There are monsters waiting for you in Sword of the Stars: The Pit, but they’re only part of the problem. In today’s rogue discovery, you can be poisoned, catch a disease, walk into a trap, get irradiated, starve to death. Presumably, if you somehow avoid all of that, something with considerably more teeth than you will eventually finish the job. Welcome to The Pit.
Developed by Kerberos Productions, Sword of the Stars: The Pit is a turn-based sci-fi roguelike that first released in 2013 and currently holds a Very Positive rating on Steam. It’s old-school dungeon crawling dropped into the Sword of the Stars universe, complete with procedural levels, permadeath, limited resources, crafting, and a dungeon that throws everything at you to stop you from reaching the bottom.
Unfortunately, something down there might be humanity’s only hope.
Humanity Needs a Cure, You Need a Sandwich
A deadly plague is tearing through your world, and somewhere beneath the Feldspar Mountains sits an ancient alien facility built by the Suul’ka. Previous expeditions have gone looking for it and failed to return, which isn’t exactly encouraging, but there’s a chance something inside could help scientists develop a cure. So down you go.
The base game puts 30 increasingly dangerous levels between you and whatever might be waiting at the bottom. Every step takes place in turns, giving you time to decide whether you should fight, run, search a room, use an item, or attempt something else that might keep you alive for another few minutes.
Combat isn’t your only concern either. Hunger constantly needs managing, equipment can require repairs, and status effects including poison, disease, and radiation can turn an otherwise promising run into a disaster. Sometimes finding dinner is every bit as important as finding a bigger gun.
Even the Monsters Are Ingredients
Although you’ll find more than 100 different items while exploring, The Pit doesn’t expect you to use everything exactly as you found it. Crafting lets you combine materials at different stations to create food, weapons, medical supplies, and other useful items. The slightly less appetizing part is that some of those materials can come from the creatures you’ve killed.
Recipes aren’t simply handed over either. Hidden messages scattered throughout The Pit can be deciphered to uncover crafting instructions alongside pieces of Sword of the Stars lore, gradually giving you more knowledge to take into future attempts.
The recipe list gets surprisingly elaborate. Alien fruit, raw meat, strange glands, antibodies, moldy bread, mutagens, and other questionable things can all become useful in the right hands. When starvation is closing in, suddenly that alien carcass starts looking considerably more appetizing.
There’s Always a Bigger Gun to Be Found
Thankfully, The Pit isn’t sending you underground armed with optimism alone. There are more than 50 weapons and pieces of armor to discover, including flamethrowers, rocket launchers, plasma cannons, and powered Brawler armor. Equipment can also receive randomized augmentation effects, while characters have their own stats and skills to improve as they descend.
The original lineup has also grown considerably since launch. Five characters from the MindGames expansion are now included with the base game alongside its starting selection, and there’s even a hidden character tucked away for anyone determined enough to find them.
Different characters bring different strengths into The Pit, but none can make the place particularly welcoming. That’s probably the biggest appeal of Sword of the Stars: The Pit. Getting further doesn’t simply mean becoming better at killing things. You’re learning recipes, managing food, improving skills, conserving equipment, deciphering messages, and slowly figuring out which of the game’s many terrible situations might be survivable.
The cure is somewhere down there, getting back out with it is another problem entirely.