Bursary of Miracles · Homecoming Assessment № IX ◆ Amount owing: one miracle

You just killed the demon lord.
Now walk home — and get weaker every mile.

A backwards action-roguelite. You begin at 100% power, having just won the war the songs are about. The seven zones between the castle and your own front door each drain you — until you fight the doorstep beast at 22%, and the things hunting you turn out to wear the kingdom’s own sigil. The gratitude is a bill. The kingdom wants its miracle back.

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Power on assessmentCastle → Doorstep

Schedule A · Power, assessed mile by mile

The whole hook fits in one column of numbers.

Seven miles. Your power falls at every campfire. Here is the twist most games would end on and this one opens with — and the punchline the kingdom would rather you didn’t read.

Castle Gates100%

Power fantasy. Everything dies in a swing or two.

“The demon lord is dead by your hand. You feel invincible.”

Cursed Wastes82%

You start respecting the grunts.

“His dying words: "It was never mine to give back." Your sword feels heavier.”

Bone Fields66%

Wisps detonate. An elite prowls the field.

“An old battlefield. Some of the bones wear the kingdom's colors.”

Dark Forest52%

Stalkers you can barely see. Dodging starts to matter.

“You rest against a tree and rise weaker than you sat down.”

Misty Marsh40%

A shaman heals everything you chip down.

“The mist eats the road — and the surveyor's marks with it. For one mile, no one is counting. The mist keeps its own tally.”

Village Road30%

Shielded knights, brutes, elites. Your name is on the wind.

“Chimney smoke. Your name on the wind. The hunters here do not hide their sigils.”

Your Doorstep22%

Your own gate. The thing growling in the dark used to fit in your palm.

“Your gate. Your garden. The thing growling in the dark used to fit in your palm.”

Enemies get weaker near home.
You just decay faster.

Two ways to read this document

A game for your hands — and for the part of you that reads the small print.

◈ For the hands

Fast, readable, skill-first action.

Telegraphed swings you dodge on a single learnable beat. Perfect-dodge witch-time. Bullet deflection that sends the shot home harder. A crowd director that makes packs dangerous, never cheap. It hits like the games it grew up on.

If you loved Hades, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight.

◈ For the heart

Bureaucratic horror with a body count of names.

Nearly every monster on this road was a person the kingdom’s paperwork happened to — a conscript rendered down, a collector kept past his contract. So of course they have names, epithets, and last words. The evil is boring and clerical on purpose; the goodness is small and specific: soup, bread, a second plate.

If you loved Inscryption, Disco Elysium.

Schedule B · Conduct of engagements

Learn the pattern. Punish the mash.

Every enemy attack follows the same rhythm, so the whole bestiary teaches one skill: read the flash, roll through it, punish the recovery.

The one learnable beat

Every enemy attack runs the same rhythm — windup, a white flash with an audible tick, the strike, then a spent, punishable recovery. Learn it once; it reads across the whole bestiary.

Perfect dodge → witch time

Roll through a strike at the last instant and the world slows to a crawl while you keep full speed. The roll’s stamina comes straight back.

Send the shot home

Roll through an enemy bullet on the beat and you deflect it — it reverses, turns yours, and hits back harder. Melee perfect-dodge bends time; bullet perfect-dodge sends it home.

A crowd that takes turns

A souls-style director: at most two enemies commit to an attack at once while the rest circle just out of reach. Packs feel dangerous, not unfair.

Weight you can feel

Hit-stop, particles, screen shake. The 3-hit combo ends on a finisher — more damage, a bigger arc, heavy knockback.

Respect the flash

Brutes, knights and the doorstep beast carry super armour: you cannot stunlock them out of a committed windup. Read the tell and get out of the way.

Schedule C · Persons encountered en route

The road home is inhabited — and it remembers you.

Every zone has people to talk to and choices that echo a mile or two later. Press a button; hear them out. Then keep walking.

You will meet, among others—

a wounded soldier who knows why he was really posted
an ash peddler who trades in blood
a gravedigger burying kingdom boys
a hermit who left the court
a farmwife with bread, and a second plate
children playing at heroes
and the Bard, who keeps meeting you — and keeps cutting verses from your ballad as you fade

The world keeps its own tally.

The Bard’s ballad absorbs your deeds and loses verses as you fade. Everyone you meet gets an epilogue when you arrive — and a darker one if you take the throne instead.

