RatTower's Ultima Underworld-inspired dungeon crawler Monomyth was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter last year. Development on the game has progressed steadily since then, but it has taken a bit longer than expected to finalize due to RatTower's decision to refactor the codebase in order to make feature development easier. The benefits of that extra work will hopefully be apparent with yesterday's release of the Monomyth backer beta. The beta consists of an area called the Lysandrian Heartlands, the caverns surrounding the game's main settlement, and it includes features such as dialogue, blacksmithing and swimming. Details about these features (including brief gameplay snippets) are available in last month's Kickstarter update. There's no launch trailer for the beta, so here's a longer progress report video RatTower put together back in May.


Unfortunately, it seems that only 34 backers actually have access to the Monomyth beta build, so I'm not sure we'll get to see much of it. The game's demo is still available, but I would recommend expanding beta access to all backers eventually. The final release of Monomyth is now scheduled for autumn.