White flash, deflect it. Red flash, dodge it.
Until the bell rings, this street belongs to the yokai, and all you carry is a lantern and a sword. Read the flash of each blade, deflect at the last moment, break a stance and finish it in one cut, and swing up to rooftops and bamboo on a grapple. A run is eleven rooms, and the Nue waits at the end.
- Genre
- Ink-wash third-person sword-fighting roguelite
- Platform
- Web browser, desktop
- Status
- Playable on the web (stage one)
- How to play
- Play it in the browser with mouse and keyboard
- Built with
- Three.js, JavaScript, Vite, Web Audio, Blender
Gameplay
Read the flash
A white flash can be deflected by blocking at the last moment, followed by a counter; a red flash can't be blocked and has to be dodged. Every enemy telegraphs its moves, so you read first and act second.
Stance and executions
Plain cuts only fill an enemy's stance and never break it; deflects and dodging a red thrust do, and a broken stance ends in a one-cut execution, with its own finisher for each enemy type.
Grapple and height
Aim at a lit lantern marker and throw the grapple: fly up and land on a roof, or swing out and let go at the top of the arc. Up high isn't safe either, with archers in stage one.
Eleven rooms, one boss
A run is combat rooms, rest stops and a boss room, each with different terrain. After every room a yokai offers a choice of three boons that change how the sword plays, and it all ends in the Nue's thunderstorm.
All ink and paper
The look is hand-painted ink wash: grass and bamboo sway in the wind, a run moves from day into night, and the warmest colour on screen is the lantern in your hand.
Screens
Under the hood
The grapple has two kinds of hook: a perch flies you onto a roof surface, a swing carries you under the hook and out with momentum; pathfinding understands height differences too.
The interface comes in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English and Japanese, and the fonts are subset to the characters each language actually uses so the web build stays loadable.
A smoke test drives the built game through a full loop in a headless browser and takes a screenshot at each step, and over a thousand unit tests guard the combat, grapple and room rules.
Next game
BONK! BEANS
Bonk everyone off the island. Last bean standing wins.