Vespillo

The heroes are dead. The work remains

A small multiplayer game about hooking your way down into a dark hole, robbing the dead, and trying to climb back out with the loot.

The great adventure already happened. The heroes went down, took the glory, and mostly died down there. You are not one of them. You are a worker sent down afterwards to dig through what they left and carry it up. Somebody has to.

You get around by hook: swing, reel yourself in, stay off the traps. Every piece of loot is a real, physical thing, so a full bag actually slows you down and swings around as you move. How greedy you get, and when you turn back, is your call.

Losing your flesh (the normal kind of death)

Most of the time, dying only costs you your body. Your skull drops where you fell, you get back up as a skeleton, and you go back to work. Go fetch the skull and you are whole again. It is a nuisance, not the end.

Lighting the candle (the real kind)

Whenever you decide you are ready, you can light your candle. After that there is no respawn. None. You die, you stay where you fell - in the dark, in a world other people are still walking through - and you do not come back until another player finds your skull and carries it up to the Keeper.  

You cannot save yourself. Someone else has to come for you. So you lean on a friend or family, or you lie there and hope a kind soul - or someone after the reward - hauls your skull up.  

You light it once. You can snuff it later, and that is it: ordinary shifts forever after.

Down. Load up. Get back.

• The hook. Swing, reel yourself in, stay off the traps. 
• Carry a real haul. There is a lot of loot - some you can use, some you can wear, some you can   fight with, some you can eat. 
• Wear what you find. Your gear is loot, and it decides whether you can beat the boss. 
• Work together in the dark. Share the descent, pull each other out, and bring home what other   people left behind. 
• The Keeper. Sell loot, take work orders, trade skulls for keys, and level up with every rank

Made by one person, still early, and it is multiplayer - so it plays a lot better with a friend or two along. I actually lost my motivation to continue working on this game. It was fun to make unique mechanics, so it's staying as an experiment.