Portugues
Faustian Sands
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
You hoist your bag onto your back and set out across the desert. There are 90 miles to go, a little food, one bandage and five coins, and you are sure that love and fortune wait on the other side, if you can only endure the trial.
The game is a text adventure in a trail-game style. Every few hours an event interrupts the walk: a soldier asking for food, a priest who knows a shortcut, bandits, vultures over a dead animal, some strange mushrooms, a wounded leg. You choose between two answers with the keys 1 and 2, and the result changes your food, bandages, money, health and speed, while the sun crosses the sky above a small pixel-art figure. When the day ends, a devil appears with a proposal. In return for food, health or speed, he asks you to give up something that has nothing to do with the road: the stars in the night sky, your left eye, the colours of the world.
It was made for Ludum Dare 44, whose theme was "Your life is currency". The author's own note says that he wanted to ask how much of your life, and of the world around you, you would trade away, and whether even the stars are a part of your life. The offers are optional, and the ending depends on what you give up.
Playing it here
The game runs in the page. It uses only the keyboard, does not save and is about 1 MB. Click on it once so that the page has the keyboard focus, then follow the on-screen text: Enter to advance and 1 or 2 to choose.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Enter | advance the text |
| 1 / 2 | choose between the two options |
Tips
Food and bandages decide how far you get. Take the sensible option when you are low, and keep an eye on the numbers at the top of the screen.
The devil's offers are optional. Think about what each one costs before you accept: they change how the world looks, and they last.
It is short. A full run takes only a few minutes, so play it again and choose differently.
Credits and licence
Faustian Sands was made by Seb Jones for Ludum Dare 44 and is in the public domain under the Unlicense. The bitmap font is a public-domain font from OpenGameArt, and the browser build uses SDL2 (zlib licence) from the Emscripten ports. The texts of the licences, the source, a small patch (the Q key, which closes the desktop game, does nothing on the web) and the build script are linked from this page.
FAQ
Nothing reacts to the keys. Click on the game once and try again.
Can I quit the game? There is no quit key on the web: just reload the page to start again.
Does it save? No, a run is a few minutes long.