The Chambers Beneath: a New Roguelike from Cyningstan

Sunday, 20th July 2025

A new game is available for the IBM PC! The Chambers Beneath is a fantasy dungeon crawler, or roguelike, in which you delve into the chambers beneath a city to retrieve an important artefact for the city's ruler. Along the way you'll fight monsters and gather treasure, and if you survive and bring back the artefact, you'll get a nice big reward from the city's ruler too.

The minimum spec to run the game is an IBM PC with a 4.77 MHz 8088 processor, 512kb of RAM, a 360k floppy disc drive, CGA or Hercules graphics, and MS-DOS, and it runs fine on faster PCs with better graphics. It also runs well in DOSBox, and there's a version for Windows so you can install and play the game easily on a Windows system. The game can be downloaded from the Cyningstan web site or from Itch. It's free, although if you want to encourage further development you can donate using Itch or using Ko-fi.

Whenever you start a new game, you get to choose to play as a Warrior, a Ranger or a Mage. Every new game is set in a different city, with a different ruler, who is looking for a different artefact. The dungeons are generated fresh for each game you play. So The Chambers Beneath can be played again and again, like any roguelike. If a game takes too long for a single session, your progress will be saved when you exit the game.

The game features a range of different weapons, both melee and ranged, a variety of armour, and some player characters are good at laying traps for the monsters. There are chests, full of treasure, including locked chests for which you can find the key or try your luck with a lockpick. There are four branches of magic which open the way to using a variety of spells. And a range of potions can either help or harm, which you can quaff or throw at monsters.

The Chambers Beneath comes with a sixty page manual that's well worth a read. It will give you the background to the game, and contains essential information on the characters, the city and the dungeons. If reading manuals isn't your thing, there's a one-page Quick Start Guide with essential information to get you equipped and ready for the dungeon.

Cyningstan is a one-man developer specialising in games that run on the original IBM PC. Star Cadre: Combat Class is their fifth full game to run on this specification. Also available are Ossuary, The Anarchic Kingdom, Team Droid, Barren Planet, Star Cadre: Combat Class, and Pym's Daily Word Square Puzzle.