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The Purple Night
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About the game
The Purple Night is a short action platformer about escorting a lost soul back to the afterlife across one long night. What makes it unusual is that there is no health bar on screen: your sword is your health. You start with a long sword, and every time something hurts you the blade gets shorter, first a short sword, then a dagger, and one more hit after that ends the run.
That trade is the whole game. The long sword reaches far and hits hard, but it is heavy, so you walk slowly and jump low. With a dagger you move quickly and attack fast, but you have to get close and you cannot afford another mistake. Some defeated enemies release a spark of health that drifts back to you and lengthens the blade again.
Along the way you meet bats that swoop down from above, bouncing slimes, charging emus and wandering flames, and at the end of the night a fiery boss who does not fight alone.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy Advance: a new game by independent developers, not a commercial release. It was made in a few days for Mini Jam 92, whose theme was death, and runs here in the mGBA emulator. Click Play and the night begins right away.
There is no save in the game itself, but F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | GBA button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | D-pad | move |
| X | A | jump |
| Z | B | swing the sword |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
Shorter is not always worse. Losing the long sword hurts, but the dagger makes you much more agile. Use the extra speed to dodge rather than trade blows.
Hit and step back. After you are hurt there is a brief moment when nothing can touch you; use it to get out of the way, not to push forward.
Watch the sky. Bats attack from above and are easy to miss while you are looking at the ground ahead.
Credits and licence
The Purple Night was made by Corwin Kuiper and Gwilym Inzani (LostImmortal and setsquare), with graphics by Gwilym and music by Sam Williams. It is one of the example games of agb, the authors' Rust library for the Game Boy Advance: the code is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and the graphics and music under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The source code of the build served here is hosted alongside the game, and the licence texts are linked from this page.