PLUMBLINE

**A metroidvania with no keys, no upgrades and no items.** Every door in this game was already open
to somebody who knew where it was. The only thing that changes between the start and the end is what
**you** know.

You are lowered into a sealed shaft to find out why the last three surveys disagree. You carry a
plumb line: a weight on a cord that reports the **true depth** of a place whose layout lies about it.

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### What you actually do

The weight goes where you cannot. It is small enough to fall through a barred floor that you are
not. Set it down in the right place and something answers.

The line measures true depth, and the rooms are drawn so that counting tiles with your eye gives the
wrong answer. The instrument does not care what the room looks like.

There is no key to find, no upgrade to collect and nothing to equip. Every gate here was openable
from the moment you arrived. **A second run takes a couple of minutes**, because by then you know —
and that is the whole design, not a shortcut around it.

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### What is in it

* **4 regions** of one sealed shaft, each cut from different rock: dressed masonry, wet
moss, engineered brick, and raw chasm nobody ever built in.
* An instrument that **refuses by name** — it tells you why it will not answer, every time.
* A depth that runs past **114 marks**, and an ending that explains why three careful surveys
each stopped somewhere different and each of them was right.
* No timer, no score, no fail state. You cannot die and nothing is lost by exploring.
* Music and sound that are **synthesised, not sampled** — there is no audio file in the game at all
except two composed tracks, and nothing here needs attribution.

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### Try it first

**The browser version on this page is the first 2 of the 4 regions, free, no
download.** It ends where the game stops teaching you, and it says so on screen. Nothing is withheld
from it to make you buy — it is the first half.

The paid download is the **full descent** for Windows: all 4 regions, both remaining gates,
and the ending that resolves the three surveys. A single portable 89 MB executable — nothing is
installed, nothing touches your registry, delete the file and it is gone.

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### Controls

Arrows or **A/D** move · **Z** jump (hold for higher) · **X** dash · **Down** lower the weight ·
**Up** reel it in · **C** take a reading · **M** mute · **F11** fullscreen on the desktop build

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### Honesty

This game was made with AI assistance and the tags on this page say so. The sound is the one row
that says **no**, and it is worth explaining: every effect and the room tone are generated by Web
Audio oscillators while you play, and the two music tracks are composed as note data and rendered by
oscillator. No generative audio model was used at any point. Tile art is from Verdant 05: Depths, a
Core Systems Asset Factory tileset; the ironwork and the brazier are generated in-project from that
pack's own palette. There is no third-party material in this product.

Windows may warn you the first time you run the download — the build is not code-signed, because a
certificate is a yearly cost this studio has not taken on. The browser version is the same game if
you would rather not.