The Game
How it plays
A grim dungeon crawler with a card battler at its heart. You walk the floor a tile at a time; when you meet something, you fight it with the cards in your hand — and with the ones he offers you.
01
Fight where it hurts
Both of you see each other's whole hand. Neither of you sees which cards the other will play. Plan your turn, lock it in, and then everything lands at once.
Every attack is aimed at a part: the head, the body, an arm or the legs. Every guard covers one of them. Guess where it is going and you take nothing; guess wrong and you take all of it.
Wounds change the fight. A blow to the head leaves you dazed. A gut wound bleeds. A broken arm hits softer, and bad legs leave you easier to hurt. Read the fight, or be read.
02
Five kinds of card
Everything you can do in a fight is one of these, and so is everything done to you.
Cards rot in your hand if you keep them too long, long fights wear your draw pile down, and you can use one item a turn. Your deck is whatever you have taken off the dead.
03
Borrow his cards
You are not alone in your head. The voice that guides you has a deck of its own, stronger than yours, and in any fight you can switch to it.
Every card of his costs corruption, and each one costs a little more than the last. Corruption makes you hit harder. It also makes you break easier. Sparing what you kill brings it back down. Letting it fill does not end well.
When it fills, you find out what he was growing you for.
04
Every body is a decision
When something falls, it leaves a body, and you choose what to do with it. Once.
Strip it
Take what it was carrying: food, tonics, teeth, silk.
Eat its strength
Keep some of what made it strong, for good. It costs you blood.
Make a card
Turn it into a card for your deck. Every creature has its own.
Leave it be
Spare it. A little health back, and some of him out of you.
05
Walk the floor
A hand-built floor, explored a tile at a time and lit a room at a time. Some things wander. Some lie in wait with a circle drawn on the floor round them, so that walking in is your choice. Some are asleep, and you can walk round them.
There are chests, and locked chests, and chests that want something from you before they open. There are fires to rest at and cook on. There is writing on the walls, left by the ones who came before you. And there are people, a few: you can talk to them, trade with them, ask them what they have seen — or not.
The demo is the whole first floor
Free, on Steam. Leave your email and you will hear when it is out.