The death screen answers who you were. A waystone with nine notches, a rotted court carriage, a sledgehammer left almost like an invitation — the props carry the history.

Win once and the road itself changes. It remembers across runs.

Schedule D · Standing collections · SEALED

At the end of every mile waits someone the kingdom already made a monster.

Area bosses are the reversal made flesh. They learn — one new telegraphed move per turn of the Age. Two of them we can show you. The rest are sealed until you arrive.

$The Foreman of the Outer Mile$

The recurring enforcer

The Foreman of the Outer Mile

“'I watched you take the war. I take notes.'”

He meets you at every mile, tougher each time, wearing a different greatcoat and a colder face — the fixed reference against which you measure your own decay. There is always, he notes, less of you to collect than there was a mile back.

Castle Gates

Cursed Wastes

Bone Fields

Dark Forest

Misty Marsh

Village Road

Your Doorstep

A taste — the first gate

$The Gate-Serjeant$

The Gate-Serjeant

“'ASSET IN TRANSIT. HOLD THE LINE.'”

The line made a man; now he braces the shattered gatehouse the ballista could not hold. He is the gentlest thing standing between you and the next mile.

Seven fallen vessels · identities withheld

Castle Gates

The Inner Keep

Subject

A name the histories kept — filed, not honoured.

✦ Sealed · Nine Ages

Cursed Wastes

The Weirs

Subject

The river remembers a coronation the ledgers do not.

✦ Sealed · Nine Ages

Bone Fields

Under the Field

Subject

Nine notches on the waystone. This is the ninth.

✦ Sealed · Nine Ages

Dark Forest

The Fairy Ring

Subject

Something the forest was told to forget — still keeping its post.

✦ Sealed · Nine Ages

Misty Marsh

The Sundered Court

Subject

Two who were counted as one, and never forgave the arithmetic.

✦ Sealed · Nine Ages

Village Road

Twofields High Street

Subject

Your street. Your name on the notice-board — with a price beneath it.

✦ Sealed · Nine Ages

Your Doorstep

Your Own Gate

Subject

It used to fit in your palm. It knows the sound of your key.

✦ Sealed · Nine Ages

▓ Further details withheld pending arrival ▓

Schedule E · Effects carried on the person

What you can still hold on to.

Smash the chest hidden in each mile — and fell the gold-shimmering elites — for gear that lasts the rest of the run. Every weapon is a real moveset; the finisher changes shape.

Weapons

SWORDTRUSTY AND TRUE

SPEARLONG REACH

AXEWIDE AND HEAVY

BOWDEATH AT A DISTANCE

THE OXHANDLESTRONGER THE EMPTIER YOU ARE

Relics

WHETSTONE+15% ATTACK

STURDY CLOAK+15% MAX HP

SWIFT BOOTS+10% SPEED

QUICK STRAPS-20% DODGE COST

LUCKY COINMORE HEART DROPS

TRAVELERS FLASKHEAL AT ZONE START

THORN BANDMELEE ATTACKERS BLEED

CURSED CHALICE+30% ATK, -15% HP

HER LOCKETCHEATS DEATH ONCE A ZONE

ROYAL RECEIPTPATROLS HESITATE (+1s)

Appendix · Unfiled · CLEARANCE INSUFFICIENT

There is more road than this.

The loop is not, in the end, unbreakable. Scattered through the walk — in a wind that never finishes counting, a fifth votive candle no one lights, chalk marks in a hand the Crown can’t read — is a stratum the surveyor never mapped. Walk far enough past your own mailbox, into the realm of everything the kingdom ever wrote off, and the game — a loop pretending to be a line — can be made to actually end. What is out there, and who is buried inside it, is ████████ ███ ████ ████████ ████.

✦ You’ll know it when the count fails

Colophon · How it was made

The monsters were written, not drawn.

Every monster, hero and boss you meet is code-generated animated pixel art on the Sweetie-16 palette — built bone by bone from a compact spec by the game’s own art engine, not a sprite among them purchased. The score is synthesized WebAudio. A handful of static images set the scene; every character standing in it is written in code.

108monsters, each with a name, an epithet and a voice

7miles from the throne to your own doorstep

100%of the cast is code-generated, animated pixel art — zero purchased sprites

0hand-drawn characters — every monster, hero and boss is written in code

You just killed the demon lord.
Now walk home — and get weaker every mile.

The whole hook fits in one column of numbers.