Yarntown

Yarntown is a free fan-made action-RPG built on the Solarus engine by developer Moth Atlas, released in July 2020 as a compact homage to Bloodborne. The pitch is blunt and accurate: Bloodborne meets 2D Zelda, cursed but cute. Where the Solarus engine's stock template expects sword-and-shield adventuring, Yarntown reroutes it toward FromSoftware's gothic hunting grounds instead.

The setup mirrors its inspiration directly: players arrive on the night of the hunt in a cursed, gothic-Victorian town overrun with beasts and corrupted hunters, and have to fight, explore, and piece together what happened through implication rather than exposition — the same environmental-storytelling instinct Bloodborne is known for, shrunk down to a top-down pixel frame.

What makes Yarntown more than a reskin is how literally it recreates Bloodborne's actual systems rather than just borrowing its mood. Combat runs on a stamina meter, with dodge-rolls that grant real invincibility frames and visceral attacks — backstab charged strikes or pistol-parry stuns — standing in for Bloodborne's own visceral finishers. Lantern checkpoints restore health but respawn every enemy on the map when used, the same trade-off as the original's Lamps. Killed enemies drop Blood Echoes, spent on leveling four stats (Vitality, Endurance, Strength, Skill) or buying items, and inventory space for consumables — 20 blood vials, 20 bullets — is capped the same way. None of this is decorative; it's the actual Soulsborne loop, running on an engine that was never built for it.

It's a small game by design: about 25 MB, a single continuous release cycle that wrapped at version 1.0.6 in August 2020, and explicitly a side project rather than an attempt at a full Bloodborne-scale campaign. That scope is part of the appeal — it's concentrated entirely on nailing the feel of a few core systems rather than padding a long runtime around them.

PlayBound lists it because it's a genuinely rare kind of fan project: not a total conversion mod running on someone else's engine, but a from-scratch recreation of a specific, beloved combat system inside a completely different genre's toolkit, built well enough that the translation actually holds up. It's exactly the kind of small, technically ambitious free game that has no reason to reach anyone outside the Solarus community without a catalog surfacing it.