Brinebound

Brinebound is a Lovecraft-inspired idle action RPG that plays right in your browser (a Windows download is also available). Your castaway fights on its own; your job is everything around the fighting: builds, forging with 9 crafting Salts, swearing eight constellation Pacts that each carry a real cost against a Sanity budget, and writing rule-based loot filters. Five chapters, 44 locations, 49 bosses, roughly 8–10 hours for a first run — then portals and a deeper tide for the second.

The core promise is that gear is never chosen for you: “Nothing is ever equipped for you and nothing is marked as ‘better’.” Every item card tells you exactly how your numbers change if you swap it in, and the choice stays entirely yours.

The build story is unusually honest. Solo developer 8bitrhys writes: “It is made with AI tools, and I would rather tell you than have you wonder: the art starts as AI-generated paintings that a pipeline built for the game cuts down into pixel art, and the code and most of the writing are done with an AI assistant. What the game is, and every decision in it, are mine.” Music is by Kevin MacLeod. Released 2026-10-08 (v0.1) and actively being rebalanced from player feedback.