itch.io

Hi. We're a two-person team, and this is the first time our game has been playable by anyone outside our own machines.

The demo is Act I with the Horse Master. It's a roguelike deckbuilder, but the twist is that every card is an actual Chinese chess move — so the fights aren't about out-damaging things, they're about where you stand when the hit lands. That idea works in our heads and in our playtests. Whether it works for you is the thing we can't test ourselves.

So if you play it, we'd love to hear about any of these:

• Did the core idea land? Specifically: was there a moment where you realized "oh, I should move instead of attack"? If yes, roughly when? If never — that's the most useful thing you could tell us.
• Where did you get confused? Any point where you didn't know what a card did, what an enemy was about to do, or why something died.
• Where did you get bored? Be blunt about this one. "I stopped playing at X" is worth more to us than a compliment.
• Anything broken. Browser version especially — different GPUs do surprising things.

You don't need to write an essay. One line is fine. "Quit after two floors, didn't get it" is genuinely useful.

There's a Windows build here too if the browser version runs rough — it's smoother on longer runs.

We read everything. Thanks for giving it a shot.

— AgentGameLab

Die and Decay — the pun landed on me about two seconds late and then I grinned.

The good tension here isn't the roll, it's the allocation. I almost never had the

faces I wanted, so every turn became "which of these three slots am I going to

disappoint." Putting the pressure on the spend instead of on the RNG is the right

call — losing to a bad roll feels cheap, losing to a bad decision doesn't.

And it kept asking for slightly more than I had on hand, right up until it got me.

Good escalation.

There is no wrong answer (in a way they are all "wrong answer“)  ：）

Thank you — this is really useful. You've pinpointed two things I'll fix: you should absolutely be able to review your Clues at the final decision (locking it there was a mistake), and the ghost needs to move faster by default. On the cultural side — it leans on a specific Chinese funeral custom (头七, the seven days a spirit lingers), and I clearly need to weave that context in more gently for players meeting it for the first time. Genuinely grateful you took the time.

Thank you for actually sitting with it — and the mental image of you poking the seventh lamp for five minutes is going to stay with me 🕯️
You're right that Accuse needs an ending of its own; right now Let Go carries all the weight and its counterpart doesn't answer back. That's the honest gap. And the Stranger's blank face is meant to be the answer — he has no face for a reason that's the whole knot of the story — but clearly we didn't make that legible enough. These are exactly the notes I needed. Genuinely grateful you took the time.