It’s been a while since I’ve posted news about Stygian Abyss, Slashing Dragon’s roguelike take on Ultima Underworld.

In case you’ve forgotten, Stygian Abyss began as Slash’s submission to 7DRL back in 2015. A first-person, action-driven dungeon crawler that plays not unlike Ultima Underworld, it presents players with a challenge that should be familiar to all Ultima fans: brave the depths and perils of the Stygian Abyss, and retrieve the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom from its depths. Graphics for the game were taken directly from the Ultima 4 and Ultima 5 tilesets, with some minor adjustments; several original tiles were also created. The music for the game should be easily recognizable as Ken Arnold’s Dungeon track, and was taken from the soundtrack of the Commodore 64 version of Ultima 4.

Since its creation, Slashing Dragon has made intermittent updates to the game, the most recent of which added an automap feature to the game, and also brought some improvements to the game’s UI.

If you would like to check out Stygian Abyss, it can be played online at Slash’s itch.io profile. You might also be interested to check out StygianGen, a web-based version of the map generation engine within the game.