Gravebloom

CARVE LIGHT THROUGH THE BLIGHT

Gravebloom is a territory-capture game in the tradition of Qix and Volfied, wearing a gothic stained-glass coat.

You pilot a lantern-vessel along the safe border of a corrupted arena. Step off that border and you start drawing a line — and while that line is open, you are vulnerable. Anything that touches it ends the attempt. Close the line back against safe ground and everything you enclosed is reclaimed: the blight lifts, and the stained glass beneath it comes back to full colour.

Reclaim 80% of a stage and you move on. There are ten.

WHAT YOU'RE DOING

• Cut and close. The bigger the region you dare to enclose, the more ground you take — and the longer your line is exposed while you do it.
• Read the threats. Drifters bounce blind through the blight. Listeners wait for you to start a cut, then come for you. Border Wardens patrol the safe edge you were counting on to close against. Proximity Mines sit still until you get close, then fire.
• Choose what carries the light. Four vessels, one gift each — DROP dashes through a gap, BELL wards off a lethal hit, SEED roots every threat in place, MOTH surges ahead. They change strategy, never movement.
• Uncover what's underneath. Every stage hides an authored window. You only see it by taking the ground back.

FEATURES

• Ten hand-authored stages, each with its own window and three-layer score
• Four vessels with distinct abilities and remembrance pages
• Twelve deeds to restore in a churchyard archive
• Full gamepad support — stick or d-pad 
• to move, one button for your gift
• Rebindable controls, volume, screen-shake, flash, and brightness settings
• Your furthest stage carries between sessions — CONTINUE picks up where you reached
• Plays in the browser. Nothing to install.

CONTROLS

Action	Keyboard	Gamepad
Move	WASD or arrow keys	Left stick or d-pad
Vessel ability	Space	A
Pause	Esc	Start
Reset the arena	R	—

All bindings can be changed in Settings.

READ THIS BEFORE YOU PLAY

This is an early build, and it is here to be judged rather than admired.

• It is hard, and it does not hold your hand. Five lives cover the entire ten-stage run, and running out of time on a stage costs one of them too.
• Your furthest stage is remembered. Reach a new stage and the title screen offers CONTINUE — it starts you there again on a fresh five lives. A game over still ends the current run, but it no longer sends you all the way back to The First Cut. Most players will not clear more than the first few stages on a first sitting — that is a known limitation, not a surprise.

WHAT WOULD GENUINELY HELP

If you play, even for five minutes, the comments are open and I read all of them:

1. Did you understand what you were supposed to do without being told?
2. Was closing a cut satisfying — and did you understand why an attempt ended when it did?
3. How far did you get, and at what point did you stop wanting to keep going?
4. CONTINUE now brings you back to your furthest stage on a full five lives — does that feel like the right amount of persistence, or should more carry over (score, chosen vessel, position within a stage)?

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Credits
Design, code, art, and music by Kaskade Labs.
Built with Godot 4.7.1. Type is Cormorant Garamond by Christian Thalmann, used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. All art and audio are original to this project.

Visit the official Gravebloom website.