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Calista is a kingdom built on the bones of something older and greater than itself, the old kingdom of Isul. Beneath its cities and farmlands lie the ruins of Isul, a civilization that mastered magic so completely it ultimately destroyed itself, leaving behind vast underground archives, crumbling towers, and labyrinthine vaults still guarded by the automatons their makers set to watch over them centuries ago.

For generations, scholars and ruin-runners have picked at the edges of this inheritance, recovering fragments of Isuldian knowledge and slowly, painstakingly reconstructing a magical tradition the kingdom is only beginning to understand. This is Calista's second magical renaissance, a cautious, gradual rediscovery conducted under the watchful eye of a crown that permits certain arts and forbids others.

Time magic is chief among the forbidden, its dangers considered too catastrophic to risk, its history too closely tied to Isul's fall to be spoken of without unease. Into this world comes a crisis: the kingdom's mana is failing, wildlife petrifying, harvests faltering, and the people given only half-answers about why. When rumors surface of the Chronos Relic's discovery, both the crown and a desperate young scholar named Noni go after it independently. Noni to save her petrifying friend Nymea, Prince Cleo to secure it for the crown. Their paths collide, and in a moment of panic, Noni does the one thing she was never supposed to do: she uses time magic openly, in front of exactly the wrong people, to save someone she cannot bear to lose.

The crown now knows what she can do, and what she can do is the only thing standing between the Crown and its ambitions.

Alongside featuring hand-pixeled sprites and tilemaps, RuneCipher is built on a custom multi-layered rendering system purpose-built for pushing the boundaries of 2D pixel art.

Real time wind interactions with foliage, realistic water reflections, and texture based lighting help create the immersive battle maps in the game. These stages are not just for show, they will constitute important elements in the game's strategy: wind can propagate burning embers in grass tiles, thunder spells conduct to multiple units in water, and rolling fog can impede the ability to parry attacks.