Palimpsest Idle
An idle action-RPG that takes place on the page. Every enemy, every blade, every scrap of armour is drawn as illuminated manuscript art on bone-white parchment — and all of it wants to kill you.
Tap to strike. Loot what falls. Push until something stops you, then find the build that gets you through it. Clearing trash fills the Boss Charge, and when it is full you commit — a wall that asks whether your damage and your survival have kept pace with the page you are on.
Loot worth reading
Thirteen gear slots and six rarities — Pulp, Parchment, Vellum, Grand Folio, Illumined, and the rarest of all, Palimpsest. Affixes roll across attributes, flat bonuses and percentage multipliers; weapons roll procs that bleed, poison and drain.
At the Calligrapher's bench you gild a piece step by step, or rewrite an affix you did not want. Everything written there is permanent, and gear you carry through Ascension keeps every stroke. Recycle the rest into Pigment and pour it back into the pieces you keep.
Weaponmancy
Summon weapons from an eighteen-strong catalogue and they fight beside you without being told — six archetypes, from daggers to scythes, each with its own growth curve and signature. Level them with Pigment and they climb in damage, rarity and affixes. Roll a growth grade you do not like, and reroll it.
Ascension
Reset the run, keep the power. Ascending banks Ink, the permanent currency, and opens two tracks that never reset. Scriptures are broad, run-wide multipliers across offense, ailments and defense, acquired at random and collected over many Ascensions. Footnotes are targeted perks you buy and level directly.
There is no cap. The ladder keeps going.
The particulars
- Platform
- Windows
- Players
- Single-player
- Monsters
- 250+
- Zones
- 35 across 7 biomes
It plays while you do not: Auto-Advance carries you stage to stage with no input, offline progress keeps earning while the game is closed, and Auto Equip picks your upgrades by per-slot scoring. For the people who read the numbers, the Ledger is a full combat meter with per-source damage breakdowns, and the Codex is an in-game encyclopedia with an entry for every system.
No microtransactions. No ads. No energy timers. No waiting for a bar to refill before you can play.
Contact
Content creators and press may use any screenshot or footage from the game without asking, monetised or not. If you need a build, a specific capture or a question answered on the record, write to contact@studioj3l.com.
Palimpsest Idle was built by one self-taught developer. Its visual art and its two music tracks were produced during development using AI generation tools, then curated, processed and assembled by hand. Nothing is generated while you play — every asset ships as a fixed file. Sound effects are royalty-free library recordings. The full disclosure is on the Steam store page.