eight cords come out of a mass at the far end of the corridor and go into your back. each one is doing something for you. one of them is the reason you can see. one of them is the reason your wounds close. one of them is your name.

the slack runs out on its own. cutting is the only thing that puts any back.

CONTENT

body horror. gore. an on-screen creature. sustained tension, no jump scares.

CONTROLS

__(COMPUTER or GAMEPAD)

A/D or L/R DPAD               walk
W/S or UP/DOWN DPAD           choose a cord
SPACE or A/CROSS (HOLD)       cut it
R or X/SQUARE                 restart
ESC or START                  pause

each cut buys you ninety pixels of slack and takes away a function you were using, permanently. the mass is reeling you in at five and a half pixels a second and it never stops. the cut takes two and a half seconds, you cannot move during it, and it closes twenty six pixels on you while you make it.

there are eight cords and the opening is forty eight tiles away.

walkthrough of the costs, spoilered in case you want to figure it out yourself

• LIGHT is the reason you can see. cut it and the corridor shrinks to what is within five tiles.
• BREATH gives you forty seconds of air and three pockets to refill at, and two of them are behind you.
• MEND is why your wounds close. after it, nothing closes.
• GRIP is how you get up a ledge. after it, you scrabble for two seconds while it comes.
• WEIGHT makes you forty percent faster and slides you back toward it whenever you stop walking.
• VOICE stops it lunging, because it can no longer hear you. it also takes every word on the screen.
• WARMTH doubles what it does to you when it is close.
• NAME is how you know your own condition.

the ending screen does not tell you whether any of it was worth it. it lists what you cut, in the order you did it.

THE 3 COLORS

#0e0d10   the dark
#d6d2c4   you, the rock, the interface
#93202a   the cords, the mass, what comes out of you

no fades or gradients. every frame of this game, menus and text included, is rendered into a buffer and snapped to those three values by a shader before you see it, so there is no fourth colour anywhere in it, including in these screenshots. shading is dithering & nothing else.

THE SOUND

nine loops that share a key. eight of them are the cords, and each one goes quiet the moment you cut the cord it belongs to. play well enough and you will finish the game in near silence, with only the bed left.

---

made solo in godot 4 for PIXEL FORGE JAM #3. 

all art, code, music and sound by SVDE.

 a run is about two minutes. it is meant to be lost a few times first.

eight cords, and it grew every one of them, and it grew them for you specifically. the reason the cut hurts is that the cord was working.

zero Ai used, ever.