Wick

What is Wick?

Wick is a turn-based dungeon crawl played in a browser, drawn in 2D, and built around one resource: the oil in your lantern. There is no map to consult. The circle of light around you is the map, and it tightens as the oil goes.

That single constraint shapes everything else. With a full lantern the glow reaches seven tiles; with a dry one it reaches a single tile. Every two steps burns a point of oil, so movement itself is a cost, and standing still is not free either, because waiting is silent but the flame keeps drinking.

Three creatures share the floors with you and each reads the light differently. Moths fly at a burning lantern from beyond its glow, shades refuse the bright core and wait at its edge, and hounds ignore light altogether and hunt by sound instead. FishRaposo has the game in development, with Vinícius Raposo credited as designer.

How to play

Each floor asks the same question: where are the stairs, and can you reach them before the oil runs out? You get no overview, only the shrinking circle around you, so the answer is found by walking and by noticing what the light does and does not reveal.

Flasks on the floor buy you time, topping the lantern back up when the glow has tightened to almost nothing. Combat is deliberately blunt: moving into a monster is the attack, while moving into a wall costs nothing at all, so a wrong turn against stone is free and a wrong turn against teeth is not.

Floors come with a loop or two built in, which matters when something is behind you. A circular route lets you keep moving, break contact, or swing round whatever is chasing you instead of being pinned at a dead end. Waiting costs no noise, but it still burns oil, so every pause is a small wager against the dark.

Controls

Wick accepts keyboard, gamepad, and touch or mouse input, and the three schemes resolve to the same small set of decisions. On a keyboard, the arrow keys, WASD, or HJKL all move and attack; a gamepad uses the d-pad or the left stick; on a touchscreen, or with a mouse, you tap toward the tile you want to head for.

Waiting a turn is space, the period key, or Z on a keyboard, the A button on a pad, or a tap on yourself. After a death, a new run begins with R, Enter, or space, with A or Start on a gamepad, or with a tap. The M key mutes the audio.

Because every input is one decision in a turn-based game, the mappings stay short. There is no aiming, no combo string, and no camera to manage: the whole interface is direction, wait, restart, and silence.

Tips for your first run

The three creatures punish different habits, so the first few floors are mostly about learning which mistake you are about to make. Oil is the clock, and the light radius is the warning that the clock is running down. A few habits worth forming early:

None of this needs speed. Every step is a considered turn, and the game gives you as long as you like to decide where that step goes.

• Meet moths at a corridor mouth rather than in the open, since they fly at the lantern from beyond its glow.
• When hounds are near, stop moving. Sound travels along corridors rather than through rock, so stillness loses them.
• Keep the flame high around shades, which cannot stand the bright core and wait at the edge for the oil to fail.
• Use the loop in each layout to circle round a pursuer instead of retreating into a dead end.
• Collect flasks while the light is still wide, before seven tiles become one.
• Bump walls freely to feel out a room, because stone costs you nothing.
• Wait deliberately rather than constantly: silence is useful, but the lantern burns through it.

Content and replayability

Every floor is generated from a seed, and layouts include a loop or two so that a chase can become a lap around the level rather than a sprint into a corner. Scoring rewards depth first: each floor you descend is worth 100 points, and each kill adds more on top. Your deepest floor and your best score are both remembered, which gives a failed run something to show for itself.

Wick is listed for 28 October 2026 and is still in development, so the shape of the dungeon could shift before it settles. What already exists is unusually open: source, design notes, and a task pack are published, and that pack holds two realistic gameplay bugs and one multi-system feature request, each with a brief, acceptance criteria, a reference solution, and an automated check.

For a player rather than a tinkerer, the pull is narrower and cleaner: fresh layouts from seeds, a score ceiling to push against, and runs compact enough that dying is an inconvenience rather than an evening.

Presentation and performance

The game is plain JavaScript running on a 2D canvas. There is no engine and there are no asset files, and every sound is synthesized in the browser, which keeps the download to the code itself and means the whole thing sits inside an HTML5 frame you can open and play.

Under the hood, field of view is computed with recursive shadowcasting, so the lantern's circle is worked out properly against corners and walls rather than approximated. The creatures navigate on Dijkstra maps, and shades retreat along a flee map, which sends them toward open ground instead of into dead ends.

Layout quality got specific attention: floor connectivity was tested across 1,800 generated floors, a check aimed at the worst outcome in a game like this, where a staircase is generated somewhere unreachable and the run dies of geometry rather than monsters. The result is a small, quiet-looking game with a fair amount of engineering behind the darkness.

Who should play it

Wick suits players who like their tension slow. If you enjoy turn-based decisions where the cost of a step is visible and the information you have is deliberately incomplete, the lantern economy gives you that in a single readable number, and the moths, shades, and hounds give it three different flavours of pressure.

It also fits short sessions. Floors are small, the goal on each one is a staircase, and the scoring is a number you can chase across attempts rather than a story you have to sit through. Anyone who has bounced off sprawling roguelikes for lack of time will find the scale here friendlier.

Finally, it is worth a look if you enjoy seeing how small games are built. The source, the design notes, and the task pack with its bugs and feature request make it a readable example as well as a playable one. If you want atmosphere and a resource clock rather than Reflex tests, this is aimed at you.