"The deeper you go, the more of yourself you lose."
You are a hero—Humanity’s final hope—sent to descend into a cursed land to destroy the source of corruption.
But every step forward cracks the truth open further: You are not here to save the world. You are here to end it!
A Descent Into the Depths
- Journey through a doomed, side-scrolling world — from the crumbling Castle, past dying Villages, the Battlefield, and to the Throne of the End — where the land itself decays with each run.
- A great Population Counter ticks down — not just a resource, but your health, your army, your soul!
- Will you sacrifice the living for power… or protect the last breath of humanity?
The Cycle of Death
- Draw a card — Good, Neutral, or Evil. Each offers power, each demands a price.
- Lead your army or descend yourself into the battlefield.
- Fall or triumph — either way, the truth deepens.
- New prophecy lines awaken.
- Then it begins again — with heavier steps and darker skies.
Your Prophecy, Written by You
- Five lines. One fate.
- Each step reveals a fragment — shaped by your actions, your morality, and your sacrifices.
- Will the world remember you as a saviour? Or curse you as the end?
Controls — Commands of a Dying King
- Arrow Keys — Walk the broken path, left and right, through ruin and ash.
- Click to Summon — Call forth your warriors... at the cost of your people.
- Cooldowns Apply — Each call to arms takes its toll.
- Descend as the King — When unlocked, take the field yourself.
Bugs/Incomplete Features -
- Descend of the King is incomplete. It was supposed to turn the game into a platformer TD from a regular TD where you control the King.
- Some issue with enemy type spawns. There are 4 enemy types, each appearing after successive 25% mark.
- The completion of the prophecy.
If You Fall… the Kingdom Falls With You.
The actual gameplay is pretty simple, and can get a little boring after a while (for me, all I really seemed to have to do to win was just spam a bunch of knights at the beginning, then wait 3 or 4 minutes until all the waves have ended), but I liked watching the units go about fighting each other, and it would be really easy to make that a little more interesting with a few more units available to the player, or maybe some variation in the enemies' abilities.
I feel like the game's strongest area is the visual aspects, which are really, really good.
Also, while I can’t take full credit for the art—since much of it is derivative—I’m really happy with the overall look and feel I was able to achieve!
I'd also recommend playing on itch io (web or windows build). I'd added mini health bars for each unit and for the enemies as well so it should be easy to figure out.
Just for reference the units prefer to engage in one-on-one fights and not an AOE attack (apart from the King). Please let me know if this doesn't work for you. :(
Haha, so it'd basically like the enemies have a one-on-one fight system. On spawning both sides look for an appropriate/closer enemy to them and marks them as their own (so nobody can steal their prey until either one of them is dead, lol) so sometimes they can go past already marked ones. I guess I should add a small indicator for this. Thanks for the feedback!! =D
:) Very fun game!
While I can't take full credits for art as most of it falls under derivative, I'm glad you found the look and feel of the game great!
Haha, I guess that's a good take on the minions lol, you never know what they might do next!! I did mention the minion behavious in detail in my previous comment so feel free to have a look. Thanks for playing!!! have fun xD
Music is vibey - the game could use a bit more audio feedback during gameplay.
Graphics remind me of Kingdom Two Crowns. Very polished look.
A bit difficult to rate since I couldn't play very much but what I did play seemed intriguing!
That system did take the most time to build, so SFX had to take a back seat. That said, feedback noted and they are at the top of my TODO list.
Again, thanks for playing and having fun xD
You could check out the gameplay trailer I made for more of what the game has to offer, but yeah, I'd leave the rating upto your judgement xD
Gameplay Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efakdOU2iV8
Feel free to share your completed prophecy after playing :)
As others pointed out, it's sometimes confusing to see our troops go through enemies or killing some from afar (and the same applies to enemies) but I understand the deadline issue ;)
Congrats on the fun game!
There's not much more to discover after that, apart from getting the remaining 2 of the 9 cards. I do plan to have something like the "Pact of Punishment" from Hades to make it more interesting if I plan a steam release.
Yeah, I see a lot of people pointing the enemy behaviour :( I'll have to rewrite that logic some time.
P.S. Congrats on completing the game @linky439 !! I'd love to see the **prophecy** you received (**since it'll be different for everyone!!**) <3
The art looks great, the intro is strong, and the BGM is good too, so I feel like I'm either hitting some kind of bug or missing a mechanic. I scrolled on the page to see if I could find some other controls for summoning the king or doing something to help in the fight but couldn't find it. Anyway let me know if I missed something (I made it up to wave 4 but then stopped because I couldn't figure out anything to do and new enemies were just walking past my army) but if you let me know I missed the way to play I'll definitely give it another shot!
### There are multiple layers to the strategy -
1. **The Basics** - How you balance spawning the units, like let knights tank and then spawn the quick to attack and die thieves, etc since population is scarce resource.
2. **When you unlock the King unit** - the game becomes into a platformer, so you could go solo or spawn some units to draw aggro. The units do a one-on-one fight until either of them dies so you could kill the enemies during that.
3. **The Card System** - There are the 9 cards segregated into 3 categories which you can choose upon death. They dictate if you wish to be aggressive or be a tanker and so on.
Ultimately the game is heavily linked to the **prophecy** (think of it as **multiple endings**). The one you get (good or bad) depends on how you play the game - sacrifice the units or save them to become the kingdom's hero.
It should take 5-10 runs to complete the game. It all depends on the strategy you choose.
When the light of dawn touches the broken crown
and the promise of hope still lingers,
descend not as the reaper, but the sentence carved
by your own hand.
For in the depths, you may find redemption -
only and echo of the end you overcame.
A heads up: I played the HTML version, and although the game remembered which cards I picked (and how many runs), my population went down from 400 back to 150, so you might want to make sure the population number is saved somewhere ;)
The game lets you spawn upto 16 NPCs each, on either side. Any more than that and you need to wait for some units to die :( I do need to do some game balancing as well, so I do understand your perspective.
The NPCs are dumb (like me) so they don't necessarily choose the closest one to have a one-on-one fight, maybe a grudge from the last life, who knows xD I'll fix their behaviour in the future updates.
Thanks for playing and I'm glad you think so highly of it!! Please do give it a try, you should be able to resume from the 4th wave. Just choose the middle row each time until you unlock the king unit. Hope you get a nice prophecy at the very end =D
P.S - Looks like you really care about your people as it's one line away from the best ending possible :sunglasses:
@borabee Ideally the game should only end if the population is 0 & the units are dead OR the king is spawned and is dead. If not, I'll have a look at these bugs you've mentioned, as no one else has reported them so far.
**The King** is a double-edged sword. On one hand, he **does damage to ALL enemies within range** rather than engaging on one-on-one fights!! That makes him crazy powerful, as you can dodge, jump and attack to absolutely destroy the enemies with correct timing. This does come at the cost of game being ended when he dies, but you can also spawn the other units to help you in battle while fighting yourself.
> Regarding the cards, there are a total of 9 of them, 3 in each category so generally after 9 deaths, there won't be any cards left to spawn after each category is depleted.
### The ending is when you defeat all the enemies and get the FULL PROPHECY.
> You can still play after that or RESET the game to get a better prophecy.
Great work though from what I could see and the trailer ;)
> **You can't spawn more than about 16 units at a time**, so you need to wait for the units to die before popping more (this was done as the game started to lag when too many were spawned at once).
I do plan to change this along with adding a HUD for the number of active units in the future builds.
Please feel free to try again and let me know your thoughts, and the ending you receive. Have fun :)