◈ GOLEM'S CIPHER ◈

▣ The door is locked with three digits

You do not know them.

The runes on the floor do — and each one will tell you exactly one true thing before it crumbles to nothing. The sum of the digits. Whether the first is odd. Which of them is largest.

Nine runes. Nine truths. Three digits. You will not get them all.

☠ The floor is made of coins, and a coin's value is its noise

Step off a 9 and onto an 8 and you have just made seventeen.

When your noise reaches ten minus your risk, the golem takes a step toward you. It does not stop. It does not sleep. It already knows you are there — it simply does not know where, and every coin you lift is you telling it.

So you creep. You take the quiet ones. You read a rune, you lose a rune, and you count.

✦ Then you name the cipher at the door

And you go down. And the next floor is deeper, and no kinder than the last.

Nine floors. One way out.

◈ What you are up against

▸ Five hundred digits. Every one is a coin, and every one is a sound.

▸ Noise is the coin you left plus the coin you took. Both of them. Every single step — and the louder you are, the further it comes.

▸ Risk is a dial you set yourself, one to nine. Turn it up and it hears you sooner — and every coin pays more. The greedy die closer to the door.

▸ The golem is a tell. Watch it. It burns hotter and beats faster the nearer it is to hearing you — and it is telling you that without a single number on the screen.

▸ Open a door without one wrong guess and the dark pays you for the quiet. It pays more the deeper you are when you do it.

▣ The nine floors

the cistern ▸ the green stair ▸ the weeping hall ▸ the old works ▸ the ossuary ▸ the foundry ▸ the black cut ▸ the red seam ▸ the vault

Each is cut from its own stone, and the stone changes as you go down.

✦ Features

• A notes page — every rune you have read on this floor, in the order you read them. You never have to remember a truth you already paid for. Press N.
• The rules on a keypress, without abandoning your run. Press H.
• A roll of thieves who went down before you — and room on it for your name.
• Ten SID tunes. Bach's Toccata on the title, and nine more drawn at random every time a floor opens.
• Full-screen art, a death you will earn, and an ending worth reaching.

☠ Controls

• Joystick in port 2, or the keyboard.
• Stick / cursor keys — move.
• Fire / space — act, and confirm.
• N — your notes.  H — the rules.
• Risk is set on the main menu, before you go down.

◈ The music

Every note is public domain, and nothing here is sampled — these are notes, typed in, played on the SID chip.

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor takes the title screen. Under the floors: Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, Handel, Gluck, Chopin, Brahms, Bach again, and Mussorgsky — one of the nine drawn at random each time a door opens.

▣ Where it came from

In 1984 a type-in listing ran in The Commodore 64 Games Book 2: clue tiles, a keeper that chased you, a secret number, and ground that fell away behind you.

This is not that game. The idea is borrowed, and gratefully acknowledged. Every byte here is new, and written in assembly.

✦ Requirements

Commodore 64 or 128 (in 64 mode), or any C64 emulator (VICE and friends). Joystick in port 2 recommended. Runs on a stock, unexpanded machine.

Ships as a .prg.

⛧ The keeper is still down there. In the dark. Counting. It will know your step next time. ⛧