Ring the bells. Climb the spire.
Coming soon Free in your browser. No download, no account.
Ring the bells. Climb the spire.
Coming soon Free in your browser. No download, no account.Angelus is a browser-based isometric ARPG. You climb a twenty-floor spire, ringing three bells on every floor to unseal the stair above it — sixty between the door and the top — and you carry the only light there is.
Everything that fights you can be killed or spared. Killing takes one more swing. Sparing costs you: you stand still, blade down, inside arm's reach, while the room keeps coming.
The bells here were rung by hand for four hundred years. Then one bad winter something came up the valley road, and the brothers stopped ringing so as not to be found. It worked — nothing found them, and the hours never started again. What is waiting up there is derelict, not evil, and that is the whole reason the choice is worth anything.
What you do
Each floor is a room in a building that stopped working four hundred years ago. The stair is the only way on, and it is sealed.
Three to a floor. Ringing one opens the stair a third of the way, and wakes whatever is sleeping nearest to it.
Everything that fights you can be killed or let go. The game keeps a count of both, and hands it back to you on the way down.
The mercy
The opening film — one minute, with sound. Nothing on this page plays it for you.
Hurt a creature far enough and it stops fighting. It stands there, lit at the edges, waiting.
Killing it takes one more swing. Sparing it takes two seconds of standing still with your blade down, inside arm's reach, while the rest of the room keeps coming. Move, and you lose it.
What you get back is light. Everything you spared stays where you freed it and burns for the rest of the run — so the way down is lit by exactly the mercy you could afford on the way up. A floor you rushed is three pools of light with dark between them. A floor you were patient on is a road.
The spire
The three
He carries the bell on his shield, which is as close as anyone here comes to a uniform.
Most health, shortest reach. He can afford to stand still, which is what mercy asks for.
He fights from the far side of the room, and a thing he wants to spare is always on the near side.
Longest reach, least health. The class where sparing costs the most, because he has to walk in for it.
Censer in one hand, book in the other. His blade does half what anyone else's does, and it is not his argument.
Absolves fastest, and runs on Grace — the resource mercy pays best. He is the one who is fuelled by sparing things.
What is up there
Eighteen kinds of thing wait on the stairs, and not one of them is evil. They are the choir that forgot what it was for. Every one can be killed. Every one can be let go.
Tiers 1–9
A brother who has been here so long there is nothing left to recognise. The first thing you meet, and the last thing that stops coming.
Tiers 1–4
Slow, heavy and hard to shift. Its grip leaves you slowed, so standing still to fight it is exactly the mistake.
Matthew 12:43
Strike it down and it walks through dry places, finds no rest, and comes back with seven worse than itself. Spare it and it does not.
Ezekiel 37:4
Light does not wake it. It has no eyes to open. You can light a whole room of these and walk in thinking it is empty.
Matthew 6:19
It does not want to kill you. It wants what you are carrying — and what it takes is destroyed rather than dropped.
Mark 5:9
My name is Legion, for we are many. It does not die once — it comes apart into the things it was made of.
1 Peter 5:8
Seeking whom he may devour. Everything else on the floor forgets you when you rise at the bell. This does not.
Daniel 4:13
Its damage is not the threat. While it can see you, everything else on the floor is told where you are.
The score
Sixteen settings in Latin, one for each floor that has one, and the theme. They play under the game as you climb, and the words and the sense of them are printed in the book you carry.
Now sounding
Lumen fero solus — I
Nothing on this page autoplays. This is the only sound here, and it offers one track at a time. The full score ships with the game.
The novel
Three pilgrims climb the same spire, four hundred years apart, and only one of them knows what the silence is for. The novel is the long version of the thing the game asks you in a fight.