvP Arena. Knight tournaments. Gauntlet champions. Castle sieges
Real-time chat with private messages, shouts, guild channels, and a Discord bridge so the conversation keeps going when you log off
Spectator mode if you want to watch someone else play
A living economy where both players and NPCs trade, employ each other, and occasionally rob each other blind
Build Your Legend
Ten races and seventeen classes (twelve base, five prestige unlocked through endings)
Stats that mean something. Charisma actually affects prices. Constitution actually resists poison. Wisdom finds secrets nobody else can see
A full economy: shops, banking, gambling, thievery, bounty contracts, weapon reforging, enchantment crafting
Nearly eighty achievements, character titles you can pick from after earning them, and ANSI art portraits during character creation
Play Your Way
Full single-player campaign that runs entirely offline
Four difficulty modes from Easy to Nightmare (permadeath, no resurrection, no second chances)
Playable in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian. Not a partial translation: the interface, the dialogue, the quests, and the combat all speak your language
Adjustable combat speed for fast or slow readers
Screen reader friendly. I'm constantly working to make accessibility better, and I take feedback seriously
Autosave and manual save slots
Connect to the online world whenever you're ready, with the same character you've been playing offline
Also playable from your web browser, over SSH, through any MUD client (Mudlet, TinTin++, MUSHclient), or as a classic BBS door
Free forever, open source under GPL v2. The source, the issue tracker, and the roadmap are all public, and half of what ships began as a player report.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Any x86 or x64 processor
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Integrated Graphics
- Storage: 150 MB available space
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Any x86 or x64 processor
- Graphics: Integrated Graphics
- Storage: 150 MB available space
Supported Languages
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
v1.1.1 - Bugfixes
Usurper Reborn 1.1.1 - A Bug Pass Regalia added systems. This one fixes things. I checked 5 main codebase areas. About seventy problems came back, and each one was checked against the source before it was fixed. Nothing new to learn here. Some things you were used to living with are gone. The ones that matter most Every NPC lost its innate weapon and armor power when a single-player save loaded. The fields were only ever written by the online server. NPCs hit as hard as they were meant to now. The world simulator could edit the wrong player's marriages and lovers, and the guard that stops your spouse from attacking you while you slept read the wrong save. Fixed. On the online server, a character brought back with /restore could not save until the next restart, one player's autosave could starve everyone else's, and nine daily counters were played on one copy of your character and saved from another. The Black Market re-rolled its stock every time you logged in, which made Nightmare's daily Legendary a farm. Stock now persists. A client that dropped its connection could leave the server spinning at full CPU on that session. A dropped connection now ends the session cleanly, and it is logged as a connection loss instead of a crash. Exploits closed The bank's robbery gold refilled on every restart. High-Low paid out at a 37 percent edge for the player. Now 1.2 to 1. Monte and Skull odds were uncapped; Wisdom could push them past certainty. Cancelling a shop's auto-buy still charged the tax. Robbing a sleeping NPC paid their gold twice. A disarm in a duel was permanent. Rewards that were wrong Buffs from food, rest, herbs, the workshop, and the temple were consumed at the start of a fight, so a fight you fled or lost still burned them. They now count the fight that actually happened. Retreating after killing some of a group counted none of the kills. Players who sold on the marketplace were never paid. Team wars never actually ran. Arm wrestling at the inn did not take ...Read full article on Community Announcements (ragebane)Patch NotesOfficial
Release 1.1.0 - Regalia
Usurper Reborn 1.1 "Regalia" - Gear Sets and a Black Market Worth Visiting Coronation put you on the throne. Regalia is about what you wear once you are there. This is the first release since 1.0 that adds systems instead of fixing them, and it is aimed squarely at the stretch from level 20 to 40, where the gear ladder ran thin and the gold piled up with nowhere to go. Gear sets Wear pieces from the same family and you get bonuses at two, four, and six pieces. Eight families are sets in this release: Leather, Chain, Silk, Shadow, Steel, Reinforced, Forged, and Mithril. Shops and dungeon drops both produce them, so you can put a set together either way. The equipment screen and /gear show what you are wearing, how many pieces you have, and which bonuses are on. An item's detail view tells you which set it belongs to. The bonuses are modest at two pieces, meaningful at four, and build-defining at six. Reinforced, for example, gives armor at two, HP and Constitution at four, Defence and more armor at six. Sets are not just for you. NPCs, companions, and your dungeon echo get the same bonuses from the same gear, and about half of new NPCs now dress in a matching set where they can afford one. Some of them will hit harder than their level suggests. One thing to know: gear you already own does not know its family. Sets count items found or bought from this update on. Nobody had a set before, so nobody loses one. The Black Market sells to your standing If you have earned your way into the Black Market, it no longer sells you the same Common junk a beginner finds on floor one. Each Dread tier sets a floor on what shows up. Nightmare guarantees one Legendary piece per day. Prices carry a premium by rarity, so a Legendary at level 30 runs around 80,000 gold before your Shadows rank and Dread discounts. That is deliberate. This is where the gold you earn in your twenties and thirties is meant to go. Items keep their rarity Until now an item's tier lived only in its name, in wh...Read full article on Community Announcements (ragebane)Patch NotesOfficial
