THE LONG DEFEAT

You start at level 99 and the game takes it away.

You go down the cairn at full strength. Everyone does, because the stair only opens for someone who has something to set down. Every ward you break, the cairn takes a piece of you in payment, and you choose which piece.

The rule the whole game is built on

What you sacrifice does not disappear. The boss two rungs below inherits it.

Give up your strongest fire attack to something that already wards fire and it costs you nothing. Give it to something that does not, and you have just armed the thing waiting for you. The screen tells you which boss will get it before you choose, so this is a decision and never a surprise.

That is the whole design, and it means the run gets harder in a way you can see coming and cannot entirely avoid. You will finish, if you finish, carrying almost nothing.

What is in it

• 10 rungs down the cairn, across four factions, each with its own wards and its own rhythm.
• 4 companions holding 14 powers between them. When someone's last power goes, their portrait goes dark and the row is struck through. That is the only place the premise is a picture instead of a number.
• Wards are drawn fresh every run, so the arithmetic of what is safe to give away is different on every descent.
• 5 music cues, composed and rendered by our own synthesiser. The battle theme ships as 6 separate stems and loses a voice every time you sacrifice a power, so the score gets thinner as you do.
• 82 sprite frames of first-party pixel art. No third-party media of any kind.

The free demo is a real slice

Play the first 3 rungs in your browser, right here on this page, with no download. It ends after the second sacrifice, which is the first point at which you have watched something you gave away come back at you, and that is where the buying decision honestly gets made.

The $14.99 download is the full descent: all 10 rungs, the ending, and the arithmetic of getting to the bottom with nothing left. A single portable .exe for Windows, no installer.

Controls

Arrow keys or 1 to 9 to choose, ENTER to act, M for sound. Touch works too: tap the right half of the screen to act, the left half to move the cursor.

Play it on a desktop or a laptop. The smallest type on the character sheet is 9 px on a 960 wide canvas, so on a 390 wide phone it lands at 3.7 px and you would not be able to read your own cards. That is measured, and it is why this page does not claim to be mobile friendly.

Honestly

A run is about twenty minutes and there is no save, so it is built to be replayed. The source ships raw and commented inside the download; js/rules.js is the entire sacrifice economy if you want to read how it is balanced.

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. This game is AI written and the disclosure on this page says so in full: the code, the art and the writing are AI made. The music and sound effects are not. They are procedural synthesis computed from a written score by our own code, with no audio model anywhere in the chain.