MOONWORT

You are the warden of a physic garden, and last night the moon changed its mind.

Every night for eleven years someone has taken the reading at Lowmoor: what the moon is doing, and what the beds are doing about it. Tonight the moon is wrong, and the beds have agreed with it. Moonwort has thrown three bells where the book promises five. Rimeleaf has opened flat. Something on the chalk downs has gone over into inflorescence and is starving, because what it has become does not know how to eat.

You have one night, three roads, and a book of empty plates.

The spell art is the recipe, rendered

This is not a game with pictures of spells in it. Every working draws its own seal from the actual plants composing it — their root form, their leaf shape, their bloom form and count, their humour. Change a reagent and the lattice changes, because the lattice was never a drawing.

The same is true of the plants. Every plate in the book is generated from that plant’s live state, so a herb cut under the wrong moon is drawn differently — not recoloured, drawn: buds where bells were, ranks of leaves the book does not mention at all.

• 26 plants, each drawn from its own botany
• 33 workings, each seal composed from its reagents
• 295 distinct plate renderings — 59 plates × 5 faces of the moon
• composed from a 33-mark hand-authored vocabulary (10 leaf forms, 9 blooms, 6 roots, 8 rings)
• no sprite sheet, no atlas, not one PNG of a plant or a spell

The moon is a mechanic, not a mood

A reagent cut under the moon now overhead is stronger. One cut under the wrong face is weaker, and you can see that it is before you cast it. Measured across the four encounters, the phase your satchel was gathered under swings win rates by 74.3 points.

Creatures are answered, not out-damaged

Six humours in a ring, each answered by exactly one other. Draw a creature and the book tells you what it is made of and what answers it — and wears its guard down while you look. But the school that answers a thing grows on a road you may not have walked yet. The order you take the three roads decides which creatures you can answer, which is the real decision in the game and the reason a second night plays differently.

What ships

• Episode One — The Wrong Moon: 24 scene nodes, three roads and a lunar dial
• Four creatures, four companions, 2,695 words of prose
• 8 painted backdrops, 4 character plates, 4 creature plates
• Four composed music tracks — written as note data and rendered, our own work, not generated audio
• 5,877 lines of hand-written JavaScript. No engine.

Measured, not asserted

• test suite: 11 suites, 117 assertions, 0 failed
• balance bots: as-played win rates 42.5%–79.2% across the four encounters — no encounter unwinnable, none free, the boss the hardest fight
• decision quality: thinking beats random play by 4–40 points an encounter, and no single strategy solves the game

The demo — free, in your browser, on this page

One road of three. The demo takes you from the garden through the herbarium and the composing table, out to the crossroads, and down whichever road you choose — arrival, a gathering plate, and a real duel fought to a result. Then it stops.

The lunar dial, and what is standing in the sixth mark on its rim, are in the paid edition.

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