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Retromancer
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About the game
Retromancer is a mix of a puzzle game and a bullet hell, built around one idea: you can reverse time on things. The Lich who once was the person closest to you has become corrupted and torments the land, and your power over time is the only thing that might bring them back. Everything you do in the game comes from that single ability.
The story starts with you already dead. Your first act is to reverse your own death, and from there you make your way through a series of small rooms in a stark black-and-white style, reversing a burnt-out campfire to bring light back, a door to open it, a candle to reveal a way out. Enemies fire patterns of bullets, and the same power turns them against you or for you: you can deflect them back at whoever shot them, and later you can freeze the bullets next to you in the air. Reversing is not free, so the purple border around your hand drains while you use it and fills back up in time.
There are three bosses, bats, skeletons and slimes in between, friendly villagers to rescue along the way, and two endings. Hats are an important part of the game: each player picks a funny little hat before the adventure starts. The game is available in English and Japanese.
Playing it here
Click Play, wait for the download (the game is about 17 MB and loads once) and click inside the game so it gets the keyboard and the mouse. The intro can be skipped with Enter or Esc. From the main menu choose Play, pick a hat and a difficulty, and press Start. Your progress is not saved: a run is short, and Enter restarts the room you are in. The optional features of the original that need the internet (a chat-bot that rewrote the dialog and networked co-op) are not part of this version. A second player can still join on the same computer by pressing Start on a gamepad in the lobby.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Mouse | move your hand |
| Left click | reverse time on the object under your hand |
| Right click | deflect bullets (once you have learned it) |
| Space | freeze the bullets next to you (once you have learned it) |
| W A S D | move your body, once you have reversed your death |
| Enter | restart the room |
| Esc | quit to the menu |
| Gamepad | right stick aims the hand, bumpers extend it, right trigger reverses, left stick moves |
A few things worth knowing
Try reversing everything. Your hand glows yellow over things that can be reversed. A burnt-out campfire, a candle or a door may be the only way forward.
Mind the purple border. It is your power meter. Use it in short bursts, let it recover and do not hold it down while bullets fly.
Bullets are a tool. Reversed bullets hurt the one who fired them, but watch out when time goes forward again.
Rescue the pals. The villagers you save are counted at the end of the game.
Credits and licence
Retromancer was made by kettek (engine, programming, art and lore), liqMix (programming, music, sound effects and levels) and Amaruuk (menu art and logo), and is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3. The font is x12y16pxMaruMonica by hicc, free to use in games. For this site the game was compiled to WebAssembly with a few changes: the chat-bot text feature, the networked co-op and the web links of the credits were removed, and the music was re-encoded at a lower bit rate to shorten the download. The licence texts, the source of this build and the patch are linked from this page.