Eye of Ishtar is a dungeon-crawler RPG set in the strange fantasy world of Paradigm Worlds.
It is inspired by classic RPGs such as Eye of the Beholder, Ishar and Might and Magic, but it is not intended to simply recreate them.
Instead, Eye of Ishtar takes the things that made old RPGs enjoyable — party building, exploration, dangerous encounters, character development, strange worlds and freedom to experiment — and places them inside a much larger and more unusual setting.
🏰 What to expect
- 🏰 A classic, idealistic fantasy world built for exploration
- 🧬 18 playable races
- ⚔️ 12 character classes
- 👹 A large and growing collection of monsters and factions
- 🧰 Hundreds of weapons, armour pieces and other items
- ✨ Spells, powers, potions, scrolls and magical artifacts
- 🌲 Wilderness exploration and survival
- 🧪 Freedom to create unusual parties and character combinations
- 📖 A story connected to the wider Paradigm Worlds universe
- 🆓 Completely free to play — no advertisements and no monetization
The game is already finished and fully playable, with room for further additions and experimentation.
🏰 A WORLD TO EXPLORE
The dungeons are only one part of the world.
Your journey can take you through ancient ruins, forests, swamps, wilderness regions and territories controlled by completely different creatures and factions.
The world contains, among other things:
- 👹 Orc and Pikt territories
- 🪓 Barbarian settlements
- 🧝 Ancient Elven ruins
- ☠️ Cultist outposts
- 💀 Skeleton factions
- 🐎 Centaur lands
- 🐉 Dragons of different types and sizes
- 👽 Strange creatures and forgotten civilizations
- 💎 Hidden locations and treasures
The world deliberately has a somewhat naive and idealistic fantasy spirit.
It is a place where you can leave the everyday world behind for a while and simply go somewhere else.
Explore a forest.
Enter an old ruin.
Find a strange settlement.
Meet something you’ve never seen before.
Then discover that it is considerably stronger than you are.
The world is not necessarily safe.
💧 Water and 🍖 food can become a problem.
Enemies can be stronger than you.
Getting lost can be dangerous.
And sometimes the best way to learn something is to die trying.
⚔️ BUILD YOUR OWN PARTY
One of the central ideas of Eye of Ishtar is that there is no single intended party.
You control four characters, and there are many ways to build them.
🧬 18 Playable Races
👤 Human
👹 Orc
👺 Goblin
🗿 Ogre
⛏️ Dwarf
🔧 Gnome
🍄 Halfling
🧝 Elf
🏹 Pikt
✨ Djinii
🦎 Lizardian
👽 Alien
🕳️ Morlok
☣️ Mutant
🧛 Vampire
🐺 Werewolf
💀 Skeleton
🗿 Half-Giant
⚔️ 12 Classes
✝️ Cleric
⚔️ Fighter
🔮 Wizard
🛡️ Paladin
☠️ Cultist
🔪 Murderer
🪓 Barbarian
⚔️ Blacknight
🕯️ Warlock
🌿 Shaman
🏴☠️ Pirate
💀 Necromant
Characters can also have different personalities, moralities and relationships.
Your party does not even have to feel like four equal heroes.
You can create a traditional group of adventurers.
Or a leader with followers. Or heroes and henchmen. Or something considerably less respectable.
🧪 EXPERIMENTATION OVER THE “PERFECT BUILD”
Eye of Ishtar already contains hundreds of weapons, armour pieces and other items, alongside spells, powers, potions, scrolls and other equipment.
The intention is not to tell players:
This is the correct way to play.
Instead, experiment.
Try unusual combinations.
Give different races unexpected professions.
Build a party that makes perfect sense.
Or build one that absolutely shouldn’t work.
There is no single perfect party waiting to be discovered.
A strange combination that looks terrible on paper may turn out to be surprisingly effective.
And sometimes the opposite happens.
👹 MONSTERS, FACTIONS AND CREATURES
The world is populated by a large variety of creatures, from familiar fantasy enemies to things that are considerably harder to classify.
There are orcs, goblins, skeletons, elves, centaurs, dragons, mutants, aliens, vampires, werewolves, morloks and many other creatures, often belonging to their own factions and territories.
