Some games ask you to save the world. Graphite asks you to remember what it felt like to build one. Developed by RipRed and published by indie.io, the tactical roguelike RPG where pen-and-ink heroes fight for the fate of an imaginary world is available now on Steam, GOG, and the indie.io Store, priced at $8.99 with a 20% launch discount.
The framing is the hook: everything unfolds inside a notebook on a school desk, with playing cards and household objects repurposed by imagination into the artifacts that shape each run. Seven heroes with names, fears, and histories race against a campaign spanning four acts of 15 days each — fighting, gathering artifacts, recruiting allies, and building a strategy before Death arrives. The clock is always visible.
Seven Heroes, Four Acts
The seven heroes are described as parts of a whole, each carrying a distinct backstory, personality, and reason to fight. A Bond System asks you to invest in the relationships between them, deepening those connections across the journey to unlock new story and progression — and their paths converge toward a truth that only becomes clear the longer you play.
That’s the part that elevates this above a straightforward roguelike pitch. RipRed is explicitly building toward a layered narrative where the fantasy world on the desk and the real world around it quietly reflect each other, which gives the repeated runs somewhere to go beyond mechanical mastery.
The Break System
It’s a smart system because it turns reading enemy intent into the core skill rather than raw damage output. Knowing what’s coming and when lets you disrupt it, and every successful Break is a small act of tempo theft.
Artifacts layer on top with no hard ceiling — rare items distributed across your party, up to legendaries that build and detonate across consecutive hits. Crucially, enemies can acquire artifacts too, turning every encounter into a genuine tug-of-war where the risk runs both ways and a plan surviving contact with the enemy becomes its own reward.
Artifacts are pulled from a deck of cards, and adventure events are signalled by a tarot draw, opening into fully illustrated scenarios.
Unlimited artifact stacking across rare and legendary tiers, for builds ranging from methodical to gloriously unhinged.
Deepen relationships with party members across the journey to unlock new story beats and progression.
Procedurally generated enemies and encounters that scale alongside your progress across every run.
Built for People Who Made Their Own Games
Graphite is aimed squarely at anyone who grew up with D&D campaigns, choose-your-own-adventure books, and the kind of deck builders you invented on a rainy afternoon. Every artifact pulled from the deck is a choice that shapes the run ahead. Every adventure event is a tarot card opening into an illustrated scenario where the outcome depends on your party, your inventory, and the path already taken.
Who Made It
At $8.99 — less with the launch discount — it’s an easy proposition for anyone drawn to tactical roguelikes with something on their mind beyond the next run. Graphite is available now on Steam, GOG, and the indie.io Store.
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