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You Will Return
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About the game
You Will Return is a quiet, tense game about reading a message left for you by someone who did not want you there. You play an astronaut who enters an ancient alien structure, with a colleague talking to you over the radio. The walls are covered with strange symbols, and the structure is full of traps hidden under the floor.
Each stretch of the structure is a small grid of tiles, and some of them hide traps. The game works like a minesweeper: the tiles you uncover show alien symbols that tell you how many traps are next to them, so you move tile by tile, reading the symbols and working out where it is safe to go. Hold Z and the suit's big light and scanner come on, and the floor and the walls show their symbols. Take a wrong step and the astronaut is hurt; the damage slows you down and carries on between levels, so carelessness is remembered.
The other half of the game is language. The writing on the walls is a message in a made-up alien tongue, and the game plays with translating it. At first you see only raw alien words; as you go deeper into a level, the translation improves, from a rough guess to a confident reading and, in the end, to what the text really said. The message is a warning about a place that should be left alone, and the translation is, level by level, the story. There are ten levels, a prologue and a few conversations between the two astronauts.
Playing it here
You Will Return was made for WASM-4, a fantasy console: an imaginary handheld with a 160 by 160 screen, four colours, a D-pad and two buttons, for which independent developers write new games. It was made in January 2022, for the first WASM-4 game jam, and it runs here in the official WASM-4 web runtime. The game saves your progress on the WASM-4 disk, in this browser, and the menu lets you start a new game or continue the saved one. The cartridge is about 43 KB.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | move the astronaut |
| Z (button 2), held | scan the symbols on the walls |
| X (button 1) | skip the cutscene; advance the dialogue |
| Enter | WASM-4 menu (pause, reset, save and load the emulator state) |
On a phone or tablet, the WASM-4 runtime shows touch buttons on the screen.
Tips
Read the symbols. Each symbol is a count of the traps around the tile. Compare neighbouring tiles before stepping.
Scan when you arrive. Hold Z in each new area to see the floor and the walls before you move.
Go slowly after damage. If you get hurt, the astronaut walks more slowly. Use the time to think about the next step instead of the last one.
FAQ
Does it save? Yes. The game stores your progress in this browser.
Is it a horror game? It is eerie, more than scary: a dark ruin, a warning and a lot of silence. There is no violence beyond the traps.
Credits and licence
You Will Return was made by Sander in 't Veld, who wrote the code and made the graphics and the music. It is released under the MIT licence. The cartridge is the optimised one that the author published in his repository, without changes, and it runs in the official WASM-4 runtime (ISC licence). The licence texts are linked from this page.