Ashbound

You were a village mage for forty years. Five villages stand between you and something that isn't service, and each of them has its own mage, bound to their post exactly the way you were bound to yours.

**Your spells only get stronger by being cast.** There is no level-up screen and no experience bar. How far a spell has grown is also what decides whether you can take a village apart without ever meeting its mage — so the progression system and the moral one are the same system.

**Arriving at a village, you choose how you walk in — and it sticks.** Turn on the villagers for an edge in the fight and a cruel relic. Walk through in silence. Greet them warmly for HP, an extra camp, and a gift. Or, once a spell has grown enough, unmake the whole village in a single blow and skip the fight — along with whatever it would have taught you.

**Every duel is turn-based and fully telegraphed.** Every mage move is shown one turn ahead, so the fight is about answering what you can already see coming. Break a mage past half HP and they change into something worse. Push them low enough and some of them stop fighting — and what you do about that is yours to decide, not the game's.

**Four endings**, resolved from how you played rather than a final choice — including one that requires clearing all five villages without emptying or destroying a single one.

**No image files, no licensed audio.** Every scene in the game is painted live, pixel by pixel, out of code — the forge yard breathing with its coals, the frozen lake thickening with rime, a mage's figure quietly redrawn in whatever cape and eye colour you picked at creation. Every sound and every piece of music is synthesised at runtime from scratch, all six tracks sharing one five-note motif so the title screen, the road, and the last fight all sound like the same piece of music.

### What to expect

- A single run in roughly 15-20 minutes

- Turn-based combat with fully telegraphed enemy moves

- Choices that carry real weight — standing, relationships, and endings all track what you actually did

- A world map that opens up as you go, plus a late-game flight ability that changes how you move through it

- Runs on phone or desktop, portrait-oriented, built for touch as well as mouse/keyboard

### Controls

Number keys select options. Space skips the text reveal. Touch works out of the box on mobile.