Raise, Rise & Die

From the Devs

You died. You did not stay dead.

What walks now is held together by the souls it absorbed — stolen lives, half-remembered, channelled through the weapon still in your hands. Enough to fight with. Not enough to fight for free.

Four ways to fight

• Duel. The card duel at the heart of the game. Build a deck around your character and your weapons, then face the AI — or another player online, with matchmaking and an Elo ranking.

• Arena. An endless run. Choose your next opponent from three, at rising risk for rising reward, and fold what you take off the dead into your deck. Your deck size is your maximum health, so growing is the only way to last — and nothing ever heals you. The run ends when you fall. Your score is what you took before you did.

• Aventure.(in construction) Leave the arena behind. Travel from place to place, search them, and find what is hidden there — secrets, cards, weapons and characters you bring back into your fights.

• Ancients' Path. Build your own runs: the sequence of fights, the

  rules, the starting deck, and the monsters themselves — down to what their

  cards do. But you cannot publish a run you haven't beaten. Clear your own,

  and your score becomes the one everyone else is chasing. It goes out as a

  six-character code.

Designed on a table, not in a spreadsheet

For two and a half years before any of this was code, the duel was played with real cards, by hand, across a table — that is where every value and every keyword was balanced and tested, and none of it got simplified on the way into the engine. The engine only does the arithmetic, so you never miss a trigger. Every decision worth making stays yours.

Every card has a price

• Sacrifice to strike. There is no energy bar, and nothing refills. To play a card, you must first destroy another one from your hand — what you burn out of it is what pays for the card you actually wanted. Every attack costs you something you were holding.

• A duel, not a solitaire. Your opponent answers every card you play: block it, counter it with one of their own, or let it through and take the opening it leaves. Who is attacking and who is defending changes hands inside a single turn.

• Nothing stays hidden. Each turn, both players flip the top card of their deck face up. You can see what is coming for you. They can see what is coming for them. Play around it.
  

Solo developed, in dark pixel art finished by hand. The art is AI-generated as a starting point, then reworked and integrated by hand.