King of Dragon Pass designer's new hellish heist game Thousand Hells is pushing the limits of a narrative concept he invented in 1999

David Dunham, the designer behind cult classic King of Dragon Pass, is launching a new game later this year through publisher Kitfox Games. Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists is a surreal, replayable afterlife heist game that defies easy categorisation — Kitfox calls it a "systemic storybook experience", Steam tags it as a strategy RPG, and Dunham himself settles on "tactical narrative game". Whatever you call it, Dunham is confident about one thing: "There's really nothing else quite like it."

The setup has players assembling a crew of hellfarers in the Eternal City — a fantasy Byzantium — before descending into one of several distinct underworlds. One is the Great Below, a gloomy realm inspired by ancient Mesopotamian beliefs where the dead "just kind of hung out and hoped that people gave you drinks." Another is the Hell of Nightmares, a dreamscape drawn from Hieronymus Bosch's paintings. Your party members' traits — adjectives like combat-trained or pathologically honest — become the verbs you use to navigate each hell. A warrior helps when you're facing a demonic ear made of knives; that same honest singer becomes a liability if you need to deceive a guardian of the dead. Crucially, party members have their own agency: a top-tier thief might refuse to join if they hate someone else in your crew, forcing you to weigh your options without ever learning exactly why the grudge exists.

The closest comparison Dunham offers is I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, where formative experiences become cards used to resolve narrative challenges. Thousand Hells works similarly — pausing the narrative to enter a separate resolution layer — but swaps cards for party traits. Underneath all of it is a design concept called storylets: conditional, rearrangeable nuggets of storytelling that can be assembled in different orders depending on context. Storylets are now a recognised fixture of interactive fiction, appearing in games like Fallen London and Wildermyth, but Dunham believes he independently developed the concept for King of Dragon Pass back in the late 1990s. He acknowledges King of Chicago may have done something similar as far back as 1987, though he wasn't aware of it at the time. Thousand Hells is his attempt to push that concept further than he has before.

King of Dragon Pass launched in 1999 to commercial indifference before slowly building one of the most devoted cult followings in PC gaming — a trajectory that gives Dunham's studio A Sharp a particular credibility with niche, systems-heavy narrative design. Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists is due later this year.