Palimpsest Idle

A monastery of monsters, written in ink

Palimpsest Idle is an idle action-RPG that takes place on the page. Every enemy, every blade, every scrap of armour is drawn as illuminated manuscript art on bone-white parchment, and all of it wants to kill you.

You start at the first stage of the Wilds with a single weapon and no history. Thirty-five zones later you are standing in the Void Observatory at the end of the Arcane, and the only thing that got you there is the build you assembled on the way. Tap to strike. Loot what falls. Push until something stops you, then find the build that gets you through it.

The loop

Tap to fight. Every tap lands your weapon damage. Crits, super-crits and multistrike echoes turn steady tapping into sudden bursts.

Kill fast to summon the boss. Every monster you clear feeds the Boss Charge. Clear them quickly enough and the stage's boss comes to you.

Put the boss down to push higher. Each one you beat opens the stage above it, and a big enough killing blow carries clean through several at once.

Outfit yourself for more damage. Loot what falls, forge what you keep, recycle the rest, then take the stronger build back down the page.

Unlock the Auto Pen and the game plays itself. True idle: no hand on the button, progress either way.

Become a master of Weaponmancy and draft your own weapons, an Arsenal that fights beside you whether you're tapping or not.

Loot, the Forge and Weaponmancy

13 gear slots and six rarities: Pulp, Parchment, Vellum, Grand Folio, Illumined, and the rarest of all, Palimpsest.

Rolled affixes across attributes, flat bonuses, and percentage multipliers. Weapons roll proc affixes that bleed, poison and drain. The rarest items carry a single powerful affix all their own.

The Forge. The Calligrapher gilds a piece step by step, or rewrites an affix you didn't want. Everything written there is permanent, and gear you carry through Ascension keeps every stroke.

Recycle what you don't keep into Pigment and pour it back into the pieces you do.

An 18-strong weapon catalogue across six archetypes, from daggers to scythes, each with its own growth curve and signature.

Your Arsenal fights on its own. Level it with Pigment and it climbs in damage, rarity and affixes. Roll a growth grade you don't like, and reroll it.

Ascension

Reset the run, increase your power. Ascending banks Ink, the permanent currency, and opens two tracks that never reset. Neither one has a cap.

Scriptures: broad, run-wide multipliers across offense, ailments, defense and your Arsenal. You acquire them at random, building a collection over many Ascensions.

Footnotes: targeted perks you buy and level directly. Sharpen one attribute, your find, your recycle yield.

It plays while you don't

Auto-Advance carries you from stage to stage with no input.

Offline progress. The game keeps earning while it's closed.

Auto Pen, a sanctioned auto-tapper with a finite Ink track, for when your hand needs a rest.

Auto Equip with per-slot scoring modes, so upgrades pick themselves.

The world, and how long it lasts

Seven biomes and 35 zones, from the Moonlit Grove and the Bone Yard down through the Fungal Marsh, the Abyssal Trench and the Glassed Battlefield, to the Void Observatory at the end of the Arcane. 353 enemies, every one drawn by hand into the same inked world, with an original score playing under the whole climb. Reaching the end of it takes most players 20-30+ hours, and Ascension has no ceiling, so the ladder past that point runs as long as you want it to.

For the people who read the numbers

The Ledger, a full combat meter with per-source damage breakdowns and segment tracking. Find out exactly what's carrying your build.

Detachable windows. Drag any tab out of the menu into its own floating, resizable window and arrange the layout the way you want it.

The Codex, an in-game encyclopedia with an entry for every system, so nothing is left for you to guess at.

35 Steam Achievements, from your first kill to the far end of the ladder.

What you won't find in here

No microtransactions. Not one.

No ads.

No energy timers, and no waiting for a bar to refill before you can play.

No account, no login, no server. The game makes zero network requests. It runs entirely offline, forever, and your save is a file on your own machine.

Buy it once. That's the whole transaction.

How this was made

Palimpsest Idle was built by one person. The game's visual art and its music were created during development using AI generation tools, then curated, processed and assembled by hand into the world you see. Nothing is generated while you play. Every asset ships as a fixed file, and the game never touches the internet. Sound effects are royalty-free library recordings. Full details are in the AI disclosure on this page.