Solarus is a free game engine dedicated to 2D action-adventure, very directly inspired by the 16-bit Zelda games and A Link to the Past in particular. Started in 2011 by the French developer Christopho, it provides everything the genre expects — top-down movement, interconnected maps, chests, dungeons, inventory, dialogs — and lets authors write their game logic in Lua.
Solarus contains no game: it runs quests, that is, data packages created with the official Solarus Quest Editor. A quest gathers the maps, Lua scripts, sprites, music and dialogs of a complete game. The community regularly publishes quests for free on the project's website (solarus-games.org): original adventures as well as very polished unofficial remakes.
| Project | Solarus |
| Author | Christopho (Christophe Thiéry) |
| First release | 2011 |
| Game type | 2D action-adventure |
| License | GPL-3.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
| Keyboard | Optional |
Recalbox ships with the Yarntown quest by Max Mraz, a top-down 2D take on Bloodborne. See the Included games page.
New in Recalbox 10.1: Solarus moves up to version 2.0.3.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solarus | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
A single emulator is offered, the standalone Solarus engine itself, available on every board. Recalbox starts it fullscreen, passes it your controller configuration and binds the Hotkey + Start combination to quitting the game.
Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled.
Put your quests in:
/recalbox/share/roms/solarus/
Supported extensions: .solarus .zip
A quest is a single file — an archive holding all the game data — dropped as is into the folder. Do not extract it: Solarus reads the archive directly.
/recalbox/share/roms/solarus/
├── yarntown.solarus
└── my-quest.solarus
The
.solarusfile is produced by the Solarus Quest Editor. A quest is tied to an engine version: a quest written for a newer version than the one bundled with Recalbox will show an error message at launch.