Roguefort is a turn-based open-world roguelike in the tradition of Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress, with the tactical spell-feel and mechanics of Rift Wizard. The continent of Cantal is at war over cheese the way Dune is at war over spice - it's the economy, the cosmology, and the source of magic. Beneath every region sits a layer of lore. Beneath every NPC sits a web of faction, reputation, and memory.

This isn't a joke or cheese-pun game and Roguefort isn't a colony sim. It's a deep open world you can disappear into for hundreds of hours, in whatever role you want. Most players spend their time wandering, exploring, dungeon-delving, and questing. The homestead and worker systems offer a colony sim experience (Rimworld style) and cosy home building (think Stardew Valley) but are entirely ignorable if you want.

Some of the things you can do

• Wander a handcrafted continent forty thousand tiles across - more than forty times the area of Skyrim. The map is fixed but the dungeons, encounters, weather, and ecology regenerate every run - same continent, different game.

• Walk into a dungeon you weren't invited to and see if you can make it back out alive. Thousands of dungeons across fourteen biomes, with bosses tuned to where you are - hydras in the marsh, lich-kings in the deeper crypts.

• Read your way into the world. Hundreds of in-game books, journals, and inscriptions scattered across the continent, written in the spirit of the Elder Scrolls books - players regularly stop their runs just to read them.

• Forage wild herbs, mushrooms, and flowers, then cook them over a campfire while a storm rolls through. Eat well and your next fight goes better.

• When you level up, the perks on offer are shaped by what you actually did. Forage enough herbs and Nature's Bounty appears, spend enough nights in the mountains and Mountain-Hardened unlocks, kill enough creatures and Battle-Scarred shows up. 175+ perks across five disciplines - no fixed classes, millions of combinations of builds.

• Hunt across glacier, marsh, forest, and volcano for hides, meat, and trophies. Overhunt a region and the population thins for a long time.

• Tame and raise sheep, goats, and cattle for milk, meat, and the cheeses you'll age in your cellar.

• Age war cheese in the right cave, in the right region, with the right cultures - and find out what kind of spell the place wanted to give you.

• Grow from raw beginner to legendary master of cheese-magic. Your rank persists through death, so every life builds on the last.

• Sweep a Raclette Scrape down a corridor of melting cheese, arc a Brimstone Wheel over a wall into the middle of an ambush, or freeze a wolf in place with a Glacier Spike.

• Claim a corner of the continent - a clearing in a forest, a clifftop, an island - and build the homestead, manor, or fortress you want.

• Hire workers who form friendships and rivalries with each other and grieve when one of them dies. Think Rimworld but fantasy and more roguelike in style and feel.

• Sail your own ship across Leviathan-patrolled seas. Chase storms, run trade routes, dive into shipwrecks for salt-eaten loot.

• Wash up on a Castaway archipelago with nothing but driftwood and salt-stained nerve, and try to reach the mainland.

• Hold the mountain fortress of Ironhearth for fifteen nights against a Frostlord and his hordes.

• Push the Compact's banner up the continent through a ten-chapter Frontier campaign, with three named generals to break.

• Take a bounty from a captain, a herb-run from a healer, or a cheese commission from a guildmaster - and see one quest open three more.

• Build reputation across five rival cheese guilds whose embargoes, sabotage, and very long memories shape who will trade with you and who will not.

• Steal a wheel from the wrong cellar, and watch the rumour catch up to you across two settlements before the guards do.

• Recruit up to three companions with their own names, histories, and quirks. They'll fight beside you, and complain about it later.

• Become a vampire. Trade your hunger bar for a blood pool, learn bat form, charm, and lifesteal, and play what is essentially an entirely different game.

• Slip up once in a town as a vampire and watch garlic appear on the doors over the next week as the settlement's awareness rises and hunters begin to track you.

• Watch fifteen weather systems crawl across the continent on real schedules - a heatwave closes a fishing season, an ash fall ruins a paddock, snow shuts a road.

• Stumble into hen stampedes, mushroom blooms, starfalls, wandering merchants, and wolf-pack raids.

Magic

In this game you don't memorise spells from a tome. You age war cheese in the right cave, in the right region, with the right cultures, and the wheel goes in your spell belt. The character you're playing is an affineur - a master cheese-ager - and your skill at the craft persists across runs, from raw beginner to legend of the continent. Six spell families across multiple tiers: Heat, Cold, Rot, Force, Control, Arcane. Each cast crumbles the wheel a little. When it's gone, you craft another. If you've played Rift Wizard, the tactical feel and visual style and feel sits in that direction.

A living world

Five rival cheese guilds - Thymerock, Roquelle, Grasse-Verdenne, Brinehold, Fennmarche - hold a continent of fourteen biomes from glacier to volcano. NPCs sit in a web of faction, reputation, and memory: settlements track what you've done and reflect it back at you in shifting prices, dialogue, and patrols. An ecology engine tracks what you've cut down and what's still growing back. Overharvest a forest and it stays thin for a long time. The guilds are at war the way craftspeople are at war: with embargoes, sabotage, occasional mercenaries, very long memories. The world doesn't pause when you're indoors.

How it plays

Turn-based, played on a grid. Hand drawn tile sprites by default, full ASCII mode for the purists. Full gamepad support with an on-screen keyboard for character creation, in case you'd rather play it on a sofa. Permadeath if you want it; Wayfarer mode if you don't, where death drops you somewhere nearby - at your homestead, a friendly town, or a prison cell - instead of ending the run.

Solo dev

There's a demo on this page you can download right now. It's a fenced corner of Grasse-Verdenne, a village called Hearthmere, a starter house with a sword in the chest, a Warden with work for you, and a handful of dungeons within walking distance. The demo isn't a "lite" version. It's already surprisingly deep and some players have got more than 20 hours into the demo already. 

Please consider wishlisting and following if you want to know when the full game arrives. I'm one person making this, and I'm in the Discord most nights talking about the game, reading bug reports, and theorising lore.