A Roguelike in Achaea, a 20th Birthday in Aetolia, and a Summer of New Things to Do

You wade into the whirlpool in ancient Seleucar and the floor drops out from under you. The Mnemosyne Trials are Achaea’s take on a roguelike dungeon, and the first thing they ask is how deep you think you can get before something down there kills you for good.

The two months since our last update have been busy ones for Achaea and Aetolia. Both games spent the early summer building new ways to play and quietly knocking down the friction that used to stand between players and the fun. Both also happened to hit milestone birthdays while doing it. Here’s what you missed.

Achaea built a roguelike, and it’s better than it has any right to be

Start a run with WADE MNEMOSYNE at the Seleucar whirlpool and you drop into a dungeon that scales forever. The floors are called ripples, and each one you clear is harder than the last. You begin with a handful of lives. Die, and the counter ticks down. Hit zero and the run is over, along with everything you built on the way down.

The building is the good part. After every floor you pick a boon from a pool of hundreds, and they range from a flat stat bump to something that reshapes how your character fights for the rest of the run. String the right ones together and a middling early run turns into a monster by ripple fifteen. The enemies you meet are pulled from across Achaea’s history, so a veteran of twenty years will still round a corner and find something they haven’t fought in a decade.

Runs pay out experience, renown, and a new currency called shimmering threads that you spend on cosmetic and practical rewards. There’s a ranking board that records the boons from your best run, and an honour line reserved for whoever has pushed the deepest. It’s mostly a solo experience, though other players can stage authorized invasions if you’re the sort who wants company in your suffering.

The community verdict was quick and loud, and the first request was obvious: let us pause. So Makarios added exactly that on June 25. Type WADE STILL during boon selection and you can walk away for up to 24 hours without rerolling your options or losing your place, with a five-minute warning before the dungeon collapses if you cut it too close. A text MUD from 1997 now has a roguelike mode with a save-and-resume feature. Read about the whole thing right here.

Aetolia is giving every class a reason to go hunting

While Achaea was building its dungeon, Aetolia was rolling out Hunting Trees, a class-specific progression system that gives each class its own path through the game’s monster-hunting side. This started with the Infiltrator in mid-May and kept coming: Monk on May 24, Shapeshifter on June 8, and then the first mirrored class pair, Luminary and Earthcaller, on June 22.

Each release retunes a class’s skills so hunting denizens feels like part of the class rather than a chore you tolerate. The Luminary and Earthcaller pass, for instance, made abilities like Peace and Enflame work on denizens for the first time, so a devotion caster can now soften a room full of enemies before wading in. If you rolled a class for its combat feel and then found the grind between fights tedious, this is the update that fixes it.

And a way to track everything you’ve ever collected

Aetolia also shipped a Collections system in June, and it scratches an itch that has been unaddressed for years. Type COLLECTIONS and you get a running tally of everything the game lets you gather: minipets, mounts, fish, styles, compendium pages, fishing holes, figurines. The tracking is retroactive, so all of your hoarding shows up automatically.

The clever part is that you can browse entries for things you don’t own yet. Want to see what a minipet looks like before you spend the credits, or where a particular fish can be caught? The compendium tells you. For a game with a serious collector streak, this turns a scattered pile of stuff into a checklist worth completing.

The quiet wins

Sometimes the smaller updates are the best, and both games shipped a batch of those.

Achaea finally attacked one of its oldest complaints: Quest Boards. New players (and plenty of old ones) have long struggled to figure out what there is to do in a given town. Now colored signboards sit in villages across the world, each one dropping breadcrumb hints toward the local quests and pointing you at the denizens who hand them out. It won’t solve the hardest questlines for you, but it means you’re no longer wandering a town wondering whether there’s anything to do in it.

Aetolia went after a similar friction point. Shamans and Alchemists used to be tied to their home cities to pick up oaths and disciplines. Now they can buy them for gold out in the world instead, which quietly unshackles two classes from a requirement that never made much sense for players who’d wandered far from home. Achaea also cleaned up travel around Meropis, adding a spread of new wing exits so the region’s growing traffic has somewhere to land.

Two birthdays, and what comes next

The backdrop to all of this was a pair of anniversaries. Achaea wrapped its in-game Year 1000 celebrations with a run of Championship events through late May, from the Worldgames to a riddle contest to the around-the-world race. Aetolia, meanwhile, hit an in-game milestone: twenty years old, with the bigger 25th anniversary on the calendar for October.

There’s plenty still on the way. Aetolia is running a condensed slate of anniversary games from July 11 to 19, nine of them, with heavier credit prizes to make up for the shorter schedule. Achaea’s July brings back the Wheel of Fortune in New Thera along with the return of Tea Time. And there’s a cross-game event involving all of Iron Realms teased for August, which the team is staying quiet about for now.

Both Achaea and Aetolia are free to play in your browser through the Nexus client, no download required. If you’ve been away for a while, the roguelike alone is a good enough reason to see what your old character can still do. Come find out how deep you can get.