The Castle
Level 1 — stone corridors, torchlight and the first three objects
The Castle is where the game begins and where it teaches you its rules without ever writing them down. You wake on cold flagstones with no name, no memory and no idea how long you have been lying there. There is a torch guttering somewhere down the corridor and, in every direction, a door. This first level is deliberately claustrophobic: bare stone, low ceilings, the sound of water somewhere below. It is a level about learning to lose gracefully, because you will lose here many times before the last door finally opens.
What the level looks like
The Castle is built from the vocabulary of a real medieval keep rather than a fantasy palace. You pass through a guard room with rotting benches, a spiral stair worn into a curve by centuries of boots, servants' quarters where somebody left a meal unfinished, battlements open to a starless sky, a stable with empty stalls, a crypt, and a cliff terrace where the wind comes straight off the sea.
Every room is a single hand-made pixel illustration, lit almost entirely by fire. The palette stays deliberately narrow — soot black, wet grey, torch orange, parchment — so that the Garden's daylight later feels like a physical shock.
Nothing in the Castle explains itself. There are no signs, no tutorials and no map. The only guidance comes from the short text under each image, which describes what your character notices rather than what you should do.
How a run works here
Each room offers a small number of exits. One continues the level; the others end the run and return you to the first room. There is no way to deduce the correct door from the picture — that is the point. Luck decides the path, patience decides whether you see the end of it.
A failed run is never wasted. Every room you reached stays permanently in your collection, so the level slowly reveals itself even when you never survive to its exit. Most players see the whole Castle long before they escape it.
The level runs across five stages. The deeper stages branch more widely, so the final stretch is where most runs end — usually within sight of the way out.
Reaching 100%
A level counts as fully completed when two conditions are met: every room in it has been discovered at least once, and all three of its objects have been found. Objects are awarded at the end of a successful run, so completion demands both exploration and repeated escapes.
Full completion unlocks a bonus artwork drawn specifically for the Castle, in which the game's creator appears inside the level holding the three objects you recovered. It is the only image in the game you cannot reach by luck alone.
The three objects of the Castle
A ring
A worn band that clearly belonged to someone, though not necessarily to you. It is the first hint that the person you were left traces behind in this building.
A knife
Small, old and much used. A tool rather than a weapon, and the first object that suggests your former life involved work rather than war.
A charm
A keepsake with no obvious value, the kind of thing people carry for luck. In a game decided entirely by chance, that is not a coincidence.