Lantern Run

It runs in your browser. About ten seconds to load, five minutes to finish, and it is free.

You are a lantern keeper in a cave that eats light.

The flame is the only thing keeping the dark off you. It is also the only thing that can hurt the dark back. And it is burning down the entire time — kerosene is found, never given.

Five minutes. One cave. Three things that want the flame out.

• The lantern is the weapon. The glow burns whatever stands in it. Hold the beam, and it narrows, brightens, and bites harder — up to 2.5× damage after seven seconds of held burn, if you can keep it on something that long.
• Fuel is the clock, not a health bar. It is how long you have left. It shrinks your safe radius as it empties, and the focused beam drinks it twice as fast. Every fight is a decision about what to spend.
• An elite at 1:00. Bosses at 3:00 and 5:00. The schedule never changes. What changes is what you brought, and which of the eight attack sets they drew.
• You keep what you earn. Wicks buy permanent upgrades between runs, and a wall of candles remembers every descent that got far enough to be worth remembering.
• The music is watching the same clock you are. Four sections that turn over on the schedule — and as the kerosene goes, the score does not get frantic. It gets emptier, until there is only the room left.

No procedural generation and no filler. One authored cave with six layouts, eight boss attack sets, twenty-one drafted modifiers, three Dark Pacts you can arm on purpose to make the run worse and richer, and a thirty-six candle wall that outlasts everything else you do.

This is a demo, and I want to know if it is any good

It is free. There is no upsell, no account, no email box. I am trying to find out two things:

1. Does the first five minutes land? Does it make sense without being explained, and does dying make you want to go again?
2. Can you actually play it? ← this one matters more than it looks

Accessibility — please tell me where this fails

I built a set of options for this release and I do not know whether they are enough, because I am not the person they are for. All of these are in SETTINGS, and there is a FEEDBACK button in there too.

• Game speed, 50–100%. Slows the whole world including the clock, so the fight is identical and you get up to twice as long to react to it. Runs made with it do not write records, and nothing else about them changes.
• Full key rebinding. Every action. WASD is not assumed.
• Controller support. Menus navigate on the stick, and the aim follows the pointer — on a Steam Deck that is the right trackpad.
• Brightness calibration with a real test pattern, because this game lives in near-black and monitors disagree about near-black more than about anything else. If the cave is a flat black rectangle for you, this is the screen to open first.
• High visibility mode. Raises the ambient floor and outlines the shadows.
• Larger text.
• Screen shake and flash intensity, each 0–100%, where 0 means off rather than quieter.

What I would most like to hear: could you read the text, could you see the shadows in the dark, and could you play it with the hands and the hardware you have? If any of the options above missed, say which one and how. Comments are open and I read all of them.

What this game records about you

Nothing leaves your machine, and there is nothing in the game that could send it if it wanted to, there is no network code in the build at all.

The game keeps a short local note of your first twenty finished runs, beside your save data, so that if you choose to tell me how it went you have something concrete to paste. It is:

• which run number it was, campaign or endless
• how it ended and how long it lasted
• kills, Wicks, and kerosene picked up
• which bosses you lived long enough to meet, and which you actually killed
• which accessibility settings were on

There is no name, no account, no ID, no timestamp, no location, and no hardware or browser information; nothing in it could be tied back to you. You can read the whole thing in SETTINGS → FEEDBACK, copy it with one button, or press FORGET IT ALL and it is gone. The game plays exactly the same either way.

I am telling you this in more detail than a free pixel-art demo probably warrants, because "we collect anonymous analytics" usually means the opposite.

Controls

	Keyboard & mouse	Controller
Move	WASD or arrows	Left stick / D-pad
Aim	The mouse	Right stick, or the Deck's right trackpad
Focused beam	Hold left click	Hold RT
Burn Wicks for a flame	Hold E	Hold X
Pause	Escape	Start

All rebindable in SETTINGS → CONTROLS.

Runs in the browser, or download it

The browser build is the whole game: same content, same save, nothing cut. It is built single-threaded on purpose, so it starts without cross-origin isolation and works on the widest set of browsers and machines. It wants WebGL2, which anything from the last several years has.

If the browser build stutters on your machine, the Windows download is the same build without a browser in the way.

Save data lives in your browser's storage for the web version — clearing site data for itch.io will clear your Wicks. The download keeps it in %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\Lantern Run instead.