Ember

You are an ember in a cave that wants you out.

Your light is the only thing keeping you alive — and it is the only thing you have to spend. It burns down on its own. It burns down faster when you use it. Wisps flee from it and die in it, but every one you burn costs you a little more of yourself.

Stay bright and you are safe, slow, and running out. Go dim and you are fast, agile, and one touch from going dark.

Two ways to play

• Endless — how long can you keep it going? A boss arrives every fourth wave and does not stop coming back.
• The Descent — twelve depths with an ending you can actually reach. Three of them are awake.

Three things down there are too big to burn by walking at them

• The Maw breathes in. It drags you toward it, drains you, and spits out more of them — then opens, for three seconds, and you had better be ready.
• The Choir sings on tethers that shield it. Only a flare cuts the song, and the song grows back.
• The Hollow unmakes light. It snuffs out what you need, slams rings of dark through the room, and starts blinking in phase two.

Cinders come back with you

Every run banks cinders, won or lost. Spend them at the Hearth on ten permanent upgrades — a dash, a shield, a hotter burn, a second flare ring — and go back down better than you left. You probably will not clear The Descent on your first try. That is the idea.

Controls

• Move — WASD or arrows
• Flare — Space
• Dash — Shift (once unlocked)
• Pause — P · Mute — M · Fullscreen — F

Touch works too: left half of the screen is a stick, right half flares. Turn your phone sideways.

How it was made

Everything here is generated from code — the sprites are hand-placed pixels, the font is a 5×7 bitmap drawn glyph by glyph, and every sound is synthesised in the browser. No asset packs, no engine, no network calls. One HTML file.

It was built with the help of an AI assistant (Claude), which wrote the code, the pixel data and the audio synthesis. Designed, directed and tested by a human.

Free forever. If you got something out of it, the tip jar is right there.