A dark, fast roguelike by Ulf Åström (2012): descend through the underworld, improve yourself with augmentations and facets, and fight with melee, ranged weapons, wands and abilities.

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

About the game

The Slimy Lichmummy (TSL) is a turn-based roguelike: every action you take lets the monsters act, the dungeon is made anew for every game and death is permanent. There is no character creation: you start straight in the dungeon. Instead of experience levels you grow by entering augmentation capsules (upgrades to your body that stay for the rest of the game) and by earning facets through achievements. Abilities (spells and skills) cost energy, which comes back over time.

Movement and ranged combat are one system: Shift + a direction fires your weapon, zaps the wand you hold or throws your ammunition that way.

Keyboard controls

Essential keys

Saving your game

• S saves and quits. The save is kept in this browser (IndexedDB); the page then starts again and TSL loads the save, continuing where you left off.
• As in the original, loading a save deletes it: there is exactly one save. The web version also autosaves at the start and on every level change, so a closed or crashed page continues from the last level change; a death, quit or win removes it.
• File ▾ → Export save downloads the save file (only while one exists), Import save loads one, New game deletes it. TSL's manual considers backup copies cheating; that choice is yours.
• When you die the game shows how it ended, then a new game starts.

Tips

• Light matters: the dungeon is dark, light sources burn out, so keep spares.
• Most items are unidentified; potions and scrolls have random looks each game. Label (A) what you learn.
• Armour absorbs damage but wears out; the first point of every hit always gets through.
• Daggers and similar weapons can backstab enemies that have not noticed you: a silent instant kill. Sneaking up on sleeping monsters pays.
• Health has no maximum: medkits keep adding to it.
• Avoiding a fight is often the best tactic. Stunning, wounding and poison weapons weaken what you cannot avoid.

New player's guide

The screen

The map shows remembered walls, doors and traps; creatures and items only while in view. The status window lists your character (Tab switches pages) and doubles as the inventory list; messages appear below the map (P for the history).

Moving and doors

Walk with the vi-keys, the arrows or the keypad. Doors open when you walk into them; some need keys or can be broken. Walk into a wall once to search it for secret doors.

Your character

Health is how much damage you can take. Energy pays for abilities and refills over time. Speed decides how often you act. Attack and dodge are percentages. Stealth keeps you unnoticed, perception finds monsters and traps, vision is how far you see.

Getting stronger

Enter augmentation capsules to install upgrades; facets come from achievements. Abilities get shortcut keys automatically; z shows what each does and rebinds them.

Hazards

Traps trigger when stepped on, webs hold you, lava and water hurt (swimming skill gives some free turns). Forcefields destroy most things passing through; hack or blow up their generators. Terminals can be hacked with a dataprobe or the Interface ability.

Playing in the browser

• The map uses TSL's own tiles; Tiles in the top bar cycles TSL → tsl-go (the sprites of c0ze/tsl-go, a Go port of TSL) → None (text). The choice is remembered. Map, Messages, Status, Inventory, Visible (creatures and items in view) and Message log are separate windows; A− / A+ on a title bar change that window's text or tile size, Windows arranges them or switches to One window: TSL's whole text screen as in a terminal. Menus, help pages and the death screen appear as text boxes over the map.
• Added for the web: x auto-explore, < / > walk to the nearest known stairs, Enter opens a menu of every command (keypad 5 keeps TSL's do-what-I-mean), and the inventory (i) takes a letter for the main action, Shift+letter to drop, Enter for the item menu. The keypad works with NumLock on or off.
• Audio ▾: sound effects (TSL has no sound of its own): most are tsl-go's effects, the rest made for this port; Music plays tsl-go's recorded track for each level. Both off by default; the choice is remembered.
• Browsers keep some shortcuts (Ctrl+W, Ctrl+T, Cmd keys on a Mac) for themselves.
• If the game crashes, a message appears at the top; reload the page.

About this version

• Based on The Slimy Lichmummy 0.40 by Ulf Åström (happyponyland.net), from the source kept at vitaly-zdanevich/the-slimy-lichmummy @ 6f885be; this port: memmaker/slimy (all changes). Tiles and fonts are the game's own (fonts: modified Terminus, SIL OFL).
• The second tile set is from c0ze/tsl-go by c0ze (tsl.coze.org): tiles from the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup tileset (CC0; thanks to the Crawl and Crawl Stone Soup teams, Eino Keskitalo, David Lawrence Ramsey, Enne Walker, Poor_Yurik, Stefan O'Rear and the original RLTiles) plus sprites made for tsl-go, used with permission. Sound effects (hit, hurt, death, pickup, eat, quaff, read, wear, stairs, spell) and the level music are tsl-go's too.