Lovecraftian roguelike in the 1920s: descend beneath the Church of Starry Wisdom for the Shining Trapezohedron.

Infra Arcana (Martin Törnqvist, since 2011) is set in the 1920s, in the style of H. P. Lovecraft. You are an investigator who enters the lair of the Church of Starry Wisdom, a cult that hides the Shining Trapezohedron in its depths. Pistols, shotguns, Tommy guns, dynamite and old manuscripts of spells are your tools; cultists, ghouls, zombies and worse stand in the way. Besides hit points you keep track of Spirit and your sanity: horrors raise your shock, and too much of it drives you mad. Death is permanent.

• About the game
• Keyboard controls
• Saving your game
• Tips
• New player's guide
• Playing in the browser

About the game

Infra Arcana is short and dense: no town, no shops, a few dozen levels. You pick a background (War Veteran, Rogue, Occultist, Ghoul) and gain traits as you level. Each descent makes a new level; there is no way back up.

• Firearms need ammunition and reloading; melee is the reliable fallback.
• Spells are learnt by reading manuscripts; casting from memory costs Spirit.
• Your mind is a second health bar: shock rises with horrors and darkness, and at 100% insanity the game ends.
• Unaware monsters can be sneaked past or backstabbed.

Keyboard controls

Essential keys

Saving your game

• Infra Arcana saves when you take the stairs down; at the stairs you can also choose Save and quit. Loading continues on the next level. Death is final: the save is deleted.
• In the browser the save, options, high scores and window layout live in this browser's storage (IndexedDB). Export save / Import save move the save file; New game deletes it. Private windows and "clear site data" delete it too: export first.

Tips

• Keep your lantern on (l): standing in light slows the rise of shock.
• Monsters with a blue background have not noticed you: melee attacks on them do +50% damage and almost always hit.
• Reload (r) before a fight, not during it; ammunition is scarce, so melee weak foes.
• Treat infections with the Medical Bag (b) at once, before they become a disease; five wounds kill you.
• Every new level restores your shock: don't linger on a level when your mind is frayed.
• Casting spells without a manuscript drains Spirit; heed the warning when a cast could drain all of it.
• Lit dynamite in your hands goes off: light it (a) only when you are ready to throw (t).

New player's guide

Your first steps

1. At the main menu choose New journey, pick a background and traits, and read the intro.
2. Explore with X, pick up items (g) and check them in the inventory (i).
3. Find the stairs down; > walks there, a second > descends (and saves).
4. Fight in corridors, keep the lantern on, and look (v) at anything unknown before it reaches you.

Playing in the browser

• The map is the game's own screen (tiles, or text after Tiles in the top bar); status, messages, inventory and what you see are separate windows. A− / A+ on a title bar (shown on hover) change that window's size of text or tiles; Windows ▾ shows, hides and rearranges them (drag a title bar or the gap between windows). Menus and pop-ups appear as text boxes over the map.
• Keys: the numeric keypad or the arrow keys move you (Shift+arrow for diagonals); keypad 5 waits. Bump the stairs to get Descend or Save and quit.
• Audio ▾: the game's own sound effects and its main-menu music (Madness by Musica Cthulhiana, used with permission), both off by default; the choice is remembered. The music is downloaded only when you switch it on.
• Browsers keep a few shortcuts for themselves (Ctrl+W, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+N, and Cmd shortcuts on a Mac), so those never reach the game.
• If the game ever crashes, a message appears at the top; reload the page to continue from the last save.

About this version

• Based on Infra Arcana 23.0.0 by Martin Törnqvist, upstream commit martin-tornqvist/ia @ a084376, AGPL-3.0-or-later; tiles by Oryx; sound effects from freesound.org under their own licences (see the game's LICENSE-AUDIO.txt); built with Emscripten.
• Our changes (auto-explore, stairs walking, command menu, inventory cursor and item menus, web build) are on GitHub: memmaker/ia (all changes).