The story

The Oubliette is where the crown puts those it wants forgotten. It was dug into the shafts of a colony that vanished centuries ago, and the deeper you go, the older and stranger the dead become, and the less the dark behaves like the absence of light. Twenty-five levels down lies the Sunstone, in the heart of the thing the colony woke. Bring it up and you are pardoned. Nothing down there wants you to leave, and some of it wants to leave with you. A new game opens with four pictures of how you came here, and each boss has three: the way in, the boss itself as it wakes, and what is left when it falls. A tap shows the next, Skip (or Escape) ends them, and Menu, Settings, Story pictures turns them off.

Dreams: when you sleep (a night on a cot, or a rest taken until you are whole) you may dream. Five dreams come due as you go deeper, and one sleep catches up on every one you have not dreamt yet. They are kept in the Journal.

The bosses

Each region ends on a boss floor, a place of its own: the Warden's cell block, the Headsman's execution yard, the Engine's last lit street, the King's throne hall, the Sleeper's living cave. It is darker than the rest, and the way down is sealed. Waking the boss starts the fight proper, and it does not fight alone: the Warden's bell opens the cells, the executed get up from the Headsman's stains, hounds come up the Engine's street, the King's court steps down off its plinths. A boss changes its manner every ten moves (ten seconds in realtime): in its fury it comes in fast and hits hard; on its guard nothing can hurt it, so use the time; in its volley it keeps away and throws. The word across the screen says which. Kill the boss and what it raised falls or runs, the pyres burn down, the dark lifts and the stair opens. The fire floors are worse: molten slag that sets you alight to walk on, and iron vents that breathe a column of fire every five moves (five seconds in realtime), burning whatever stands on them, you or them.

Moving and fighting

Move: arrow keys, WASD, vi keys (hjklyubn) or the numpad, in both paces. Tap a tile to walk there; tap an enemy to attack it. Attacking sleeping or unaware creatures always hits.

Act (Enter, or the red button in the middle of the wheel; the Act button at the top of the toolbar on a big screen): strikes the nearest enemy in sight, or does what your own tile offers: the shaft, the thing lying there, a neighbour to talk to, or a turn of waiting. The button says which before you press it.

Search: space. Wait: period or X. Search reveals hidden doors and traps nearby. Rest (R) puts the torch out (no oil burns while it is out, and the dark you chose does not weigh on you), searches until healed, and strikes the flint again. A night on a cot heals you whole at once for a third of the food a rest would eat, clears what ails you (and keeps what helps), and leaves you Rested: for 300 turns fear gathers half as fast and health comes back twice as fast. What happened (V, or tap the lines): everything the log has said, with the turn of each line.

Shafts: stand on one and press Enter or tap your hero. Each of the five regions ends with something that holds the shaft: on depths 4, 11, 14, 21 and 25.

Gear

Open a thing from the pack to see its page; a swipe across the page, or the arrow keys, turns to the next thing in the pack. Rods grow three ways: with their own level (two of a kind worked together, a sun ember, or found deeper), with your hand (every fourth level adds to a bolt that hurts), and each in its own way from +2. Pack (I): tap an item for actions. Quickslots 1-4 use an item at once; F fires your first quickslot at the nearest enemy.

Unknown draughts and pages are learned by use. Throw the ones that burn, choke or blind rather than drinking them. Heavy weapons and armour need might, which grows with your level. Two of the same item can be merged into a better one, up to +4; a sun ember makes one thing (or your torch) a level better for good, with no limit, and a weapon or armour it goes into has an even chance to need one less might. The first three levels of a weapon or armour are worth a full step each; past +3 every level is worth half a step. A blow that lands always bites: no armour turns more than nine tenths of a hit away, and some of what walks the Forge Halls and the Abyss goes through steel.

Class skills: every class is great with some kinds of weapon and armour (a gold stripe under them in the pack), weak with others (a red stripe), and okay with the rest. Great: +20% to hit, +25% damage, 2 less might. Weak: -25% to hit, -25% damage (rods -30%), 2 more might; weak armour stops 30% less. The Knight is great with blades and polearms and in heavy armour (his brace counts double), weak with bows, thrown weapons and rods and in light armour (he loses his brace). The Sorcerer is great with rods (they never run dry) and staves and in light armour (rods recover faster), okay with bows and thrown weapons, weak with every other weapon and in metal armour (every zap takes longer). The Cutpurse is great with light weapons and thrown weapons and in light armour (the hood hides him until two paces), weak with axes, blunt weapons, polearms and staves and in heavy armour (the hood hides nothing). The Ranger is great with bows (they never run out of arrows) and axes and in light armour (he senses six paces off), weak with blunt weapons, staves and rods and in heavy armour (worse aim, and he senses only three paces off).

Pedlars: besides the peddler's shop, some prisoners have a few things of one kind to sell (ask them after a talk), and now and then a hawker sits on a floor with lamp oil, draughts, pages, food, weapons, armour, trinkets and rods or throwing knives. Every seller has prices of their own: some cheap, some dear; the window says which.

