BOLTHOLE

BOLTHOLE is a twin-stick action-adventure in one barred keep. You move with one hand and aim every crossbow bolt with the other, while the dead fire back. Step into a room with foes in it and its doors bar behind you until the last one falls.

Play the free demo in your browser above: the Gatehouse, the Rookery and the Rookery Warden, ten rooms. The full game is the Windows download.

In the full game

• 27 hand-built rooms: the Gatehouse, then four sealed wings of the keep (the Rookery, the Armory, the Ossuary and the Undercroft, down a hatch in the court), then the Heart.
• Four seals, taken in any order. A wing you cannot beat yet is one you leave for later.
• Five wardens, each attack drawn on the floor before it lands: the Rookery Warden's stoop, the Gravebound's charge that banks off the pillars, the Great Lich's turning spiral, the Sporefather's spore clouds, and the Manticore, which brings back the ring, the stoop, the volley and the spiral.
• Five bolt upgrades, kept once found: pierce, heavy, fire, ricochet and frost.
• 13 creatures besides the wardens, in four fighting styles: swarmers that rush you (giant bats, harpies, kobold skirmishers, ghouls), casters that fan orbs (liches, kobold shamans, myconids), marksmen that fire one leading needle (eye tyrants, skeletons) and brutes that charge (stone wardens, troglodytes, mummies, gelatinous cubes).
• Shrines that save and heal, a map that fills in as you go, and an ending.

Fair and readable

Every warden fight was played hundreds of times by test bots before it shipped, each with the fewest upgrades a player can bring to it: a bot that reads the drawn tells wins far more often than one that ignores them, and no fight ever stalled. Bring more upgrades and the fights get easier. If a fight is too much, the assist setting slows enemy shots, adds hearts, or both. It is off by default and you can change it from the pause menu at any time.

Controls

Keyboard: WASD to move, the arrow keys to shoot in eight directions, or aim with the mouse and hold the left button. Gamepad: left stick to move, right stick to aim and fire, Start to pause. In the browser demo on a phone held sideways: left thumb moves, right thumb aims and fires. P or Esc pauses, M toggles sound. The game saves at shrines.

Made from our own packs

The cast comes from our sprite packs Wildmark 02, Wildmark Actions 02, Deepwarren 01, Deepwarren 02 and Mourncrest Reforged 01. The music is from The Sunken Choir and Adversary, and the sound from Barrage, Steel and Bone, Portcullis, Creature Vocal Forge, Threshold, Akatsuki, Alembic, Dread and Descent.

Made with AI

The code and the writing were made with Claude. The sprites are AI-generated art from our own packs (PixelLab) and the rooms are drawn procedurally by our own code. The music is written scores rendered with a soundfont, and the sound effects are synthesized by our own code; no generative audio model was used.

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. More from the studio: csaf.itch.io