LODESTONE

**The dungeon does what the stones you carry add up to.**

You go down wearing a carved harness with four sockets. Twelve engraved marks exist, and each one does something to how your body moves: how hard you can push, how much the dark air drags on you, which way you drift when you stop steering, how much of a hit the rock gives back.

You are never told what any of them do. You are never even shown one on its own. What you feel is the **sum of the four you are carrying**.

So the only way to learn what a mark means is to build a carry set that isolates it, hold a direction, and pay attention. Three of the twelve are the exact opposite of three others. Carry both halves of a pair and that part of your handling cancels out completely, which is the cleanest question you can ask the dark.

## The lamp is the clock

It burns while you descend, so dawdling costs you. It burns much harder when you meet rock **at speed**: a graze is nearly free, a collision is most of your light. Too fast and you smash, too slow and you go dark. Where a carry set sits between those two is the whole game.

If the lamp goes out you lose nothing but the climb.

## What carries between runs

Not a stat. Not an unlock. There is nothing to grind here and no upgrade to buy. What you take out of the shaft is knowing what a shape means, and that lives in you rather than in a save file.

## Play it in your browser first

The free edition on this page is **four shafts and six marks**, and it is a real lesson rather than a teaser. The six span movement in both directions and the fourth shaft is genuinely hard.

The **Windows download is twelve shafts and all twelve marks**, and it ends somewhere.

## Controls

Arrows or WASD to **hold** a direction. You do not step, you accelerate. Z or Enter to confirm, X to go back, P to pause, M to mute. On a phone, drag to steer and tap to confirm.

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Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Every mark and the whole harness are cut at runtime by the game's own code. There is not one image file in this game, and the source ships with it, unminified.

AI disclosure: the code, art and text were made with generative AI assistance. The music and sound effects are procedural synthesis from note data, not the output of a generative audio model.