NOVEM

One lamp. Three things that never come back. Nine circles down.

A first-person dungeon crawler for touch or desktop. Your lamp has a dial. Turn it up and you see further - and so does everything else. Every step you take burns oil, and there is no more oil than what you find down there.

The dial is the whole game

Five settings, from shut to wide open. At 0 you see nothing and cost nothing. At 4 you see five squares of corridor, and every sleeping thing sees you first. Raising it costs oil the instant you turn it. Lowering it is free - and free is the most useful thing you will learn.

Three resources, none of them regenerate

• Oil: burned by the lamp, one tick per step. Runs out, you die in the dark.
• Blood: spent to swing, and spent again when something lands a hit on you.
• Salt: thrown. The only way to kill a thing without paying blood for it.

They are found in caches and nowhere else. There is no healing item, no rest, no regen tick. Whatever you walked in with is the budget for the whole descent.

Nine circles

Limbo
The Storm
The Mire
The Hoard
The Styx
The Tombs
The Burning Sand
The Malebolge
Cocytus

Each one bends a rule rather than adding a monster. Sight is capped. Caches are thinner. Nothing sleeps. The map lies to you. And each floor draws its own weather on top of that, so the same circle is not the same corridor twice.

You can leave

Light a brazier and you may turn back from it. What you are carrying goes into the bank, and the bank is the only thing that survives a run. Die instead and the dark keeps all of it - the summary will tell you exactly how much, and how many steps you were from the stair.

Purgatory

The fire you start at, and the fire you come back to.

• The table buys ceilings - how much oil, blood and salt you can hold at all.
• The pot renders tallow into kit: a pitch flask, a pouch of packed salt, bound linen.
• The vows are side-grades. Take something away, get something back.
• The reliquary remembers the ten relics the shades have given you.

And when you win

The way down opens again, harder. Six grades that stack: the wick is thin · they listen · the caches are picked over · the cold reaches up · nothing sleeps below the Styx · one vow is owed. Each rung pays more into the bank.

Controls

Touch and Keyboard, portrait and desktop.

Gesture	Key	Does
Swipe up	W	Step forward
Swipe left / right	A/D	Turn
Swipe down	S	Turn around
Tap in the world	Click	Attack, Open, Take, Speak ...
+/-		Dial the lamp
Belt tap	Belt click	Use
Character tap	Character click	Character sheet
Map tap	Map click	Dungeon Map

Notes

Your progress is kept in the browser's own storage on your device. Everything you see is generated at load: the stone, the fog, the sky, the maps. Every run is seeded and reproducible.

Credits

• Three.js (https://threejs.org)
• Kenney (https://kenney.nl)
• Craftpix (https://craftpix.net)
• xyezawr (https://xyezawr.itch.io)
• devkidd (https://devkidd.itch.io)
• Karsiori (https://karsiori.itch.io)
• VT323 (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/VT323)

Licences (CC0 1.0 · SIL OFL 1.1 · pack licences)