LANTERNBOUND

The lamps along the moor road have gone out, one by one. Three of you walk out from Aldermoor to find out why, carrying one oil lantern between you. It burns down the whole time you are out there, and it is the only light in the world.

LANTERNBOUND is a turn-based JRPG where the lantern is not a meter. It is the lighting, the fuel and the information, all at once. While it is lit you can read what the thing in front of you is about to do. When it goes out, the telegraph is replaced by three question marks and you are guessing.

The stack is the puzzle

Every ability your party uses does its job and pushes a colour onto the lantern — EMBER, AZURE, VERDANT or PALE. The lantern holds three, in order, oldest falling off the bottom. Enemies telegraph their attacks as a required sequence of those colours, and matching it breaks the attack before it lands.

So the interesting decision is never "which attack hits hardest". It is what order the party acts in — because a well-aimed ability at the wrong moment buries the colour somebody else needed. Four colours in a three-slot ordered stack is sixty-four reachable states from a roster of a dozen abilities. Nobody authored the combinations; they fall out of the ordering.

Every press is scored

Choose the action, then hit the mark as the bar sweeps. A perfect press hits harder and feeds the flame. A miss does neither, and the flame keeps burning either way. It is a second skill stacked on the first, and it is honestly the second one: the ordering puzzle is the game, and the timing layer is what makes a solved round feel like something.

Ten creatures, ten rules

Eight roamers and two bosses, and each one changes a different law of the fight — not a different stat block. The Moor Ghoul hardens against whatever you left on top of the stack last round. The Fen Bat eats your lantern every round whether or not you break its lock. The Tomb Spider always strikes whoever is already hurt. The Iron Warden is plated against EMBER from the first round, permanently. The Barrow Wyrm holds two colours hardened at once, so half your palette is blunted.

Every one of them was balanced by bot across sixty seeded fights, and no two of them are the same fight — that is asserted over all forty-five pairs, not claimed.

What is in it

• Three places, each generated with its own ground and its own vocabulary: Aldermoor's cobbles and hedges and its well, the moor's sward and standing stones, the cairn field's scree and dry-stone walls.
• An authored campaign — scenes with portraits and named speakers, from the village gate to the barrow.
• Ten creatures, three party members, all hand-made pixel art.
• An original score, and the mix moves with the lantern: as the flame dies the melody falls away from the bass, which is the light going out rather than the music fading.
• Oil caches to find, monsters you can walk around instead of fighting, and a lantern you have to decide when to spend.

Play it in your browser first

The full browser build on this page is free and needs no download. Walk out of Aldermoor, get ambushed, and find out whether the ordering puzzle grabs you. If it does, the paid download is the same game as a standalone build you own.

Before you buy

• Keyboard only. WASD or the arrow keys to walk, number keys to choose an action, SPACE for the timing press and to advance a scene, R for a new region, M to mute. There is no touch input, so this is not a phone game and the listing does not claim to be one.
• Runs in any modern browser. The download is the same build, packaged to run offline.
• Roughly thirty minutes to reach the barrow the first time, and rather longer to beat it.

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Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Built on our own first-party sprite and tileset work — the same art we sell to other developers, used here in a game so you can see what it looks like in motion.

AI disclosure: code and graphics are AI-generated, and the text and dialogue are AI-written. The music and sound are synthesised procedurally from code rather than by a generative audio model. Declared truthfully in the listing's own AI fields.