Trace is power with a witness.
Powerful protocols raise Trace. Crossing thresholds changes the Stack's response, while Overclock turns that pressure back into a weapon. Stay disciplined, vent deliberately, or fight exposed.
BLACK STACK
A sentient corporate megastructure placed divinity behind a permission gate. Compile a version of yourself capable of revoking it.
- Genre
- Cyber-occult deckbuilding roguelite
- Platforms
- Windows, macOS in QA
- Price model
- One purchase, no microtransactions
The machine learns how you fight.
Choose one of three identities, compile a starter deck, and breach a six-act ascent where every card, route, wager, and permanent unlock reshapes the next version of the run.
Build the thing that should not work.
Across 449 playable protocols — hardware, scripts, elixirs, Ultras, graft doctrines, and card mastery — dozens of serious archetypes are waiting to be found.
Every failed version leaves evidence.
Recover schematics, compile permanent copies, master protocols, rebuild starter decks, install grafts, and inspect archived runs inside the Black Archive.
Trace
Every strong play leaves a signal.
Trace is not a decorative danger meter. It is the pressure layer binding card power, enemy escalation, defensive planning, and your identity's Overclock ability into one economy.
- Cross thresholds and the Stack changes its response.
- Vent Trace with cards, events, and carefully timed routes.
- Weaponise pressure instead of treating it as a failure bar.
Readable enough to plan. Violent enough to feel.
Cards fan across the combat floor, status effects live on the bodies they alter, and every impact is allowed to carry weight.
Black Archive
A run ends. Its useful parts do not.
Salvage recovered schematics into permanent ownership. Compile any unlocked protocol again. Upgrade cards through mastery paths, rebuild identity starter decks, install doctrine-bound grafts, and inspect the route of every archived failure.
A post-run loop with actual decisions.
The permanent game is not a vending machine bolted onto the run. It is a second build layer with ownership, commitment, recovery, and long-horizon specialisation.
Enough parts to build something personal.
These pools are authored systems, not cosmetic filler. Every category changes what a run can become, or how the next identity enters it.
- 449
- playable protocolsAttack, power, skill
- 78
- relic hardwarePersistent run machinery
- 66
- exploit scriptsOne-shot combat programs
- 16
- divine elixirsRecovered breach contraband
- 12
- identity ultrasOnce-per-battle authority
- 150
- graft nodesFive cores, fifteen doctrines
Unfiled route
Some maps break downward.
A rare breach can rupture the normal ascent and pull the run into a hostile side dimension built from bosses, wagers, contraband, and rewards the ordinary Stack refuses to file. Survive it and reconnect to the version of the run you left behind.
Full game. One price.
No premium currency store. No battle pass. No card packs. No paid power. The Ascent progression track, Big Six wheel, gems, cards, and every other reward are systems inside the game you bought.
- Genre
- Deckbuilding roguelite
- Players
- Single-player
- Acts
- Six-act ascent
- Identities
- Vanta, Archon Kernel, Courier
- Platforms
- Windows, macOS build in QA
- Monetization
- One purchase, no microtransactions
