Loose Spirits

Cleanse a haunted house by fighting ghostly spirits and closing all the rifts on each floor. 

Spirits start out only partially manifested (denoted by lowercase letters). In this form they are rather harmless and you can even switch places with them by moving into them, but every turn they remain within line of sight they will get closer to fully manifesting. Once fully manifested (denoted by uppercase letters) they will gain troublesome abilities specific to their spirit type. If you do enough harm to a spirit by damaging it with your spells then you'll temporarily banish it, but it will eventually respawn at an open rift. You can close a rift (denoted by ~) by moving into it.

You can power your spells by drawing upon the house's echos of otherworldly energy, but doing so is not without risks. Once used, the echos you collect will fade and disappear over time, and using them to cast spells will make this happen faster. Each echo is tainted by the house's corruption and contains unknown curses which will hurt or hinder you when using them. Specifically, each collected echo has two random curses. The first curse scales with the cost of the spell, but will only trigger if you hit at least one spirit. The second curse has an echo specific chance of triggering per spirit hit, so effectively scales with the number of spirits hit. The game tracks how often the on hit effect triggered, but the exact chance of triggering is hidden. You'll generally want to identify what curses an echo has before risking using it with more powerful spells.

Along the way you'll also find some single use magic scrolls (denoted by ?) which might help you out in an emergency. Good luck, ghost hunter!

Status Conditions

There's two status conditions which can be inflicted by curses or spirits. They can't directly kill you, but they can place you closer to death.

• Bleed - Causes harm equal to bleed amount when moving. Bleed is reduced by half when resting.
• Pain - Temporarily reduces current health. Pain is fully removed at the end of the turn if no fully manifested Flayed Ghosts are visible. Cannot reduce health below 1.

Controls

• Arrow keys / vi keys (hjkl) / wasd - Movement and directional targeting
• z / . - Rest, which allows you to recover health, reduce bleeding, and collect echos
• x - Enter examine mode, different spirit types have different unique abilities so examining is highly recommended. Once in examine mode, movement controls move examine target and Tab or Shift+Tab rotate between visible spirits
• 1-3 - Select a spell to cast. Once a spell is selected directional controls will aim it (if applicable) and 1-5 will select an echo to power it
• i - View spell descriptions
• e - View descriptions of collected echos
• r - View scroll inventory. You can then use 1-4 to read a scroll
• p - Show message log history
• ? - Show a help menu
• Esc - Exit mode/menu or open escape menu
• Enter - Once you clear a floor (by closing all rifts), pick up all remaining scrolls and proceed to the next floor