When you have the ritual and the god, or at least think you have enough to make an educated guess, you'll need to head to Stonehenge and fight your way through it to cast the spell. Your notes and spellbook will keep track of these more obvious clues for you, but you might want to jot down the colours and meanings of the runes you find on your own. It might be a rune scrawled on the wall whose meaning and target might help you contextually figure out the relationships between the deities or what they stand for, or it might be a scrap of journal or ancient text that more bluntly spells out a portion of the information you need. In dungeons, towns that have been overcome by the shadow, you can find a variety of clues. Both the god responsible, and their colour and runes, change on each playthrough. Your ultimate goal is to both figure out the components of the ritual needed to banish the god invading the world, as well as which of three unspeakable entities that god is.
Based on whatever you accomplished before you died, the game will grant you experience points, and whenever you level up, you're granted upgrade tokens you can spend on improving everything from your maximum health and sanity to your initially abysmal ammo capacity for your next playthroughs. All you can do is keep hunting for clues by examining everything you can and searching everywhere, but if you fail, don't worry. but they also might insist you're delusion and plead for you to seek help. A family member might text with an encouraging message or whatever funds they can spare. All manner of random events can pop up, and how you decide to deal with them can have unexpected outcomes. A town marked with red is a potentially hostile place with a dungeon to explore, location that's green is somewhere safe(ish) you can find goods and services in, and an orange location is a place you have an objective in. From your car's trusty GPS, you'll select and travel to destinations, and in towns you'll have a handful of options to choose from, like getting medical attention, finding people to sell you supplies, or looking for work.
Oh, and did we mention? The game is randomized every time you play, so don't expect to quit after a run of bad luck and have everything be all hunky-dory because you think you know where everything is, you filthy cheater.Ī lot of the basic gameplay plays out something like a choose-your-own-adventure text game. You'll need to work fast, but balance your health and even your sanity, as you search a landscape ravaged by desperate, terrified people and dark forces. Every action you take takes time, and with only 72 hours remaining before the world is swallowed by darkness, you don't have a lot of it.
The only option you have is to drive from town to town, investigating rumors, taking odd jobs, and clearing out places the evil has infested, but the clock is literally ticking. but the catch is, you're not sure which god it is, and banishing the wrong one would be disastrous.
Currently playable for free in Beta, the game stars you as humanity's last hope to perform a ritual to banish an ancient god whose shadow is slowly consuming the world. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw draws inspiration for everything from indie hit Faster Than Light and cult classic Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem for his roguelike survival horror adventure game The Consuming Shadow.