| Action | Keyboard |
|---|---|
| Move | W A S D · Arrow keys |
| Shoot | I J K L · Arrow keys |
| Place a bomb | Shift · Ctrl |
| Use your active item | E · Space |
| Use a card or pill | Q |
| Map | Tab (hold) |
| Pause | Esc · P |
| Mute | M |
| New run | R (asks first) |
| Delete a saved run | Press and hold CONTINUE on the title screen |
You are Wren, and you are going down. Each floor is a handful of rooms laid out around a boss. Clear rooms, find the boss, kill it, and take the trapdoor it leaves behind. Then do it again, deeper, until something stops you.
Dying ends the run completely. There are no lives and no continues — what you keep is what you learned.
One hand moves, the other shoots, and they are independent. Walking left while firing right is the whole game; if you find yourself standing still to aim, that is the habit to break first.
On a phone both sticks are invisible until you touch them, and they appear wherever your thumb lands rather than at a fixed spot. Shooting snaps to the four cardinal directions on purpose — a thumb cannot hold a diagonal, and pretending otherwise reads as the game ignoring you.
Red hearts sit in containers. Damage empties them, red hearts refill them, and items like COAL HEART add more.
Soul hearts are different and better: they sit outside your containers, they are always spent before your red health, and nothing refills them. Treat a soul heart as one guaranteed mistake.
Everything is counted in halves. Most hits cost a full heart, most heart drops are a half.
Doors open when a room is clear. Two kinds never open on their own: a gilded LOCKED door wants a key, and a secret room has no door at all — you find the wall it is behind and bomb it.
A locked treasure room holds one item on a pedestal, and it is usually the best thing on the floor. That is what your first key is for.
A shop stocks three items at 15 coins each. A floor rarely gives you 45 coins, so a shop is a choice, not a shopping list.
A bomb opens rocks, secret walls and shortcuts, and it hurts you if you stand in it — unless you are holding WET MATCH, which makes you immune to your own fire entirely.
The single most valuable thing to bomb is a TINTED ROCK: the pale, glinting one. It is the only thing in the game that is guaranteed to drop something, and 45% of the time that something is a soul heart.
Items on pedestals are permanent. Most are passive and simply stack — two IRON NAILs are +2 damage. A few are ACTIVE: you carry one at a time, it charges by clearing rooms, and you fire it with E.
Cards and pills share ONE held slot. Picking up a second drops the first back on the floor, so you can always change your mind until you leave the room. Press Q to use what you are holding.
Every card is good. Pills are a coin flip — four of the six help, two hurt, and there is no way to tell them apart before you swallow one.
Most rooms pay out nothing: the empty result is 46 of the 100 weight in the drop table, deliberately. Luck bleeds weight out of that empty bucket and spreads it across everything else, saturating at luck 6.
So luck does not make the numbers bigger. It makes the world more generous — and a few items (NINTH TOOTH especially) key their proc chance directly off it.
Every floor is a pure function of the seed. The same seed always builds the same cellar, down to which room pays out what — clearing a room on a given seed pays the same no matter how you got there. Click the seed on the title screen to type your own.
The game checkpoints every time you enter a room, and again when you background the app. To stop deliberately, pause and choose LEAVE + SAVE; the run will be waiting under CONTINUE.