2D pixel-art action roguelite
An old tree at the bottom of a prison keep grows you a new body each time you die. Add scions onto your weapons and let the roots rework your limbs.
You wake in a cell full of roots at the bottom of a prison keep. An old tree is keeping you alive. Each time you die it grows you a new body, and you walk out of the same door. The way out is up: through the keep, along the castle walls, and past the Warden, who takes one look at you and says, "Again?"
Carry two weapons, roll through attacks, and parry with whatever is in your hand. Every enemy attack shows itself before it lands: yellow can be parried, red has to be dodged. Parry at the right moment and the enemy staggers, open to critical hits. Parry an arrow and it flies back the way it came.
Enemies carry scions, living branches you can attach to a weapon, and elite enemies always drop theirs. A scion changes what your hits do: thorns that stick and burst, a vine that pulls the enemy to you, a root that runs ahead through the ground. It gets stronger with every kill.
Poison, resin, vine, thorns and fire. Put two on the same enemy and they set each other off. Resin and vine trap an enemy in amber until a heavy blow breaks it apart. Fire in a spore cloud is an explosion that throws everyone back.
At the root shrine at the end of each biome, the tree offers you three grafts, new growths for your body, and you take one. Each changes what you can do, and each costs you something. Take three of the same family and your whole body changes: bark, thorn, leaf or vine.
Bring the sap you find to a root shrine to keep it, or lose all of it when you die. Saved sap feeds the Old Tree, which unlocks new weapons, scions, seeds, grafts and two-weapon combos. It gives you more options and never quietly raises your damage.
Each biome's rooms are put together in a new order every run as one continuous map. Take a side path for the chest at its end, smash through a cracked floor, find the secret room, and use the root passages to get back.
You don't have to read anything. Start a run and go. But someone has scratched DON'T FEED IT into the wall, and there are more words higher up. Keep coming back, and a much more serious story opens up under the surface.
