Ponor: Folk Horror RPG

The bura is blowing through the alleys of Rovinj, not one shutter is open, and the town is dying in its sleep. What is smothering it came up from below, out of a hole in the rock that was here before the town, before Rome, before any of it. Four people go down after it. A harambaša who spent thirty years holding a line somewhere too narrow to run, a smuggler who knows every hole in the wall, a glagolitic nun with her book, and an old man who knows what you pour across a threshold.

Ponor is a first-person, grid-based dungeon crawler of thirteen floors, running from the paving stones of old Rovinj down to the bottom of the pit beneath it. You move a tile at a time and see through the party's own eyes, and the moment something hostile knows where you are, the world stops and takes turns.

What sets Ponor apart is that no creature here is simply a bigger number. Each one is a rule, and a rule is not solved with a better sword but by working out what you are actually looking at. The mora does not attack the waking — she waits for you to lie down, and while she is near, sleeping costs instead of giving. Iron passes through her like smoke, but she will not cross salt, and the line has to cut the whole width of the passage or she will just walk around it. A vukodlak is not hard to put down, only hard to keep down, and fire will not do it — a hawthorn stake through the body will. A vila laughs at steel and wants cold iron. A vodenjak lives only in the flooded chambers and everything it does is put you in the water. An ala sleeps across the one hall you have to cross, and light is what wakes it, so you go past in the dark or you do not go past at all. A karakondžula climbs on somebody's back and cannot be hit without hitting your own.

So what you are carrying matters more than what you have levelled. A handful of salt poured across a threshold, a hawthorn stake, a piece of cold iron, a torch you sometimes need to light and sometimes need to put out in a hurry — those are the answers, and they run out. Rest is not free, a torch burns on a clock, and your save waits for you at the top of the floor rather than where you fell.

Four characters, forty-one abilities and no class restrictions: anyone may carry anything, it just will not suit everyone. Every creature is painted by hand and every one of them has a voice. The game is in Croatian and English, and the folklore keeps its Croatian names in both.

Everything ships inside the app, so Ponor runs with no network connection at all. There is no registration, no analytics and no in-app purchases. The game is free and funded by ads, and your save and settings stay on your device.

If you have Google Play Games on the device, you also get a leaderboard of the deepest floor reached and four achievements tied to places on the way down. Signing in is handled by Play Games itself and asks for no new account and no password; the only thing that leaves the device is the number of the floor you got to. Without Play Games, or if you turn the sign-in down, it is the same game — just without the leaderboard.

Ponor is a horror game with scenes of violence and is not intended for children.

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