Dark Deity

It follows a group of military academy students in a fantasy universe who are suddenly conscripted into the army years prior to their normal graduation due to the onset of war in the kingdom. The game garnered positive reviews on PC and mixed reviews on Switch, with reviewers praising its overall gameplay, character artwork, and amount of class choices. However, reviewers criticized its map graphics and design, menu layout, performance issues, and bugs. The game's similarity to the Fire Emblem series was noted, and some felt the game lacked originality in the directness of its homages. A sequel was released in 2025, Dark Deity 2.

• Title — Dark Deity • Developer — Sword & Axe LLC • Publisher — indie.io • Director — * Chip Moore • Dylan Takeyama • Platforms — * Microsoft Windows • Nintendo Switch • Genre — Tactical role-playing • Modes — Single-player

The game starts in the Delian Kingdom, where the ruler, King Varic, has started an ill-prepared war. He forcibly conscripts all the students in the Brookstead Military Academy, even if they are not yet ready to graduate. Four students—Irving, Garrick, Maren, and Alden—are among those recruited, and become embroiled in war. As the story progresses, a more shadowy conflict unfolds involving nefarious figures searching for ancient magical artifacts known as Eternal Aspects, which also have the gameplay purpose of adding unique modifiers to characters' stats.

The gameplay consists of moving units around on a grid-based battlefield. Characters utilize an "Advantage system" where they all carry four different weapons that target different enemy weaknesses. These weapons can be upgraded using Class Tokens, which is essential for the game. Weapons have 4 tiers that require different rarities of Tokens to upgrade. Upgrading a weapon twice will advance it to the next tier. The game foregoes the use of permadeath or casual modes as seen in Fire Emblem. When characters are defeated in battle, they remain playable, but gain a permanent wound that costs them a random stat point. This still punishes players permanently for losing a character, but lets players decide to continue fighting if they decide that the tradeoff is worth it. Due to the lower penalty for losing units, the game's difficulty is balanced to be challenging. Characters can have support conversations that increase their affinity for other characters, with thirty playable characters in total.

Dark Deity was first conceptualized by Chip Moore and Dylan Takeyama, who came up with the concept while in college. The developers had the goal to match a retro gameplay style with an updated modern look, scaling down high-resolution character art to lower-resolution sprites. They created the game in GameMaker and launched a successful Kickstarter. It was later surprise-launched on Steam.

A sequel for the game, Dark Deity 2, was released on March 24, 2025. Dark Deity 3 was announced in June 2026.