v1.0.6 - Hotpatch
Usurper Reborn 1.0.6 - Typing Fix One fix, and it is the one I have been chasing since the online server opened. When a chat message, a tell, or a world event landed while you were in the middle of typing, it would wipe out what you had typed. Every time I fixed it for one way of connecting it broke for another. This time I stopped guessing. I built a test rig that connects to the server every way the game supports, types half a line, sends a message from a second account, and records exactly what shows up on the screen. It turned out there were four different problems, one per kind of connection. What you will notice Browser players: you can now see what you type in game. You could not before. That was not a display glitch on your end, the server simply never sent your keystrokes back. SSH players: a message arriving mid-line no longer erases your text and then submits it invisibly. Mudlet, TinTin++, telnet: after a message the real prompt comes back, not a blank line or "Your choice:". Steam and desktop client: a message goes on its own line and your half-typed text is shown again underneath the prompt. Screen readers: no more erase codes in the stream. SyncTerm, NetRunner and other BBS terminals: the server was throwing away your terminal type, so you were getting the wrong box-drawing characters. Fixed while testing this release. If your box art was garbage before, try again.Read full article on Community Announcements (ragebane)Patch NotesOfficial
v1.0.5 - Bug fixes
Usurper Reborn 1.0.5 - Polish I walked through the whole game after 1.0.4 looking for things that get in the way of new players. This release is the result. Nothing new to learn. Update and play. The game was telling you the wrong keys Five hints pointed at keys that do something else. The low health warning sent you to for the Healer, which is actually Home. The Healer is . In combat it told you to drink a potion with , which is Disarm. Potions are . The level-up hint named the wrong key for the Level Master, which is . And every caster was told to cast spells with 'C'. There is no C. Spells are on the quickbar, number keys. All fixed, in all five languages. Dungeon rooms with monsters said CLEARED The tag in the room header for a room that still has monsters in it read , same as an empty one. It has been that way since 0.60. It now says DANGER. Hints that never showed up Three tips were written and translated a long time ago and never had a trigger: the first level-up nudge, the inventory tip, and the save tip. They show now. If you skipped the dungeon tutorial you also got nothing at all about how to move around. You get the short version now, and it waits for a keypress instead of being wiped by the room drawing over it. Main Street will only show one new tip per visit so they never stack up and push the menu off screen. Single-player shows your revives The status bar now shows how many free revives you have left in single-player, the same way the online server shows lives. It is hidden on Nightmare, where there are none. Online fixes Sending a /tell to someone who is offline used to throw the message away. It now lands in their mailbox. The team message option in the Team Corner said "sent" and did nothing. It now mails your whole team. The in-game "" notice when someone mails you while you are online never actually arrived for most people. It does now. Group dungeon messages showed account names instead of character names. Attacking someone in the Arena while ...Read full article on Community Announcements (ragebane)Patch NotesOfficial
v1.0.4 - Bug Fixes
Usurper Reborn 1.0.4 - Bug Fixes Six fixes for bugs you reported, plus one change to how the world names its people. Nothing new to learn. Update and play. Party XP split no longer resets If you set your party to share XP evenly and later found your character quietly taking all of it, this was the game, not you. Any fight without your party present, and any teammate death, was rewriting your setting. It now remembers what you asked for. Even split means even across whoever is alive that fight, no matter how your party changes. One thing to do once: if your split is already stuck on 100% for you, open Party Management in the dungeon, press X for the XP screen, then press E. That resets it to even and it will stay that way. Gambling can no longer put you in debt High-Low dice at the Inn could take you far below zero gold if you doubled down and lost. The stake now leaves your purse when you sit down, and losing costs nothing more. The most a run can cost you is what you bet. If you are already in the negatives from this bug, ask an admin for a gold correction. What you need to do If your party XP split is stuck on 100% for you: Party Management in the dungeon, press X, then E. Once. If High-Low dice left you below zero gold: ask an admin for a gold correction. The fix stops it happening again but does not refund the old loss. Dead spouses no longer come back as strangers When a spouse died for good, a new NPC could later be born or arrive with the same name and inherit your whole relationship with them. Also, logging in during the short window after a spouse was knocked down, before they came back, could widow you by mistake. Both fixed. Only a permanent death ends a marriage now. No more duplicate names The world keeps a record of every name it has ever given out, so you will not meet a second Halvar Copperfield after the first one is gone, and children are far less likely to end up as "the seventh." Names already in your world stay as they are. Smaller fixes The dun...Read full article on Community Announcements (ragebane)
