The candles: lighting all twelve

B by the summoning circle starts the rite: the hero walks into its middle and rises, possessed, while the world darkens; the candles' picker opens; taken, the candles flick on one at a time from the top round clockwise, and only once the last is lit does the hero come down.

The candles: the difficulty

Twelve candles round the circle are the game's difficulty. A candle can be lit up to one past the most a voyage has been won under (winning means beating the story boss at the gates). Each lit makes the islands tougher, in more monsters and tougher bosses first, the rest a candle or two apart. One candle is the gentle start, plain ghosts, slimes and snails and the old bosses. Bats, mushrooms and the Lost Folk's camps come at two, the newer monsters and bosses, the tide run and the odd islands at three, ranged monsters and elites at four, night, fog and storms at five, monsters that shrug spells off at six, mega elites at seven, monsters resisting your favourite spells at nine, and challenges keep growing to the last. Lighting fewer than you may turns you into a chicken for a bit. The Difficulty page has every number.

The gravestone

A nameless gravestone stands by the circle, and Pell scratches a line on it every time he rows the hero home.

The dev shrine

With Dev mode on in Settings, a stone by the raft unlocks everything and picks the next voyage's island, weather and boss.

A voyage and its route

Every voyage sets out from home on the raft. It's three legs of four islands, then the gates: the first leg always the Spring Isles; on a leg's boss island, the raft asks where next, two regions offered (for the second leg two of the Autumn Woods, the Winter Isles and the Tropical Isles; for the third two of the Cloud Isles, the Underworld and the Deep). How hard an island is goes by how far into the voyage it is, not which region it's in. A leg's four islands are a voyage island, a survival island, a shrine island and a boss island; after each boss the raft puts in at a rift isle. Each island is a few screens joined by corridors, sealed by rock walls until every monster on the screen is beaten and every rift sealed; the raft comes to the screen the island's finished on.

Clearing an island

Beat every monster and seal every rift; the raft comes ashore and sails on, hearts and spells carried over.

Survival islands

The second island of each leg: no monsters to start with, one endless rift that no element seals, and more tearing open the longer it's held. Hold out until the timer runs down and the rifts close, then beat every monster left. A secret heat makes it harder the more damage the hero deals, easier for a struggling one.

Shrines

The third island of each leg has a shrine: an optional challenge. Stand on it or beside it to relight its flame and the island tears open with rifts round it; keep the flame alight (stand by it, or throw fireballs into its brazier) while beating every monster and sealing every rift, and it blazes: XP and a gift to choose (every heart back, a heart more, or turnips). Let it go out and it's spent.

Rift isles and trials

After every boss's island the raft puts in at a small isle with a rift stone in a half ring of totems. Until every combination's learned its rift stands open onto a trial: a realm of the combination's own, waves of its monsters, then its keeper. Win at the first difficulty to learn the combination; the harder gives its cape, the hardest its keeper's threads and now and then a fairy. The first time, Tamsin is there; from then on she keeps a stone at home and opens chosen trials for obols.

The tide run

Now and then a voyage island is a long strip in a storm that scrolls along with a tsunami at the hero's back. Barriers across the strip (driftwood, a sand drift, burning wreckage, rocks) only break to their own element, monsters come from ahead, and the wave flings wreckage and whatever it catches at the hero. Its secret: frost thrown at the wave three times freezes it solid, two guardians ride out of the ice (see the Bosses page), and the Frost Gloves are frozen in it, to be melted out with fire.

Palm beaches

Some warm islands are tropical beaches: sand and waves, palms, shells and crabs, footprints the waves smooth away.

Graveyards

From the second leg, the voyage and shrine islands have a graveyard screen or two: dead trees, headstones and lanterns, mostly ghosts (air tears at them), and restless graves instead of rifts, which air seals outright.

Weather

From five candles, some islands are night (fire in hand is the light), fog (a gust blows it back, fire burns it off) or storms (rain, sheet lightning, and bolts that come down on telegraphed rings and stun). The first island of a voyage is always day.

The Lost Folk

From the first shrine island, a warband camps on a screen of the voyage and shrine islands: a shield bearer holding the line (flank it), blades and spears taking turns, archers and a caster healing. One camp a voyage holds a villager bound at its middle: beat the band and untie them, and they live at home from then on.

Elites and loot

From four candles one monster on each screen is an elite (purple, twice the health, hitting twice as hard) that drops a chest: a pickup, a boon star, a heart, turnips or a pouch of XP.

The gates

The voyage's end, a chain of islands, one for each of Hades's household. The candles lit say who waits there (one candle Cerberus, each more the next, six Hades), the ones before them gone and their gates standing open. Beat it and the voyage is won: obols, another candle that can be lit, and the way home. Once Hades is beaten, every voyage ends in the whole gauntlet, one island after another, the raft waiting after each in case you'd rather sail home. Once the gates have been reached, Pell takes vows that make the next voyage harder.