How to play
One orb, thrown and recalled. Everything below follows from that.
Controls
| Input | Does | |
|---|---|---|
W A S D | Move | Diagonals are normalised, so cutting a corner is not faster than running straight. |
Mouse | Aim | The wizard faces the cursor whichever way it is walking. |
Left click | Throw / swing | With the orb in hand, throws it. With the orb out, swings at whatever is next to you. Holding it does nothing unless you have taken Charged Shot, which moves the throw to the release and winds it up while held. |
Right click (hold) | Recall | Drags the orb back to you. Let go early and it keeps the velocity it had built. |
Space | Blink | Instant, passes through walls and enemies, and cannot land you inside geometry. |
F | Utility ability | Only bound once you have bought one — abilities are sold only in the Essence Shop, one on every visit. |
U | My Upgrades | Lists every card you hold, coloured by rarity. Escape (or U again) closes it. |
Escape | Pause | Opens settings without leaving the run. Everything freezes and goes silent: sound effects are held and the music stops. The music also stops whenever the game window is in the background, and comes back when you return — unless the game is still paused. |
F11 | Fullscreen | |
F3 | Developer overlay | Spawns anything, grants any card or ability, forces a wave modifier or special wave. |
The run
Throw it, then get it back
You have one orb and it is both the weapon and the problem. Thrown, it flies until something stops it, bouncing off walls and enemies and losing speed the whole time. Held, you have a melee swing and nothing else. Nearly every card in the game is an answer to some version of the question "what happens between the throw and the catch".
Recall is a second weapon
Holding right click hauls the orb back, and a returning orb hits whatever it meets just as hard as a thrown one. It comes home round the scenery, not through it — a tree in the way stops it until you step aside. Releasing early keeps the speed it gathered, so a recall is also how you re-aim without picking the orb up. Walking into a moving orb catches it — you do not have to wait for it to come to rest.
A wave, then one card
Clear the field and the upgrade screen deals three cards, and you take one. Utility abilities are not dealt here: they are sold only in the Essence Shop. Rerolls and banishes accumulate on a timer rather than being spent currency, so a bad screen late in a run is a smaller disaster than a bad screen early.
A build, not a pile
Every card belongs to one of twelve families, and every card you own in a family makes that family's other cards likelier to turn up — so an early lean compounds into an identity. Hold 3, 5 and 7 different cards of one family and its three traits switch on, tracked in a column on the right of the screen; a card that would complete one says so above it. A run starts with one card from the family you pick on the menu. A legendary bought in the shop comes with a curse, printed on the card before you take it. The run ends with your build's name — the leading family's adjective and the runner-up's noun, a Frost Juggernaut — and each build name keeps its own records.
Every fifth wave, the Essence Shop
Kills earn essence — one each, five for an elite, twenty-five for a boss — and after every fifth wave the free card is replaced by a shop: an ability, a boost and a card pack for each of your two biggest families, a reroll, and Transmute, which sacrifices random cards you own for a choice of one a rarity higher. Unspent essence carries over, and your total sits in the top-right corner beside a purple orb.
Why you died
The death screen has a recap down its left side: what killed you and how hard, which three enemies hurt you most, which three of your cards did the most damage, your biggest single hit, and how much you were healing per wave — averaged only since your healing last changed (a healing card, a curse, the drop rate halving), so it describes the build you died with rather than the one you had ten waves ago. See Upgrades opens every card you ended the run with, and the screen waits for Continue (or Space) rather than closing on the first click. Kills made through the F3 developer menu never count toward the recap.
It gets specific, not just bigger
Waves ramp, but the interesting pressure comes from named events: a modifier that changes the rules of one wave, a designed wave built from one kind of enemy, and a fixed boss every tenth. None of them are simply "the same wave with more health".
