Hey Product Hunt 👋 I'm Steve, maker of Sub Rosa. After building 5 SaaS products as a solo developer, I wanted to change direction and finally dig into something I'd always wanted to make. I've been hooked on MUDs since the 90s, those text worlds you'd read a room in twice just to soak it in and lose a whole evening to. This is my way back to that. It also came from a small frustration. I love RPGs, but I'd grown tired of games fighting for my attention. The daily logins, the streaks, the energy timers, the nagging to come back. I wanted the opposite. Something you open, drop into for fifteen minutes or two hours, and then put down with nothing owed. No vault. No FOMO. No card required. So Sub Rosa is a text-based dungeon crawler. Every descent is its own self-contained story. You read rooms, make choices, and fight. You can strike, brace, speak, or study, use skills and cast spells, and each one is a check rolled against a difficulty. Four stats, 28 points to spend, and relics you carry between runs. It's dressed to read like an old manuscript instead of a game screen, because the whole thing is about the words. Now the cool part. Each dungeon is written and narrated by AI. The antagonist, the tone, the factions and the rooms are drafted before you arrive, then narrated room by room as you walk. I know "AI game" is a crowded phrase right now. I didn't build it to ride a trend. I built it because it was the only way I found to get that "no two nights are ever the same" feeling without a fixed script. I'd rather say that plainly than hide it. A few lines I refused to cross, because they're why I drifted away from most modern games. No ads. No tracking. No daily tasks. No streaks. No pay-to-win. Five full runs are free, and you don't need an account to start. A subscription just opens the wider archive. That's the whole business model. What I'd really love feedback on: – Does the writing hold up, or does it start to feel samey after a few rooms? – Is the combat (strike, brace, speak, study) clear enough on a small screen? – For the MUD and interactive fiction folks here, what's missing for this to feel like a real descent? I'll be here all day in the comments. Tear it apart, ask anything. 🌹

Sub Rosa

a text rpg of private descents

a text rpg of private descents