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Death's Apprentice
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About the game
Every master needs an assistant, and Death is no different. You are the new apprentice: a small figure in a hooded cloak with a scythe, and your first day of training is simple. Walk through the rooms of Death's realm and collect the hourglasses your master has left lying around.
The lessons start slow. The first room teaches you to walk, then to jump and to hold the jump for a higher one. Later rooms bring harder ideas: hourglasses that are running out of sand, so that the lesson restarts the moment one reaches zero, jump pads that throw you across a gap, doors that need a key you have to fetch the long way round, and a small dash for gaps that look too wide. And yes, Death's domain has spikes. Touch them, or fall off the edge, and you simply respawn, with a joke from your master and no harm done. The tone is dry and playful, like a school lesson with a very patient teacher, and nothing in it is gruesome.
A speedrun clock in the corner starts with your first move and runs until the last hourglass, and the game keeps your best time in this browser. It is a short game, a handful of rooms, and the author says as much at the end: the contest deadline came, and he was too tired to make more. The scenery is drawn with lines and rectangles, with no images, and the music was made with the SoundBox music tool.
Christoph Schansky made it for js13kGames 2022, a contest where the whole game has to fit in 13 kilobytes.
Playing it here
Click Play and use the keyboard: the game has no mouse or touch controls, so it is meant for a computer. Press M to turn the music off if it gets in the way. When you finish the last room, reload the page to start over.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| A / D, or left / right arrows | walk |
| W, or up arrow | jump (hold it to jump higher) |
| Shift (while jumping) | a little extra push forward |
| M | music on / off |
A few things worth knowing
Hold the jump. A tap and a held jump differ a lot in height, and some hourglasses are only reachable with the higher one.
Plan your route. In the rooms with several hourglasses, the order matters. Go first for the ones that are about to run out.
A fall is free. There is no life counter, so when you are stuck, jump off the edge on purpose: you respawn at the start of the room.
Credits and licence
Death's Apprentice was created by Christoph Schansky (DerBenniBanni). The game is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3. The licence text, the notice for the SoundBox music player, the complete source code of this exact build and a small style patch (it only makes the game fit its frame) are linked from this page, and the code is also on GitHub.