Save Maurice!

About the game

Jimmy's uncle Maurice went off digging in the mines and has not been seen for two weeks. Aunt Linda is worried, so she sends Jimmy after him with a pickaxe, a lantern and two pieces of advice: don't wear out the pickaxe, and keep the lantern topped up. There is also a voice from "the fourth wall" that explains the controls, and the story only makes full sense once you reach the bottom.

The game itself is a single long dig. You start on the grass by a tree and work your way straight down through layer after layer of earth, two hundred and fifty-six rows of it. The ground below the first screens is generated at random every time you play, so no two digs follow the same route. Soft dirt gives way in a single blow, while rock and the mixed blocks take more work, and open pockets in the ground let you drop several rows for free.

Every swing of the pickaxe counts against you. Your score starts at a thousand and loses a point per hit, so the real game is reading the ground ahead and picking the cheapest way down: walk along a ledge to reach a gap, go round a rock rather than through it. Meanwhile the lantern burns down as time passes, and the cave grows darker. Small lamp recharges are scattered in the rock; pick them up to brighten the screen again, and every charge you still carry at the end is worth extra points.

Les-Wet wrote it in Game Boy assembly for the Game Boy Competition 2025, starting from ISSOtm's gb-starter-kit, with pixel art by Fredou and a soundtrack composed in hUGETracker.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in binjgb, a Game Boy emulator compiled to WebAssembly, in the original four shades of grey that the author recommends. Click Play, press Enter at the title, then read the story with X or skip it with Z.

A dig takes a few minutes and the cartridge does not save; the final screen shows your score, the number of hits and the lamp charges left. F2 saves the emulator state in this browser and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Look before you swing. A short walk along a ledge to an open hole is free; a block of rock costs several hits.

Fall when you can. Dropping through an empty pocket takes you down without a single swing.

Keep the light. The lantern starts with three charges and loses them over time. Collecting recharges keeps the cave visible, and each charge above three at the end adds fifty points, while each one below takes fifty away.

The scoring. Score = 1000 − hits + 50 × (lamp charges − 3) + bonus. The author's guide: above 1000 is legendary, above 900 great, above 800 good. Finishing with fewer than 500, 450 or 400 hits earns a bonus of 50, 100 or 200 points.

Got stuck? If you dig yourself into a corner, A, B, Start and Select pressed together take you back to the title screen for a fresh dig.

Credits and licence

Save Maurice! is by Les-Wet: code, design, story and music ("Dusty", made in hUGETracker), with pixel art by Fredou and testing by Xilo. It is free software under the GNU GPL version 3, which the author confirmed also covers Fredou's art. The game is built on ISSOtm's gb-starter-kit (zlib licence), with Damian Yerrick's PB16 decompressor and random number generator (zlib); the music player is hUGEDriver (public domain), and the hardware.inc, debugfile.inc (CC0) and rgbds-structs (MIT) includes come from their own projects. The complete source code of the build served here, with the build script, is hosted alongside the game, and the licence texts are linked from this page.