Soul Elysium

SOUL ELYSIUM

A fast-paced online action RPG more than 20 years in the making.

Fight. Explore. Grow stronger. Challenge other players. Discover powerful abilities and transformations—and help shape what Soul Elysium becomes next.

⚔️ ENTER SOUL ELYSIUM

Soul Elysium is a multiplayer action RPG built around fast-paced real-time combat, character progression, exploration, PvE, and competitive PvP.

Choose your path, develop your character, master an expanding arsenal of abilities, and fight your way through a world where becoming stronger is only part of the challenge.

Whether you're hunting enemies throughout the world, progressing alongside friends, experimenting with your build, or testing yourself against another player, Soul Elysium is designed around one idea:

Getting stronger should give you more ways to play—not just bigger numbers.

🔥 THE PUBLIC TEST IS LIVE

Soul Elysium is currently in active development, and we're opening the game to players while we continue building, balancing, and modernizing it.

This isn't a finished release.

Things will change. Systems will be reworked. Balance will move. You may encounter bugs—and there's a very real possibility you'll discover ways to break things that we haven't.

We want you to.

Tell us what feels great. Tell us what doesn't. Show us what you broke. Challenge our combat systems and help us determine what Soul Elysium should become.

Player feedback from this public test will directly influence future development.

⚡ FAST-PACED COMBAT

Soul Elysium emphasizes movement, positioning, timing, and the effective use of your abilities.

Engage enemies at close range, attack from a distance, rapidly reposition yourself around the battlefield, combine abilities, and learn how different opponents fight.

And when you're ready to test what you've learned...

Fight another player.

🏆 PvP & COMPETITIVE COMBAT

PvP has been part of Soul Elysium's identity for years.

Challenge other players, experiment with different abilities and strategies, and put your understanding of the game's combat systems to the test.

We are actively refining competitive combat throughout development, with a long-term goal of creating PvP where player knowledge and execution matter just as much as progression.

🌎 EXPLORE & GROW

Travel through a large interconnected world filled with enemies, locations, progression opportunities, and increasingly dangerous encounters.

Fight alone or alongside other players.

Become stronger.

Unlock new abilities.

Reach new stages of power.

Then find something stronger than you.

🕹️ A GAME WITH MORE THAN 20 YEARS OF HISTORY

Soul Elysium didn't begin as a modern indie project.

Its history stretches back more than two decades.

The game was originally created using BYOND, an engine that powered an entire generation of online games and communities, by Bustercannon, now known as StasisXLII. Over the years, Soul Elysium evolved through different developers, players, systems, worlds, and eras.

Now, Studio XLII is bringing it into a new one.

The version available here represents both the continuation of that history and an experiment:

How far can we push Soul Elysium—and BYOND itself—today?

We're modernizing the existing game, improving its systems, experimenting with new ideas, and learning from the players joining us along the way.

At the same time, we're laying the groundwork for Soul Elysium's eventual transition to Godot, where we'll have the freedom to rethink systems that were originally designed around the limitations of technology from another era.

We're not interested in simply recreating the old game in a new engine.

We want to discover what Soul Elysium can become.

🧪 YOU'RE JOINING DURING DEVELOPMENT

By playing now, you're getting into Soul Elysium while many of its future systems are still being decided.

Expect:

• Balance changes • New content • Experimental mechanics • System redesigns • Bugs and occasional weirdness • Community tests and events • Continued improvements to combat and progression • Major changes as development continues

Some ideas will work.

Some won't.

That's part of why we're opening the doors.

💬 JOIN THE COMMUNITY

Soul Elysium has always been a multiplayer game, but the community surrounding it is just as important.

Join our Discord to find other players, report bugs, share feedback, follow development, participate in events, and talk directly with the team.

If you're interested in game development itself, we're also openly sharing parts of the process as we experiment with BYOND, redesign old systems, create new artwork, and prepare for the game's eventual move to Godot.

Discord: https://discord.gg/ZFY343Tau

⚠️ A NOTE ABOUT THE CURRENT BUILD

Because the game and its launcher are independently distributed applications, Windows may display a security or SmartScreen warning when launching them.

As of 9/30/2026, We have recently completed an authentication process through Microsoft which will allow us to be more "legit" with our downloads and lighten up the SmartScreen Warning. 

If you experience problems installing or launching Soul Elysium, join our Discord and let us know. We'll help you get into the game.

🤖 A NOTE ABOUT AI

Studio XLII uses AI as a development tool—not as a replacement for artists, developers, or creative direction.

We use AI-assisted tools to help us learn unfamiliar systems, better understand and improve legacy code, troubleshoot problems, explore ideas, prototype concepts, and expand what our small team is capable of accomplishing.

Our goal isn't to fill Soul Elysium with mass-generated artwork, dialogue, or unreviewed code. Quite the opposite. AI allows us to spend more time learning, experimenting, refining our skills, and turning ideas into working systems that we might otherwise lack the time or resources to explore.

Artwork used in the game is created and curated intentionally. Code produced with AI assistance is reviewed, tested, modified, and integrated by our developers. Game design, mechanics, balance, worldbuilding, art direction, and the countless decisions that define Soul Elysium remain firmly in human hands.

For us, AI is another tool in the toolbox—alongside Aseprite, BYOND, Godot, Git, and everything else we use to build the game.

We're using AI to become better developers, not to avoid being developers.

🚧 DEVELOPMENT STATUS

Soul Elysium is currently in active development.

The public test is free to play, and your feedback matters.

If an online RPG surviving more than twenty years, being pushed beyond the technology it was originally built for, and gradually evolving into something new sounds interesting...

Come see what we're building.

— Studio XLII