Rise From Ashes

The fog has covered the village for as long as anyone can remember. It hides the sky, and no one alive has seen what lies beyond it. Only the Spire rises through it. The legend says whoever reaches the top learns the way out. The legend also says something inside is waiting to make certain no one does. RISE FROM ASHES is a tactical survivors-like. The horde pours in, your Scrolls fire on their own, and the screen fills with everything you built. What decides the run is not the drop you happened to get. It is the deck you assembled before you walked in.THOUSANDS COME. YOU CUT THROUGH EVERY ONE. Pure bullet heaven pressure. No complex inputs, just movement and positioning while the screen keeps filling until the timer runs out. Near the base of the Spire a floor asks you to survive a little over a minute. Near the top it asks for six, and by then it is asking a lot. The horde is not faceless. The Skeptic is a warhorse pinned to the ground by a stake through its belly, unable to take a single step, still firing at anyone who can. The Vainglorious is a four-faced mask hanging in the air that never once strikes you itself, and simply keeps sending its followers to do it.SYNERGIES DECIDE THE RUN. Auto-chess grammar dropped into real-time combat. Every Scroll carries traits, and every Scroll you field carries synergy markers with it. - Main Synergies commit you to a class. Blood Knight caps its own Life and grows stronger the more of it is missing. Plaguebearer stacks poison until the floor rots. Ranger turns every dash into a free volley. - Sub Synergies sharpen a single trait. Shooting drives projectiles faster, Resonance makes a Scroll fire one more time, Illusion puts more summons on the field. They do not all switch on at the same threshold. One activates off a single Scroll. Another stays dark until nine. So every run asks the same question: how many of your limited slots do you commit, and to what? And a build is never locked in. You tear the deck down and rebuild it before every single battle.FORGE YOUR SCROLLS. THEN CARVE THEM. Scrolls are not handed to you finished. You buy them off a rack you reroll with Embers, and then you go to work. - Merge copies of the same Scroll to raise its Star Grade. At the third star it unlocks a Variation that rewrites how the skill behaves rather than how hard it hits. A scythe stops traveling in a straight line and starts sweeping in every direction. A cooldown disappears entirely. Arrows begin piercing. - Bind Sigils into a Scroll. A Sigil only fits a Scroll whose traits accept it. Some add raw numbers. Others add pierces, summons, extra triggers. And some grant a Synergy the Scroll never had, which puts a threshold in reach that you had no business reaching. The two halves feed each other: raising a Scroll's Star Grade is also what opens its Sigil slots. No two Challenges ever assemble the same Scroll twice.SPECIALIZE. DO NOT JUST GROW. Between Challenges you return to the Village, and permanent growth arrives on two axes that both punish spreading yourself thin. Memories and Prisms. In the House of Mirrors, Recall Points go into a six-tier tree of Memories split across Attack, Defense and Utility. That much is familiar. Then you lay a Prism over it. A Prism covers a shape on the tree, horizontal, vertical or diagonal, and every Memory caught inside it gains a second effect that flat stats cannot buy: a share of your Life folded into your Armor, one revival per Challenge. Prisms cannot overlap. There are only four. So the tree stops being a checklist you fill in and becomes a decision about where to concentrate. Testaments. Rune pages, one bound to each Main Synergy. King, Class and Common Testaments rewrite what that class does at its core. And they do nothing at all unless that Synergy is live in your deck, so committing to a page is committing to a way of playing. Change your mind whenever you want. Resetting the tree costs nothing and returns every point.EVERY RUN IS A VOLUME OF MANGA. The world is drawn entirely in black and white, in ink and hatching, like the interior pages of a comic. The interface laid over it goes the other way, bold and vivid, like the cover of one. The main menu is that cover, and starting a game turns it. We did not want you to feel like you launched a game. We wanted you to feel like you opened a book. [hr][/hr] [h3]ALSO IN THE SPIRE[/h3] - The Wheel of Fate. Three reels spin before every floor and you take one of the three stages they land on. Match all three and they fuse into something better, or into something considerably worse. Luck tilts which way. - Arcadia. Something that cannot be killed is eating into the Wheel while you climb. - World Gimmicks. One-shot fixtures sitting on the map, waiting for you to decide to wake them. The Ravenous Furnace lays down a field of fire and burns half your Embers to do it. - Battle, Event, Rest, Treasure, Boss. Events arrive as a single inked panel with the text set beside it, and end in a throw you can pay to weight. - Fully localized in 12 languages. [hr][/hr] "I got lucky and won." is not the sentence we are after. "I won because I built it well." is.