What is solebound?

Solebound is a browser-based game about repairing shoes in a fictional city called Ashmarrow. The entire game ships as a single HTML file with no external assets, no dependencies, and no installation. You download the file, double-click it, and it opens in any modern browser that supports WebGL2 (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari 15 or later). All of the geometry, textures, sounds, and character portraits are generated by code at the moment the game loads, rather than being stored as image or audio files. The story is unusual and specific. Ashmarrow was built on "listening stone," a pavement that records every footstep pressed into it. For four centuries the city's mapmakers did not draw maps, they read the roads. When people stopped walking, the stone forgot, and whole districts drifted away into something called the Hush. The premise is that a worn shoe holds the memory of the route it walked, so repairing a shoe faithfully, stitch for stitch, causes the road it traveled to remember itself back into existence. You inherit the last repair shop on Lamplight Row and have twelve days to fix twelve pairs of shoes. Gameplay happens across several workstations: inspecting, cleaning, mending, soling, and finishing. Each tool comes into your hand on screen, with the brush wobbling along the leather, the awl dipping on each stitch, and the hammer swinging in time. The grading system rewards faithfulness to the original shoe rather than making it look new. Dyeing a shoe that was not supposed to be dyed, or removing a mark the owner asked you to keep, hurts your score regardless of how clean the final polish looks. Under the hood, the game uses a hand-written physically based rendering pipeline with real-time shadows, ambient occlusion, bloom, and other visual effects. Shoe geometry is built from parametric curves, and the repair state itself lives on the GPU through mask textures that track dirt, damage, polish, dye, stitching, and more. Audio is fully synthesized in the browser. The game includes twelve jobs with grade-dependent outcomes, eleven recoverable memories, fifteen upgrades across five tools, and three endings.