Elin is a Roguelike Wide-Open Sandbox by the creator of Elona and set in the same universe, years before Elona.
Set in the continent of North Tyris, your character wakes up in a grassy field, and is woken up by two mysterious persons wearing black cloaks; one of them promptly hands your character a land deed for the zone they're in, allowing them to create their own personal home/town. As you get used to the world, you'll start doing quests, explore dungeons, and discover the story of the world as it slowly unfolds.
The game shares many gameplay elements from its predecessor - dungeon crawling and quests, but also farming, pet-breeding, business management and more, with the major addition of extensive base-building and crafting elements which allow you to create your own town. Whatever you do, though, make sure to pay your taxes. It also includes plenty of Elona-brand weirdness - armor and weapons made of raw meat or paper, inane randomly generated quest descriptions, cannibalism, and once again one of your starting potential pets is a little girl - which you can arm and turn into a dangerous killing machine, of course. Despite being a roguelike, by default permadeath is turned off. note
The game originally started as 'Elin's Inn', and was more meant to be a management spin-off game of Elona, before evolving into a full-blown successor. The game started its alpha in early 2023, and was released in Early Access on 1 November 2024.
Elin provides examples of:
- Abnormal Ammo: Like its predecessor, arrows and bullets can be made of weird materials - including meat, paper, or even grass.
- Action Bomb: A few monsters, like the 'Hot Guys', do extremely deadly explosions when killed. This can be prevented by throwing a liquid at them, giving them the wet status and preventing them from...well, igniting.
- All Deserts Have Cacti: Particularly odd because they show up up at the beach. Not that players will mind having easy access to the needles they drop for low level crafting stations and a few recipes. Or just get bones from deconstruction.
- Anachronism Stew: Perhaps even more so than its predecessor - the otherwise medieval towns have Japanese-styled gacha machines and vending machines (some of which sell porn books and panties), as well as televisions and other otherwise incoherent furniture, that's not even going to mention the various machines/robots and guns you can find around.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Due to gaining skills via using them one option the game gives you, but isn't vocal about, is to hang yourself up on the gallows, a free one is given by the tutorial, which will cause all citizens, meaning your guests won't, to start beating the shit out if you like a pinata. You can't die in this state and will hang until you run out of stamina. An 100% risk free way to level armor and defense.
- Similarly the game treats training dummies, also the tutorial gives you one, as valid targets to increase your weapon stats on. If you're training up a new weapon skill or just don't feel confident at lower levels you can use this to easily train up, also low risk. This will automate and take stamina as well.
- In Elona, it could be difficult to find specific NPCs, especially generics. If you were on a delivery mission, guards could tell you which general direction the recipient was in, otherwise finding who you wanted was all down to your personal observation skills. In Elin, guards not only know the location of all important NPCs and certain important furniture, but they also lead you right to whoever you ask them about. And in Derphy, which doesn't have any guards, most generic NPCs have the guide function.
- Artistic License – Geology: The ores and minerals of North Tyris are...weird:
- You can find bronze and steel ores and mine them - despite the fact both of them are alloys that do not occur in nature.
- There is also a plastic ore, despite plastic neither being a metal nor occurring in nature.
- Silver can be found as a gem, despite being a metal.
- One of the most common crystals you can find are made out of bones.
- Granite is the most common stone material and one of the softest. In reality granite is less common than sedimentary rocks and much harder than them.
- Asian Fox Spirit: There are two types of Kitsune you can play as; the white-haired Mifu focus more on supportive buffing and debuffing, while the red-haired Nefu focus on hybrid magic and close quarters combat. They have their own gods, the siblings Kizuami of Trickery and Horome of Moonshadow, who provide bonuses to the aforementioned play styles. Their apostles, the White Vixen and Fox Maid are also notable examples, with the Fox Maid even growing tails as she levels up, growing in speed and durability.
- Asteroids Monster: Blobs in early dungeons can split into more blobs when attacked. Mass Monsters found later are like Blobs on steroids, being not only stronger but also having significantly stronger ability to divide - a single Mass Monster can turn into a dozen very easily - and those clones can split off into more clones, and so on, and so forth...
- Boring, but Practical:
- Bandages are a must-have for dungeon delving. They can be made easily with fabric and tree resin, and one of the best and most economical fabrics to make them, silk (which has a potent Healing+ trait), can be found in pretty much any dungeon by smashing cobwebs. For a number of turns, the Bandage will give a potent regen effect and, if you optionally use an herb to craft it, cure a status effect, making dangerous fights a lot less stressful.
- Jure of Healing is considered the most generalist God(ess) to worship - she lacks any special gimmick, the stats and skills she buffs just from worshipping her tend to be very useful for starting characters, such as Regeneration, her special Active ability is a huge party-wide heal that costs Stamina instead of MP, her God Pet is a tanky humanoid who can cast high-tier healing magic, and she's easy to give Offerings to since she accepts Junk, which is present pretty much everywhere. People who want to make specific builds go to other Gods, but Jure is one of the few Gods that ANYONE can benefit from.
- The hammer tool alows you to deconstruct things. Or destroy them outright if they're already raw material. If you check what materials things are made out of you might find some useful deconstruction projects, such as cacti needles into bones or the trash bags into a source of cheap, easy thread. Or turn flowers into leaves. Just be careful because those leaves count as food and will spoil.
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp":
- For whatever reason, potatoes are called 'imo' - most likely coming from the Japanese word for potato, which is jagaimo, but that still doesn't explain why they're called that. Funnily enough, Sweet Potatoes, are still called Sweet Potatoes.
- Coconuts are called 'Palulu' and come from 'Palulu trees' - which are palm trees. Which is especially strange, considering an item called Coconut Milk is already in the game.
