The Master’s Shadow is a narrative-driven gothic roguelike where the player, an apprentice bound to wizard Master Malacor, must sabotage a ritual to escape. The game features a villain that is not scripted but operates as an autonomous agent governed by the same deterministic engine as the player.
- The antagonist can be driven by any brain, including a built-in ACO pathfinder or a local/frontier LLM plugged in via environment variable.
- The game includes three distinct phases: stealth cottage exploration, survival hex-crawl, and turn-based ritual duels.
- There are six bloodlines with unique mechanics, twenty-two data-defined spells, and fifteen persistent Honours.
- The core engine is fully deterministic, ensuring identical state hashes for the same seed and action journal.
- All assets are self-contained, generated via scripts without external keys or network requirements.
The project emphasizes systemic depth and replayability through its deterministic simulation and pluggable AI components.