Some are enemies.
Some may be neutral.
Some may be useful.
And some are simply strange things you probably should not have approached in the first place.
The bestiary is already substantial, and it is one of the areas where the unusual nature of Paradigm Worlds becomes most visible.
Just a few examples over dozens of food and drinks
🌲 SURVIVAL AND EXPLORATION
The Wildlands are not simply a backdrop.
Exploration involves practical problems as well as combat.
You may need to find:
💧 Water
🍖 Food
⚔️ Better equipment
🧪 Potions
📜 Scrolls
💎 Treasures
✨ Magical artifacts
There may be no convenient shop nearby.
You might have to hunt.
Raid enemy settlements.
Search ruins.
Take equipment from defeated enemies.
Or simply find a way to survive until you reach somewhere safer.
The world rewards exploration, but it does not promise that exploration will be comfortable.
👁️ THE STORY
Four heroes have been resurrected.
Ishtar sacrificed her Eye to bring them back.
The heroes once belonged to the Justice League, a legendary organization that attempted to maintain peace between the great powers of the world.
But more than ten years have passed since they disappeared.
The world has changed.
The Ketele Cultists are spreading.
They believe that the world itself is an illusion and that killing creatures is not murder, but liberation.
Their ultimate goal is to bring Ketele into the world — an entity associated with chaos, destruction and the collapse of the existing order.
And somewhere in the middle of all this stands Senara Sinch, a human pirate who may know more about what happened than she initially reveals.
🌍 PART OF PARADIGM WORLDS
Eye of Ishtar takes place within the wider Paradigm Worlds universe.
Paradigm Worlds has always been a mixture of genres, ideas and deliberately strange combinations:
fantasy, science fiction, post-apocalyptic worlds, mutants, monsters, technology, magic and creatures that don’t necessarily belong together.
Eye of Ishtar approaches that universe from a classic fantasy RPG perspective.
If you know Paradigm Worlds from the Mount & Blade: Warband mod, you may recognize some of the creatures, factions and ideas.
If you don’t know Paradigm Worlds at all, that’s fine.
Eye of Ishtar can be played as its own RPG adventure.
🛠️ MADE WITH UNREAL ENGINE 4.27
Eye of Ishtar is built with Unreal Engine 4.27, using Unreal’s Blueprint-based development tools together with assets and contributions from a variety of creators.
The project has been developed independently over several years.
It is finished and ready to play, while development can continue with additional content, improvements and experimentation.
🆓 FREE TO PLAY
Eye of Ishtar is completely free.
There are:
- ❌ No advertisements
- ❌ No microtransactions
- ❌ No subscriptions
- ❌ No paywalls
Just download the game and play.
The game is distributed through ModDB, the platform used for the Paradigm Worlds projects.
The release also goes through ModDB’s authorisation process before becoming available for download.
🌍 EXPLORE THE OTHER PROJECTS
Paradigm Worlds
The original Mount & Blade: Warband project and the foundation of the wider universe.
Vritniht: Tentacloid Conspiracy
A horror dungeon crawler set in the distant future of Paradigm Worlds.
Vritniht: Tentacloid Conspiracy — ModDB
Modding Simulacra
The developer website and home for independent game projects.
❤️ A NOTE FROM THE DEVELOPER
Eye of Ishtar wasn’t created as part of a large commercial campaign.
It grew through years of making things, learning Unreal Engine, experimenting with ideas, working with other creators and expanding the larger Paradigm Worlds universe.
The game is deliberately old-fashioned in some ways.
It is a game about going somewhere, finding things, meeting strange creatures, building a party and seeing what happens.
There are many polished RPGs that will tell you exactly how you are supposed to play them.
Eye of Ishtar is more interested in seeing what you do when nobody tells you.
If you’ve played Paradigm Worlds before — welcome back.
If you’ve never heard of it — welcome.
And if you’re looking for a strange fantasy world where you can spend a few evenings exploring, fighting monsters, building a ridiculous party and temporarily forgetting about the everyday world…
I hope you enjoy playing it.
⚔️ PLAY EYE OF ISHTAR
Free. No ads. No monetization. Just play.
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