- Call-Forward: The map is mostly the same as Elona save for being set years earlier. Thus The Cave you start in Elona and Vernis are there, except Vernis hasn't even been settled yet, though the Cave still has everything it had in the first game, including the Fridge.
- Charles Atlas Superpower: A bit unintentional but because of the whole "use a skill to gain exp in it" setup its possible to become a super powerful badass through raw physical training alone.
- Cast from Stamina: A handful of combat actions cost Stamina instead of MP, such as the high-damage Bladestorm attack or some of the special abilities obtained by worshipping some Gods - since Stamina doesn't naturally regenerate other than when sleeping, unlike MP, and Stamina-recovering consumables are rare, you have to be a lot more careful in choosing when to use them.
- Cute Slime Mook: Like the previous games, Putits are small gelatinous slimes with cute dots for eyes, they serve as easy early-game monsters.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: One of the current superbosses is Innos Tur'as, the Prince of Betrayal, an evil god outside of the regular pantheon that was sealed in the Place Where Winds Rest. You can unseal and fight him - and he has the power to back up his godhood, good luck.
- Disk One Nuke:
- A lot of guides will point you towards wine making the moment you can. This is because, if done right, it can have an efficent effort to price value. Collect fish, any kind so long as it's considered seafood, grind it in the woodworking bench to get spice flakes in groups of 5 or more per fish, get said into a wine barrel, either bought with furniture tokens in Mystida or learned from an npc you rescue in the first plot dungeon, and let it sit until it ferments into wine in about a day. Each bottle is roughly 50 orens when sold so due to the large numbers you get them in you will get enough for those pesky early game bills with plenty left over for meals or to save for more expensive items.
- For throwing, and muscians in particular who start with that offensive skill, the iron microphone is a powerful item and can be gotten early if you get lucky with furniture shops or travel northwest and get influence in a certain town. Its raw damage is very strong early on and its special ability improves your musical performances while having the "Returns to hand" feature which lets throwers have a strong, reliable weapon that can't get lost. A rare random alternative from trees is putit in amber, lower damage but chances of dealing elemental damage.
- Empty Levels: Averted - unlike its predecessor, the game avoids having meaningless character levels that just increase HP and MP by not having proper character levels at all - instead, Experience is gained by travelling and increasing any of the skills, and are used to gain Feat Points that can be used to unlock various special traits. The rest of the power-ups are derived purely through skill training, attribute increases and gear.
- Elemental Crafting: All items in the game have a material they're made out of, each with different effects, both in tools and for weapons and armor, with different tiers of efficacy:
- Sand and Raw Food are by far the worst materials in the game - to the point that armor made out of it will often have negative DV and PV, with nothing positive to counterbalance.
- Grass, paper and plastic tends to be only slightly stronger than sand and raw food, but are at least useable in the early game.
- Wood will likely be your first tier of weapon/armor you have available - they have absolutely nothing special (other than the fact they're flammable - which means that flame attacks can destroy them) and have very meh stats, but functional for the early game.
- Mica is common and has very middling stat, but has a natural luck-boosting passive.
- Stone will likely be the material your first decent gear will be made out of, offering decent protective values as armor and decent damage values as weapons, while having no particular strengths or weaknesses.
- Silver is a bit weaker than stone, but has a natural Darkness-protecting passive on equipment.
- Once you get an Iron weapon, it'll likely be worth it, featuring very good damage and protective values. After that, you have higher-tier materials like Bronze, Steel, and Obsidian to look out for.
- Expy: The Executioner class is Gyro Zeppeli from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run, having studied anatomy to execute people with swords and thrown weapons.
- Fantasy Metals: Mica is a common, blueish metal that appears in early gear. Weapons and armor made from it tend to be very weak - weaker than stone - but for some reason have an inherent luck-boosting passive.
- Guide Dang It!: The game isn't very forthcoming with some details. Thankfully the basic tutorial covers most of what you need to do to simply play the game and live so the more confusing stuff is often stuff you find by trying to branch out from the ol' reliable methods the game teaches you at the start. That being said some of the stuff is still more helpful than others.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Since any creature can drop a Corpse you can then cook and eat, that also includes humanoids - which has the effect of turning your character temporarily insane, inflicting a whole slew of status effects and hallucinations on them. Bizarrely, certain monsters that definitely don't look human, like the Floating Eyes, count as human meat.
- Informed Species: The "hungry sea lion" enemy is quite clearly actually a walrus.
- Intimidating Revenue Service: Being by default a land-owner, you will have to pay your taxes, which increase based on Fame. Failure to do so will cause your Karma to shoot down to -100 and cause guards to instantly mark you for death.
- Stat Grinding: Like Elona before it you gain skills by using the associated actions or perks. Stats, however, are given by food instead of grinding, or perks if you go that route.
- Super-Strong Child: While age is a statistic, it has no actual effect on gameplay, meaning your character can be 8 years old and be strong enough to wipe out entire dungeons, just as easily as any other character.
- Unproblematic Prostitution: Prostitution is an actual mechanic, normal to the point of being ridiculous - as long as a character - any character, is drunk, you can talk to them and offer to have sex in exchange for money - regardless of gender, age or sex, with the only malus of -1 Karma. Thankfully, the player is spared the details.
- Vancian Magic: A variation. In order to use a spell, the character has to learn it through reading books or having 'magical dreams', giving you 'stocks' of that particular spell. There is no limit to how many spells you can memorize at one time and you can have hundreds of spell stocks at once, but to cast it, you need to consume both a stock and MP.
- Younger Than They Look: Some non-playable characters can have the model and face portrait of an adult character, but be significantly younger than that - such as an old woman being 30 years old, or an adult-looking character actually being 10. Of course, the opposite is also possible.