An unusual turn-based deckbuilder where elemental reactions, alchemy, and over 180 spell cards open up countless tactical possibilities.
Blood, fire and water all have different uses in Tactical 2d Roguelite Inearth, depending on what you do to them and who’s around to witness it. It’s a solo creation from reynvert. You go down into the ground with a deck of spells and loads of ways to modify your environment.
The developer cites the systemic combat of BTG3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2, as well as the deckbuilding of Slay the Spire, as inspirations. That gives us a good anchor point for understanding the project really: the cards are your tools, and your positioning and the environment will dictate what those tools can do.
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A Battlefield That Changes With Your Spells
Water is a fairly simple example. Power can travel through the connected pools so an attack can be directed at several enemies. That same connection can carry the attack back to you so freezing the water becomes a way of cutting the attack off.
Oil is another option: you can set it alight, and that will trigger a reaction which will damage and push the enemies in the vicinity. The sequence is important here, as changing the ground prior to the attack can alter who is caught in the result.
Inearth has 9 damage types and 9 health types with very different responses to the same effect. Heat is damaging to Organics but healing to Golemic health, and is healing to the Damned. A spell’s effectiveness is therefore entirely dependent on its target and having a variety of answers is very useful. The dev’s damage/health chart neatly lays out those relationships.
Alchemy also opens up the possibility of recovery. Blood + Alkahest makes Azoth which gives you regeneration.
That means you can turn material that’s left on the battlefield into something that can be used to sustain you. A very attractive design in my view as the aftermath of one action can provide the ingredients for the next, which leads you to think about what you leave behind when you attack.
Positioning has a cost. Under the official Energy rules, movement and playing cards draw from the same resource, which refreshes at the start of your turn. Spending energy to get to a better position therefore has a direct bearing on what you have left to play spells with.
That gives movement a direct relationship to your hand in that a useful card still needs to be in the right position and have sufficient energy to play it.
Building and Modifying Your Deck
The feature list currently includes over 180 spell cards across the 8 elemental domains, plus item cards and gifts which change the rules. There are 3 playable characters.
Acquiring spells and changing them both involve different stops during the descent. Academies sell you spell cards for Credits. Labs, on the other hand, use Insight to alter spells. Insight has another use in that it can be used to pay for combat retries. In the fiction, Subject Yellow is in the process of mentally planning the encounter as per the Insight rules.
Reynvert’s dev updates cover unlocks and difficulty progression through runs as well as saving in combat. They’ve also clarified that treasure encounters are meant to be environmental puzzles.
One example is that to get to a treasure beyond a set of burning stairs you may need to be protected and move very carefully (a rain spell or long teleport could make the journey much easier). That in turn extends the utility of your deck into how you go about navigating the environment and getting to the rewards.
A Mission Into the Hollow Earth
The setting is very much one of a descent with a very grim purpose. Humanity’s expansion into the underground has awakened the Worldroot (the organism which connects the various worlds).
Its Gates allow alien threats to come through, and that’s where VEIL comes in. They’re the group that abducts people who are capable of manipulating matter. Subject Yellow is to cross a Gate and cut off a branch on the other side, thereby sealing the Gate and leaving him stranded on the other side.
The Steam page also states that the visuals and audio have been a mix of AI and manual work. Inearth is set for release on October 27th 2026 for Windows PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.
