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Tyro Shaman
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About the game
The village is getting ready for the Sun Festival, the yearly farewell to winter, when people start to fall ill and collapse where they stand. You are Naura, who has lived for two years as apprentice to the Shaman in her hut in the forest. One morning you wake to a voice in a half-dream, and the hut is empty. Without the Shaman, healing the sick is up to you, so you pick up your tambourine and set out.
Tyro Shaman is a small adventure built around rhythm. You walk from the hut through the forest to the village, and every patient you meet hides a spirit that has fallen out of balance. Step close and the screen changes to the ritual: the spirit plays a rhythm of eight beats, shown in a simple box notation, and you must answer with the rhythm that will heal it.
What makes it a puzzle is that each kind of spirit wants a different answer. The calm Earth spirit only needs its rhythm repeated. The eager Wind spirit wants it one beat early, the easygoing Water spirit one beat late, and the fierce Fire spirit wants every beat turned into a rest and every rest into a beat. Each ritual is faster than the one before, and you have three lives for the whole journey; lose them and the story starts over.
Tristan Repolusk wrote it in Game Boy assembly, music included, as his final project for a university course on music and ritual, drawing on Korean shamanism and the healing music of the Wana people of Indonesia.
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. Click Play, press Enter at the title and read through the opening with Enter.
It is a short game with four rituals, meant to be played in one sitting; the cartridge does not save. F2 saves the current state of the emulator in this browser and F4 brings it back, which helps before a hard ritual. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Game Boy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | Control Pad | walk |
| X or Z | A or B | play a beat during the ritual |
| Enter | Start | start the game, skip a text screen |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Get close. A ritual only starts when Naura stands right next to the patient.
Count the lead-in. After the ritual begins you get four beats before the spirit plays its eight; then you have eight beats to work out your answer before you play it.
Learn the four spirits. Earth: repeat the rhythm. Wind: the same rhythm, one beat early. Water: one beat late. Fire: swap beats and rests.
Mistakes cost lives. Every wrong rhythm takes one of your three lives, and running out sends you back to the start of the story.
Credits and licence
Tyro Shaman is by Tristan Repolusk (meteoritenhagel): code, music, story and original art, under the MIT licence. The font is Public Pixel by GGBotNet, in the 8x8 adaptation by Santiago Crespo (CC0). The scenery tiles are from Gumpy Function's free Game Boy RPG fantasy tileset, and the character sprites from The Pixel Nook's GB Studio Character Pack (CC BY 4.0), with some sprites modified by the author. The music player is hUGEDriver (public domain). The licence texts are linked from this page.