Emberstill

🔥 Welcome to Emberstill

A turn-based tactical puzzle about a village frozen in time. Plays in your browser on desktop and mobile.

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You're a lone traveler passing through unfamiliar land when you stumble upon Emberstill — a village gone completely still. Its people stand petrified mid-motion, turned to stone, frozen not by cold but by something else entirely. No one greets you. Nothing moves. Except you.

Armed with whatever weapons you can find — each shaping how you move and strike across the village — you'll have to piece together what happened here, room by room, statue by statue.

Every room you restore reveals a little more of the truth behind Emberstill's silence.

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⚔️ How it plays

Exploring the village is free: walk anywhere you like. But step into a fight and the arena closes around you, and combat becomes turn-based, like a board game.

• Your turn: one action. Move one tile, attack, swap weapons or wait. Every action costs your turn, even a missed attack. Bumping into a wall doesn't.
• Their turn: one action each. Then every enemy acts, one at a time, under the exact same rule. No hidden tricks: if an enemy has to walk toward you, it can't hit you that turn. Stepping back is a real move.
• Every weapon has a shape. The Sword hits only what's right next to you. The Spear reaches two tiles away but can't touch anything adjacent. The Bow shoots far down a line but is useless up close. Picking the right weapon for the distance is the whole puzzle.
• Read the board by color. Blue is you: your aim, your attacks, your turn. Purple is them: enemy outlines, their attacks and the arena border. A ring on the ground always marks whoever is acting right now.
• Falling isn't the end. If you go down, only the current fight restarts. Everything you've already restored stays restored.

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🎮 Controls

Action	Keyboard	Touch
Move	Arrow keys / WASD	D-pad (bottom-left)
Attack / confirm	Space	Bottom button of the action cross
Swap weapon	Q	Left button of the action cross
Wait a turn	Z	Right button of the action cross
Cancel	Esc / X	Right button (while aiming)
How to fight (reopen)	H	? button (top-right)
Mute / unmute	M	Speaker button (top-right)

📱 On mobile: play in landscape. The on-screen controls appear as soon as you touch the screen, and disappear if you use a keyboard.

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📜 Credits

• Design, art and code: André França
• Tiles and icons: Kenney.nl (Tiny Town, Tiny Dungeon, input icons) — CC0
• Music: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — "Magic Forest", "Ossuary 4 - Animate", "Unholy Knight", "Mystic Force". Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 — http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Sound: 400 Sounds Pack by Chequered Ink — free for any use, including commercial, credit optional
• Fonts: Metamorphous, VT323 — SIL Open Font License 1.1
• Made with Godot 4