The field is part of the fight
Trees are cover, not just obstacles. A ranged enemy only fires with a clear line to
you and its shots die on the first tree they cross (they fly over rocks and stumps), and
a Siphon's beam
snaps the moment something comes between you. Enemies arrive from just past the edge of
the screen, walk round scenery rather than through it, and spread into a ring rather
than a heap. When your orb is off screen a big outlined arrow at the edge points to it —
one per orb if you have two — with how far away it is written beside it. A boss always has
its own arrow: a large crimson one at the edge, labelled BOSS and with its name, whenever it
is off screen, and a crimson marker bobbing over its head when it is on screen. Once a wave
has nothing left to send and three or fewer enemies remain, arrows point to them too.
On easy and normal the map always leaves at least two orbs' width (96px) between any two
solid obstacles, so there is room to throw between them and nothing to wedge in. Hard keeps
its tight woods.
The upgrade screen
Clearing a wave opens it. You are dealt three cards and take one. Utility abilities are never in it: they are sold only in the Essence Shop. After every 5th wave the free card is replaced by the Essence Shop instead. Which cards you are dealt leans toward the families you already own, and a legendary bought in the shop carries a curse.
Rerolls redraw the screen; banishes remove a card from the pool for the rest of the run. Both accumulate on a timer rather than being spent currency: you gain a reroll every 2 waves and a banish every 4, capped at 9 and 9. A bad screen late in a run is therefore a much smaller disaster than a bad screen early, which is the intent — the early screens are where a build is decided.
Rarity is a draw weight, not a power ranking. A card is offered in proportion to it:
common 40 · uncommon 28 · rare 16 · epic 8 · legendary 3.
Cards at their stack cap, cards whose prerequisite you do not own, and cards that conflict
with something you already took are all removed from the draw rather than offered and
wasted.
Staying alive
Bodies drop hearts, and the chance depends on how badly you need one — it reads your health fraction, so the field stays clean while you are healthy and starts paying out when you are not.
| When | Chance | |
|---|---|---|
| Above 85% health | 1.2% per body | You are fine, so the field stays clean. A heart here would only be walked over and wasted. |
| 60 – 85% | 4.5% per body | Chipped. Just often enough to notice that bodies are worth walking to. |
| 35 – 60% | 10% per body | In trouble. The wave starts paying you back for clearing it. |
| Below 35% | 20% per body | One in five. The band is deliberately steep at the bottom, because this is where a run is decided. |
| After wave 15 | ×½ every band above | By then a build is strong enough that a steady trickle of hearts would make it unkillable. The recap's healing average restarts here. |
| Elite kill | ×2 capped at 85% | A fight you chose to take should pay for itself. |
| Boss kill | 2 drops guaranteed | On top of the boss's own large heal. |
| Nightmare | ×0.7 on top of everything | Fewer hearts, but the same third-of-max heal between waves as every difficulty. |
A heart lives 20s, flashes for the last 3.5s, drifts to you inside 130px at 520px/s and is collected at 34px. At most 8 sit on the field at once, so a wipe in a big wave cannot carpet the ground.
Healing goes somewhere.
Player:heal banks the excess so Overflow can turn it
into shield instead of letting it evaporate at the cap. Shield absorbs before health, and draws
as plates over the bar. Mitigation — Stoneskin, Last Stand — runs through a single
mitigate() funnel, so two sources cannot silently multiply into immunity.
Dying stays possible late in a run. Invulnerability after a hit is 0.3s, so a crowd can land a second hit. Shields are capped at 30 (they never drain, but never grow past that). Life Steal heals on kills rather than hits, Overflow converts half, Second Wind is 3 seconds, Ward rebuilds in 25, and every difficulty heals a third of your max health between waves (Easy 40%). Every heal runs through one function, so a Plague Priest's aura, the Withered curse and Blood Price all scale it the same way — and the death recap can count it.
Difficulty
Picked before the starting family, at the start of a run, and locked for its duration — changing the menu mid-run cannot rewrite what you are playing. Records store the difficulty alongside the score, because a HARD score and an EASY score are not the same number.