WHAT WE BURN

The house is full of things that belonged to people you loved. Every one of them will burn. Every one of them is worth more than the heat.

You have one fire and fifty-three keepsakes. Carry a thing back to the Hearth and choose, and it is always the same choice:

• Burn it. It buys you Warmth. It costs you Humanity. And it summons the Frostbound of whoever it belonged to — they stay in the house, and they take the warmth back.
• Keep it. Put it on the Mantel, where it gives you almost nothing and is worth everything. Kept things resonate: the same owner sings, opposites clash.

The best fuel is always the worst thing to lose. High warmth means high cost and high glow, so a player who burns optimally strips the Mantel of exactly the pieces that would have thawed the Frozen Heart. There is no build that wins both ways.

You cannot lose your progress

Warmth zero is not death and not a restart. You harden: a little more of you goes, the world loses some of its colour, and you wake at the Hearth keeping every kept memento. Hardening is the difficulty curve and the checkpoint at the same time. The game saves after every action, so close the tab whenever you like.

Four systems, and each one feeds the others

• Warmth and Humanity — one decision, repeated under rising pressure.
• The Mantel — your upgrade tree is the things you refused to burn, so progress is paced by restraint rather than grinding.
• Rooms remember — a room gets colder the more you have already taken out of it. Greed compounds geographically.
• The Frostbound — which monsters exist, and where they hunt, depends on which keepsakes you burned. The horror is authored by the player.

53 hand-authored keepsakes across ten owners and all eight emotions, each with its own line of prose, and each growing its own frost sigil at runtime from the same five numbers the economy runs on. Two keepsakes that play differently look different, necessarily.

Controls: mouse for everything. 1–3 select carried, B burns, M mutes.

Made for Month of Horror #1 — theme "Frozen Heart"

Disclosure

Every asset in this build was made by Core Systems Asset Factory — no third-party art, audio, fonts or code. The surface textures are generated by our own procedural rasteriser, the frost sigils are drawn by the game itself, and the music was composed by us and rendered through our own synthesiser.

AI disclosure: Code yes. Graphics yes. Text & Dialog yes. Sounds no — the audio is self-contained procedural synthesis, which itch.io’s own guidelines state is not generative AI. The synthesis code is AI-written and is covered by “Code yes”.

More from Core Systems Asset Factory

More from CSAF

• ONE ROOM DREAD — Something is in the room with you. Three instruments, one lamp, no second guess.
• Wicklight — You are the light. They live in your shadow.
• STARCHART — Every voyage you fly is inscribed forever.

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