Avernum: Escape from the Pit (2011)
Avernum: Escape from the Pit is a 2011 role-playing (rpg) video game made by Spiderweb Software.
Exiled underground for crimes real or invented, you wake in Avernum, a vast nation of caverns beneath a surface empire that wanted you gone. Jeff Vogel's role-playing game hands you a party and a sprawling world of eighty towns and dungeons, three grand quests, dozens of spells and battle skills, and hundreds of artifacts to dig up. Freedom is the point: wander, take sides, or plot escape from the pit. A 2011 rebuild of Spiderweb Software's 1990s Exile series, it trades graphical polish for depth, reactivity, and the pleasures of old-school open exploration.
Quick answers
What is Avernum: Escape from the Pit about?
Exiled underground for crimes real or invented, you wake in Avernum, a vast nation of caverns beneath a surface empire that wanted you gone. Jeff Vogel's role-playing game hands you a party and a sprawling world of eighty towns and dungeons, three grand quests, dozens of spells and battle skills, and hundreds of artifacts to dig up. Freedom is the point: wander, take sides, or plot escape from the pit. A 2011 rebuild of Spiderweb Software's 1990s Exile series, it trades graphical polish for depth, reactivity, and the pleasures of old-school open exploration.
When was Avernum: Escape from the Pit released?
Avernum: Escape from the Pit was released on 14 December 2011.
Who made Avernum: Escape from the Pit?
Avernum: Escape from the Pit was made by Spiderweb Software.
Similar games
Explore Avernum: Escape from the Pit guides
Avernum: Escape from the Pit in our writing
- Companion guide: The CRPG: The Complete Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games
A few thoughts on Avernum: Escape from the Pit
The buried nation of tunnels and relics rhymes with Made in Abyss, whose explorers descend a monstrous pit chasing wonders and rarely come back whole. Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth suits readers drawn to the same pull downward, a subterranean world stranger and larger than the surface admits.
Open fantasy worlds that reward wandering off the main quest
Avernum drops you into eighty towns and dungeons with no obligation to follow any single thread, rewarding whoever wanders furthest off the beaten path. These games share that same freedom: sprawling maps built for detours, side stories, and secrets that only turn up if you stop chasing the main quest and start exploring.
Doorstopper fantasy series where the world outgrows the plot
Escaping Avernum means picking a way through eighty towns, three grand quests, and a whole invented society underground, the kind of scale usually reserved for fat fantasy novels. These series share that same instinct: worlds so dense with factions, history, and geography that the plot becomes just one path through something much bigger.
Ragtag bands cutting a path through monster-haunted lands
Avernum's exiles have only each other to lean on as they fend off monsters and bandits underground, and these picks share that same setup: small bands cutting through demon-haunted territory, town by town, where the fights matter less than the loyalty holding the group together.
Dark, epic soundtracks for delving into the depths
The caverns of Avernum are lit by torchlight and menace, an underground empire built for brooding exploration. These records carry the same weight: heavy riffs, doom-laden prog, and orchestral scale suited to marching into dark, dangerous places where nobody is coming to rescue you.