Instar

A storm-beast hatches in your hands and bites into your spine

Rain, roots, headlamps. You are a sheller, the lowest job in Drownport, crawling the floor of a storm-forest for shed shells to sell. Tonight your crew boss, Dax, has found something bigger: a cluster of eggs fused into a grove of lightning-glass, and he wants one intact for a Company buyer. You pry one loose. Lightning hits, the egg splits in your hands, and a wet, cat-sized hatchling with a green-glowing core climbs your arm and bites straight through the back of your neck. For one second you see through two sets of eyes.

Instar is an AI text adventure about raising a monster, in a gritty sci-fi world with a LitRPG spine. The bond you just got is supposed to be impossible. Licensed riders need a Company implant called a tether, and an unlicensed bond is a felony: the beast gets culled and the rider's tether gets burned. You have no licence, no implant and no way back.

The first scene

The story opens in the middle of the crisis. Dax has a shock-pike in his hand and wants the hatchling sold. A Company patrol drone has seen the flash and its searchlight is already sweeping through the rain. Whoever takes the hatchling from you tonight will kill it, because a fresh bond broken on its first night kills the beast.

Then it's your turn. You can run, bargain, fight, hide among the roots or try something nobody has thought of, and you name the hatchling. If you never name it, the crew calls it Hex, after the hex-shaped glow on its back, and the name sticks. Hex goes into your Codex that same turn as a Storm Hatchling, the first entry in the record of everything you bind.

Molt by molt, you build the monster

A galvanid grows only by molting, and it molts only inside a lightning strike. So when your beast levels up, you have to take it up a stilt tower into the open storm, where the drones can see you. The shell splits, lightning pours in, and a new body stands up steaming. Each molt offers three paths:

• Gale: glass wings, gliding, then real flight and riding a lightning bolt.
• Reaper: foreleg scythes, charged edges, silent hunting.
• Bastion: armour plates, ember vents, a rideable bulk, then a living shield that takes the hit meant for you.

Picks stack, so a scythe-armed beast with glass wings is normal. Hex grows from cat-sized to wolf-sized, then big enough to ride, then a war machine and finally an Apex with a boss silhouette of its own. A fourth path, Crown, opens only at the top, and only if Hex trusts you.

The Ladder

The underground fighting circuit runs out of the Molt, an illegal pit-bar in a drowned treatment plant whose roof is the shed shell of a dead Apex beast. It is a ranked pit-fighting ladder: Copper, Cobalt, Violet, Apex. Each rank has a Warden to beat, like Mother Ruin and her ember-red brute or the Dalton brothers, who fight as a pair. Fights read like boss encounters, with entrance cards, phase changes and visible tells you can counter.

Wins pay and make you famous, and the Company watches every pirated fight feed. Ladder fame raises your Heat, and Captain Voss's Culler Squad raids wherever the Heat points.

A Brood, a rival and a city that wants something

Hex's core sings, and lesser wild galvanids answer. You can bind them into your Brood by beating them, feeding them, saving them or out-singing their alpha, from fist-sized Sparkmites to rare beasts once Hex is big enough. Even other riders' beasts can be won, though never for free. It plays like a creature collector where every catch is a scene.

You won't be alone. Juno Teal turns up at the Ladder qualifier as your rival, sharp and competitive, riding a glasswing called Siskin. If you earn her respect, she can become your first companion. Mags, who owns the Molt, trains you because the bond "shouldn't exist, and I want to see what it turns into". Twin runners on the Float sell information to anyone. A defected Company scientist lives on a gutted barge in the forest and reads shed shells like tree rings.

Tone and style

The world is dark: rain, haze, neon over floodwater, a corporate dystopia living under a storm that has not stopped in eighty years. The creatures are the brightest thing in every frame, and the writing is short and physical. Hex talks to you through the tether, first in images and feelings, then in short caps fragments like "STORM. HUNGRY. GO UP.", and reacts to everything you do. The story is mature (16+): violence, injury and corporate cruelty, with no sexual content. Charge, Sync and Heat are never numbers. You read them from the glow of the shell, how your beast holds itself and the faces on the city's screens.

Questions before you play

Do I need to know LitRPG or creature-collector games to play?

No. You write what you do in plain words, and the story handles the rest. The molts and the ranks give the story a game-like shape, but fights are prose with readable tells, not dice rolls or stat lists.

Can I lose my beast?

Yes, if your choices lead there. Overcharging Hex on stolen batteries or letting the Cullers catch you can end in its death. Losing it is earned by your choices, never random. The endings follow from your bond, your Brood and the allies you made.

How long is a playthrough?

The story is built around a season of about thirty storm-nights, with the bite on night one and a showdown at the end of the season. How long each night takes is up to you.

If this is your kind of story

If you want a bond that grows with every scene, Instar is a good fit for anyone who likes a weakest-to-strongest climb. For a fantasy take on raising your own beast, try Dragon Rider Academy, or Gullet for a creature-pit story set in a harbour town.