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Explore the Grotto
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About the game
Explore the Grotto (the title screen simply says The Grotto) is a short top-down adventure set in a cave. You arrive as a newcomer, and the first person you meet, Miru, asks for a favour: get rid of the bats that live south of her place, and pick up the sword waiting to the east. Not far away lives Tom, who sees things very differently and insists that the grotto cannot do without its bats.
The cave is made of rooms you cross one screen at a time, with pits to avoid, signs to read, chests to open and corridors so dark that you need a light to find your way. Along with the sword there is a torch to find and an extra heart that makes you sturdier. The bats fight back, and so, eventually, does whichever neighbour you end up crossing.
How you treat the bats decides which of the two you face at the end, and each choice leads to its own ending. One of the endings hints that there is still more to find.
Playing it here
Explore the Grotto was made for WASM-4, a fantasy console: an imaginary handheld with a 160 by 160 screen, four colours, a D-pad and two buttons, for which independent developers write new games. It was written in Odin for the first WASM-4 game jam, in January 2022, and runs here in the official WASM-4 runtime. Click Play and press X on the title screen.
The game itself does not save, and it takes a short sitting to finish. Enter opens the WASM-4 menu, where you can save and load the state while the page is open (2 and 4 do the same directly); R starts over, as one of the endings suggests. A gamepad works too, and on touch screens an on-screen D-pad and buttons appear.
Controls
| Key | WASM-4 button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | D-pad | walk |
| X | button 1 | start; talk; read a sign; open a chest; swing the sword; next line of dialogue |
| Z | button 2 | switch item (sword or torch) |
| Enter | — | WASM-4 menu |
| R | — | restart the game |
Space or V also works as X, and C as Z.
A few things worth knowing
Talk to everyone twice. What Miru and Tom say changes as the story moves on, and their lines are the only guide to what to do next.
Select the torch in the dark. The torch only lights the way while it is the item in your hand, so press Z to switch to it before entering a dark corridor, and back to the sword when you need to fight.
Read the sign near Tom's corridor. It gives step-by-step directions through a passage you cannot see, and following them takes you straight through.
Credits and licence
Explore the Grotto was created by Donatien Rabiller (Sharundaar), who wrote the code in Odin and drew the art, including the title and game-over screens. He dedicated the whole repository to the public domain under Creative Commons CC0 1.0. It runs here in the WASM-4 runtime (ISC licence). The licence text is linked from this page.