GLYPHTRIP

An idyllic meadow. A cave. Smetterlings.

Plato's solids hang in one sky. A room behind one wall is Indra's net. Hell is under new management. Your trip will take you through places that become increasingly difficult to describe correctly, built from cosmologies that were never meant to share a wall. You begin somewhere peaceful.

Remember it.

GLYPHTRIP is a real-time, first-person, run-based, rogue-ish dungeon sprinter with no third dimension, raycast from a flat grid onto a screen of colored Unicode, where the beat runs through the world you have to navigate. The description above calls it an ASCII roguelike. It lied. Nobody searches for the truth. Instructions are sparse. Explanation is fleeting. The deeper you go, the less reliable either becomes.

Explore nonsensical realms and fragmented experiences. Find things that should not be there. Try to reach the heart of what has been sitting quietly alongside you your entire life. Try not to lose your head.

RAM.

Your weapon is a short dash. That's it.

RAM something and it goes flying. Throw enemies into walls, into each other, across pits, through rooms, or into things better dealt with from a distance. Momentum passes between bodies. Crowded rooms become unstable very quickly.

Some things cannot be rammed. Throw something else at them.

Twelve kinds of glyph populate the dungeon, each with its own behavior and its own little contribution to the problem in front of you. Learning what they do is most of the instruction you are going to get.

Manage your trip.

Every kill raises your TRIP. Your score climbs. The pace quickens. Color begins to turn. Walls bloom. The world starts describing itself differently.

At 100, you SINK. Keep killing and stay down as long as you can.

Stop killing and gray static begins to eat the picture. Stay on one floor too long and THE PROOFREADER arrives. It walks through walls.

Go deeper.

Twenty floors form a single descent. MONOCHROME becomes THE BLUE. THE BLUE gives way to COMPLEMENT CLASH, then SPECTRUM, then finally THE SHATTER, where the terminal itself seems to be coming apart around you.

Generated floors are mixed with forty hand-drawn pages placed at seeded depths. Some contain chasms. Some have soft walls. Some fold space back on itself. Some walls are windows into another part of the page. Walk through one. Come out somewhere else. You know THE LONG WALK exists. You may not see it.

There are places that are not part of the dungeon.

Every floor above the last contains something printed incorrectly. Find it. RAM it. Fall off the page.

There is a bar that serves hot mojitos. A nursery is five marbles short. A room without light only reveals itself to aggression. Somewhere, a crowd is waiting for the DJ. Somewhere else, a bouncer would like a word with you. Two, actually. Both in Cyrillic. There is a pool at sunset where nothing can hurt you. A desert road that asks how committed you really are.

A red carpet.

A chicken.

Most of these places exist for the length of a single song. When the song ends, so does the room.

The music is part of the machinery.

GLYPHTRIP contains a 52-track original soundtrack woven directly into its floors, encounters and hidden spaces. Some rooms exist because a song exists. Some events wait for a particular bar.

THE UNWRITTEN waits at the bottom of every descent and lasts exactly as long as its track. The page keeps changing until the music stops.

Then you do it again.

Reaching the bottom does not finish GLYPHTRIP. It changes it. You surface carrying one relic from the descent. Begin another loop and a new LAW is applied.

By the second loop, every floor is dealt from the hand-drawn pages. By the third, enemies begin appearing before they should. By the fourth, THE PROOFREADER no longer waits for you to fall behind. On the fifth, you never fully sober. A power you carried before may return changed. There are five loops to the end of the book.

The Lexicon remembers what happened.

There are 130 entries. Places. Events. Things you found once. Things you did by accident and may never do again.

As the Lexicon fills, the Index opens into an archive of what you have encountered.

One shelf remains empty.

Choose your edition.

Each run can be opened three ways.

LARGE PRINT is the gentlest edition. Every hit is capped at a fifth of you, and once per stratum a killing blow may send you somewhere else instead.

FIRST PRINTING is GLYPHTRIP as originally balanced.

UNCUT removes the guardrails.

You can change how cruel the book is without changing what the book contains.

Inside

•  20-floor descents across five visual strata

•  45 hand-drawn dungeon pages mixed with procedural layouts

•  37 relics

•  34 apparitions

•  12 enemy glyph types

•  130 Lexicon entries

•  Hidden Elsewheres built around individual songs

•  Five escalating loops governed by new LAWS

•  A 52-track original soundtrack

•  Three save slots

•  Steam achievements drawn from the Lexicon

•  Full key rebinding and controller support

•  Invert look and still-camera options

•  Photosensitive mode

A warning, said plainly.

GLYPHTRIP contains intense flashing lights, rapidly changing imagery and high-contrast patterns that may trigger seizures or other adverse reactions.

PHOTOSENSITIVE MODE reduces visual effects, and STILL CAMERA holds the view steady. Both can be changed at any time.

Reduced effects do not guarantee safe play for photosensitive players.