Cursed Souls: Giovanni's Orchestra

About the game

You wake up in an open grave, like a nameless body in the morgue, and you are cursed. Rats run away as you climb out, a raven circles the bell tower and a voice calls you from below: "come down to me, ashen one." The dungeon has three levels, one above ground and two beneath it, and on each of them the job is the same: find the downstairs, stand on it and press Space to summon the boss, beat the boss, and press Space again to go down.

What makes the game is its way to count health. You carry up to six power orbs in a stack, and the number of orbs is your hit points. There are four kinds: Fire burns an enemy next to you, Lump hits one two tiles away, Slime teleports you two tiles, and Ice wraps you in armor. You can only use the last orb you picked up, and when you are hurt the stack loses orbs from the top, so the order in which you collect them is a plan. Enemies drop orbs when they die, more often when you kill them with fire, and some of them curse you, which locks slots of your stack until you kill, fight a boss or move on. There is no luck in the hit chances or damage, and no enemy can deal more than three points in a turn, so every loss is something that you can see coming.

It is a short, severe game with an ascii look, an examine mode that describes every enemy in a line, and a list of achievements (press A) that works as a list of challenges for the next run.

Playing it here

Click Play and the game loads in the page (about 1 MB, downloaded only when you press the button). Press Space to pass the introduction text. The game saves your progress and your achievements in this browser; clearing the site data erases them. The page makes no requests outside this site. A keyboard is needed.

Controls

In the aim mode and the examine mode: arrow keys or hjkl move the cursor, PgDn, n or o lock the next target, PgUp, p or i the previous one, Space uses the orb, and Esc goes back to the normal mode.

Tips

Think about the order of your orbs. The last one in the stack is the one you can use, and it is also the next one you lose.

Kill with Fire when you can. It is the surest way to get an orb back.

Mind the curses. A cursed slot cannot be used or filled, so removing curses can matter more than killing.

Read the enemy line. It gives its name, the orb that it drops and its hit points, and the orb tells you how hard it is.

FAQ

Is it hard? Yes. It is a short game that expects you to die a few times and learn the monsters.

Is there a save? Yes: the game keeps your run and your achievements in this browser.

Does it work on a phone? No: it needs a keyboard.

Credits and licence

Cursed Souls: Giovanni's Orchestra was made by Bozar (Red Tabby Studio) and is free software under the MIT licence. The game includes the rot.js library by Ondrej Zara (BSD 3-Clause). The licence texts are in the licence file linked from this page, and the game is exactly the one the author publishes.