Goblins: the old colony's tunnel folk. They live in the Warren, their fortress, reached through a goblin hole on one floor of the Undercity or the Catacombs; elsewhere you meet one only now and then, and never where people are. How they take you is up to you, and word goes round the warrens. At first they keep to themselves; it takes a good many good turns before they call you friend and fight at your side, and not much harm before they attack on sight. The Journal says how they take you.

People: the condemned keep to themselves until you have shown them kindness (a meal shared, an errand done, a cell opened). After a few kindnesses they help you as they can, and the better they know you, the less the peddler and the sellers mark their prices up for the depth.

People and things: talking to someone, trading with the peddler or a hawker, reading a stone or sleeping in a cot is the Act button (or a tap on them) beside them. Walking into someone edges past them; walking into a stone or a cot does nothing.

Vaults: iron doors are locked. The key is always somewhere on the same level.

Cutpurse: C hoods or unhoods the torch. Ranger: tap distant enemies to shoot them; the bow never runs out of arrows. Sorcerer: rods never run dry in a sorcerer's hands.

Realtime: blows fall on their own at arm's length. The Ranger's bow shoots on its own too, and the Sorcerer's known rods of force and fire fire on their own, at the nearest enemy that is awake and in range whenever nothing is within reach.

Errands: prisoners ask for help: a creature to kill, a keepsake to find, a place to look at, mushrooms to gather, a parcel to carry to someone else on the floor (sealed, if you leave it so), someone to lead to the way down, lamps to light again. Accept, do the deed on that level, and return: take what was promised, let them keep it, or press them for more. Mother Grub in the Warren has errands of her own. Locked cells hold prisoners; the cell key is somewhere on the level, and the freed remember you. Altars take an offering for gold, health, knowledge or a blessing on your weapon. Dread is the violet bar under hunger, and it is always gathering down here: faster the deeper you are, in the dark, with the torch out, with enemies in sight, with every blow you take, much faster when you are surrounded, and beside graves, coffins, blood, bones and the grim markings painted on some floors. The kind markings ease it: the chalk ward (which nothing hostile will cross), the ash sun (which feeds your torch while you stand on it), the ochre hands (which mend you once) and the tallied spiral (which maps the ground around it once). Your own torch only slows it. What eases it is the light of the place (its torches, fires and lamps), altars, talking to people or standing beside them (steadily, two points a turn, with no enemy in sight), a kill, a level, a meal (a fifth of the bar), a night in a cot (which a cot offers whenever you carry any dread, whole or not), and the draught of nerve. Past 40 your aim and your feet suffer, more the higher it climbs; past 75 you cannot rest; past 85 you may freeze for a turn; at 100 you break: you fling something from your pack and run for a few turns with no say in where, or you faint where you stand.

The Boneyard: on some depths of the Catacombs a lych gate stands in the wall of a room. Through it lies a field of graves, walled in, fogbound, lit by nothing but a few grave candles, where dread gathers faster and only the dead walk. A mausoleum at its far end holds something worth the walk. Some stones can still be read (walk into them): memoirs, riddles, verses, and a few that do more than speak. One grave is dug right through: step in and you fall to the next depth, and the stair up from there is buried behind you. The gate is the only other way out.

Journal (O): every level you reach adds a page of what you have learned about the Oubliette, the colony beneath it, and your own case.

Light: your torch burns oil; refill it with flasks of oil, or walk into a campfire or hearth: each push fills it by 15% (in realtime, lean in and it climbs), and simply standing beside a fire feeds it a little every turn; the reading shows how full it is. When it dies you see only what is next to you, and the things in the dark still see you. You only see what is lit. Wall torches, campfires and glowing fungus light rooms from afar; what stands in the dark stays hidden until it steps into the light, and so do you; only a shape one pace past the edge of your light shows, as a shadow, and you can shoot at it.

Zoom: + and - keys.

Controller (Bluetooth pad, on the phone or in a browser): the stick or d-pad moves (in realtime it steers); A attacks the nearest enemy in sight (or closes on it), and with none acts on your own tile (stairs, pick up, wait); B cancels, or opens the menu; X searches; Y rests; LB opens the pack; RB the map; Start (the menu key on a handheld) opens and closes the pack; Select the menu; LT blocks and RT strikes on the guard circle, and RT fires a quickslot outside a fight; hold LB and press A, B, X or Y for quickslots 1 to 4; the sticks pressed in zoom. In any window the stick moves a gold ring between the choices, A presses, B closes. Wireless pads such as GameSir's work in their Xbox, iOS or Android modes; on an iPhone, iPad or Mac use the pad's iOS or Xbox mode. Menu, Settings, Controller is where the pad is chosen: any controller, or the GameSir Pocket Taco, which clamps over the lower half of an upright phone: with it chosen the game keeps to the top two thirds of the screen, above the clamp, while the pad is connected. The same page chooses whether the touch controls step aside while a pad is in hand, and if a pad's buttons come out mixed up, Controller setup there asks you to press each one, and the game remembers it for that pad.