What Songbringer is
Songbringer is an open-world action RPG with roguelike and metroidvania elements, set in a science-fiction galaxy and drawn in pixel graphics. You play Roq Epimetheos, an accidental hero who cruises the galaxy aboard the ship Songbringer with his skybot Jib, looking for green planets that the galactic police have not reached. On the planet Ekzera he finds a nanosword hidden in a cave and wakes an ancient evil. The sword hums, and it is worth carrying anyway.
The world is built from a 6-letter seed that you pick when you start a quest. That seed generates the planet, the overworld, the secrets and the dungeons, and the same seed always produces the same world on any platform. That makes it easy to hand a seed to friends, compare what you found, or run a familiar world again for speed. Pick a fresh seed when you want to be surprised.
Playing it together
Songbringer has local co-op: player one controls Roq, and player two takes over Jib. When nobody is playing Jib, he runs on AI. Jib scans the bodies of fallen foes and sometimes uncovers valuable loot, and he can gain the ability to stun enemies. The game also supports Remote Play Together, so a friend can join over the internet as if they were sitting next to you.
Progress is shared rather than split. There are no experience points; you get stronger by crushing mobs, beating bosses and claiming lost technological devices. The overworld is open and non-linear, so you can head in any compass direction or play dungeons in whatever order you like. Of the nine dungeons in a world, some are thematic with puzzles and items you need to finish the world, some are hidden side quests that grant abilities, and some are brutally hard. Splitting up or tackling the tough ones together is a legitimate way to play.
Before you start
Pick your world seed carefully, since it defines everything you will explore. You are not even required to pick up the sword, so the pace of the opening is up to you. Eating cacti gives Roq psychedelic powers that let him perceive secrets hidden in plain sight, and some items combine into new artifacts — a blink orb plus a fire cube, taken to the droidsmith aboard Songbringer, becomes a fire orb that teleports Roq forward a few steps as a fireball.
When you finish a quest, the game scores your time, the percentage of map uncovered, the percentage of items obtained, and whether you played regular or permadeath mode. Scores go to a global leaderboard sorted by world seed, so the seed you and your group choose becomes the thing you compete on.