Last Torch

Project intro

Last Torch is a top-down cave exploration game where you are trapped below a rockfall with one torch. The screen is dark except for the light around you, and that light is also your clock: the flame shrinks as it burns, and oil flasks on the cave floor refill it. Find the stairs up in each of five caverns before it goes out. Your flame leans toward fresh air, so it points the way out. Bats, spiders and slimes knock oil out of the torch, and in the flooded cavern the pools slow you to a wade. Each cavern is bigger than the last, every cavern keeps your best time, and the last screen adds them up. Controls are arrow keys or WASD to move, P or Esc to pause, M to mute, and on-screen arrows on a phone. Everything you see and hear comes from the game's own code: no image files, no sound files, no outside fonts. The author made it for AI Browser Game Jam 5 by typing what he wanted into mChatAI+, an app he is building for the Mac — the first request asked for a one-HTML-file cave game with a shrinking circle of torchlight, oil refills, five levels, timers and saved best times, and the second request renamed the game to Last Torch everywhere and fixed the phone arrows covering the start card. Free in the browser.