Quartermark

Quartermark is an RPG where four heroes fight automatically. You decide who joins the party, what equipment they wear and which skills they develop, then watch the party battle through 100 maps, 3,400 floors and 440 monsters. Each map ends with a boss that you must defeat to continue.

Maps and monsters

The 100 maps include haunted forests, crystal veins, drowned villages, ice castles, a black pyramid, rivers of lava, a burning library, clockwork halls, islands in the sky and flesh caves. Maps grow from ten floors at the start to fifty at the end, leading to the Last Word. Each has its own boss, along with lighting and weather effects such as snow, rain, embers and ash, and smoke from torches.

The 440 monsters have individual 3D models, skeletons and animations. Their designs include a rotting stag, a pharaoh in gold, a dragon on its eggs and a brain on spider legs. Fire beasts smoke, storm beasts crackle with lightning, and ghosts trail mist. Creatures can also wander between lands of their kind, so the same five faces do not appear on every map.

Heroes and skills

You can recruit 16 heroes, each with four skills that follow the same rules:

• Basic: an ordinary attack that is always ready.
• Core: a signature skill on a cooldown, which a boss can silence.
• Reaction: activates automatically when a condition is met and takes priority over other skills.
• Aura: stays active for the whole party.

Some heroes strengthen one another when placed together, improving their skills. The game also has nine keywords shared by heroes and items: Poison, Bleed, Burn, Freeze, Weaken, Shield, Fury, Thorns and Ward. Pairing a hero with a weapon that shares a keyword makes them more effective together.

Gear and upgrades

Every boss drops a piece of gear. You can gamble to upgrade it: each +1 multiplies every stat on the item, but an attempt can destroy it. The odds are shown before you commit. You can sell gear you cannot use for souls, the currency for upgrades and new heroes. A +10 item is worth more than twice as much as a +0 item.

Prestige and companions

Prestige resets your floors and hero levels but keeps your gear, souls and purchased heroes. Each reset adds to a permanent tree that compounds, letting you progress further. Kills build bonds with monster families, and the family you hunt most sends its young as one of six companions who fight alongside your party.

Further progression includes champions, hero mastery and awakening, runes, the Weekly Gate and ten curses, each with its own leaderboard.

Learning from defeat

After you hit a wall three times, the game shows what caused your defeats: what killed you, what it did, who fell first and which keywords were active on both sides. It provides this information without giving you the answer to the problem.