Isentroth

Isentroth is a solo text RPG from the studio Schedule 3 Wizards, set on the Isenmarch, a cold Norse frontier. An AI “Machine Game Master” narrates the story, answers your choices and rolls the dice at your side. You create a character, swear vows, and manage momentum, supplies and companions. The game’s own description says it plainly: the world has teeth and does not explain itself.

Under the narration sits a dice ruleset adapted from Ironsworn and modified for solo play. The rules sheet beside the story tracks your stats, your health, spirit and supply, your momentum, the folk you have met and the progress of your current journey. The art is pixel-style scenes with an ambient soundtrack, and the whole thing runs as a desktop game on Windows and Linux. It needs an internet connection, because the narration is generated live during play.

We played the free demo for 24 hours. The presentation, the soundtrack and the world are what you notice first, and they are the reason to try it. Three things hold it back in the build we played, and each has its own section in our first look:

• Almost every action triggers a roll. The loop becomes repetitive, and outcomes feel more random than the choices behind them.
• The dice seem to write the story. Player agency felt thin: the roll, not the decision, shaped what happened next.
• The mechanics and the story sometimes disagree. In our run the game charged wilderness-style resource penalties inside an inn, and a vow did not progress as it should. The developer confirmed both and was already working on them.

The developer, who goes by Mattlock, read our transcript, acknowledged the problems and talked through tuning options. For a game this early, that response is as encouraging as the writing.

Models

The Steam page says the game connects to a third-party AI service, Anthropic, and that the Machine Game Master’s narration is generated live. It does not name a model version, so we do not either. The page also states that the scene art, music and ambient audio were generated during development and then art-directed by the team, that the interface frame art began as image-model samples the team cut and cleaned, and that the ruleset adaptation, world systems, location descriptions, interface design and the Machine Game Master’s voice are human-made.

Pricing

The Steam page does not list a price yet, and the game is not on sale. Steam shows a free demo you can download today and a planned release in November 2026. We will add a pricing table once the game has one.

Content and age rating

The developer rates Isentroth 18+ and does not cite an official rating board. By its own description it contains frequent narrated violence, injury and death, including companions. At the intensity the player chooses, it can also include torture, cruelty to animals, body horror, plague, drowning, starvation, and slavery or captivity, and these can be switched off in the game’s “Terms of the Tale” menu. According to the page, sexual content, harm to children and self-harm are excluded at every setting.

We haven’t rated Isentroth, and won’t while it is a pre-release build. See our first look for the full 24 hours — a rated review follows at launch. (Isentroth is an independent game by Schedule 3 Wizards; Arcanum is unaffiliated with it. Its ruleset is adapted from Ironsworn by Shawn Tomkin, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence; Isentroth’s listing states it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Tomkin Press, and neither is Arcanum.)