THE BRASS ORRERY

Most games hand you a class and let you climb a tree. The Brass Orrery hands you a five-pointed star and asks what shape you want to close in it.

Strength, Toughness, Agility, Resistance, Spirit sit at the five points. Between them is a lattice of sixteen nodes. Light a node and it pays you its stat. Close a SHAPE — a spire, a facet, the inner ring — and the geometry itself grants you a talent. Reach an apex and the orrery names you: you do not pick “Hammerward”, you become one, because you reached strength and toughness and the instrument can read that off your lattice.

3,593 legal builds at the campaign cap. Eighteen classes, none of them chosen from a menu.

Every creature carries a lattice too

Bonding is not a shop. A wild thing in the wilds has closed nothing — its own REACH lattice is dark. You bond it by closing a shape in ITS star, and which shape you close is which companion it becomes: wide (the Ring, a little of everything), deep (its own Spire), or across (a Facet, and the technique that comes with it). Three creatures, nine bonded forms, and the pool respecs between fights — because reading the foe and rebuilding is the loop, not a punishment for guessing wrong.

Nothing here is a sprite file

Every instrument, every bonded form, and every engine that walks onto the field is drawn by the game from the numbers you chose. Your machine’s silhouette is your build: strength puts mass across its shoulders, toughness plates it and counts the rivets, agility rakes its legs and spins its flywheel, resistance wraps it in null-coils, spirit raises its lantern and lights a crest. Two players with different stars are looking at two different machines.

45 distinct generated visual entities. No sprite sheet, no atlas, no PNG of a character anywhere in the build.

The fight

Turn-based duels over painted venues — a night quay, a proving hall, the ninth vat. Steam is a resource and venting braces you but scalds whoever lands on you. Momentum buys extra actions at seventy per cent power, because a hasty blow is a hasty blow. Past a certain round the boilers mount and the fight stops being something you can stall.

Three provings. The last one is a wall, and finding its seam is the fight.

Demo and full game

The browser demo is the first proving. The download is all three.

The free demo holds the whole system: the full sixteen-node orrery and all eighteen readings, the wilds and the bond, and the first proving — Dock-Ward Amber on his painted quay — fought to a win, with respec-and-stand-again on defeat.

The paid Windows build is the complete gauntlet: The Pale Lector at twelve points, the Warden of the Ninth Vat at sixteen, two more painted venues, the widening star (8 → 12 → 16), and the victory plate. No browser, no expiry, nothing phones home.

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• NOCTUARY — $3.99. Sixty-six nonogram plates; solve one and the grid develops into a mounted moth that has never existed. Free demo in your browser.
• BANNERET · Wicklight · Antipole — free, playable in the browser.
• The full catalogue — games and developer tools.