Grimvault — Descend ten crypts and take the crown

What is Grimvault — Descend ten crypts and take the crown

Grimvault is a small isometric dungeon crawl that runs in the browser. You start at the mouth of a crypt with five hearts, one sword and no map, and ten hand-built floors stand between you and the Crown of the Fallen King. Every floor asks one thing: throw all the levers, weigh down all the pressure plates with stone blocks, or clear out everything that moves. Only then do the seals on the staircase break. Torches light a small circle around you and coloured beams rise from whatever you still have to reach, so the dark is a nuisance rather than a wall.

The fighting is real time and close range. Your sword reaches a little over one tile, only in a cone in front of you, and takes a third of a second to recharge, so trading blows with a skeleton that hits for two costs more health than stepping back. The dash matters more than the sword: it carries you eleven tiles a second for a sixth of a second, and nothing can touch you while it lasts. Falling does not end the run either. You can restart the floor you died on with the health, gold and levels you entered it with.

How to play

1. Move with WASD, the arrow keys, or the stick in the bottom left on a touch screen; the crypt is isometric, so the stick follows the floor's diagonals.
2. Space or J swings the sword, shift or K dashes, and E or L uses whatever is beside you: lever, chest, locked door or staircase.
3. The bar at the top names the rite of the floor and counts your progress, while beams of light mark whatever is left to do.
4. Push a stone block by walking into it. Once the rite is done the staircase unseals and E takes you one floor deeper.

Strategies that work

• The dash lasts a sixth of a second and you cannot be hurt for any of it, with a cooldown just under a second. Spike tiles cycle every three seconds and stand up for the first one and a quarter, each offset from its neighbours, so dash across rather than wait.
• Your swing reaches about a tile and a quarter, only in a cone ahead, and recharges in a third of a second. A skeleton takes three hits and deals two damage on contact, a quarter of your health, so strike, back out of reach, then strike again.
• Each hero level adds one damage and two points of maximum health. A wraith is worth five experience, a champion ten, and a champion always drops an ember draught: six health back and one damage for good. Clear the kill floors fully before taking the stairs.
• Blocks slide one square at a time, in the direction you face rounded to north, south, east or west, and will not cross a wall torch, a gate, a door, another block or the staircase, though they sit happily on spikes. On the last plate floor the left block cannot go straight down: shift it sideways first.
• The Fallen King has sixty-four health and three ranges. Beyond five tiles he braces for half a second and throws two orbs, which your sword destroys in flight; between two and a half and five tiles he charges; closer, he can only walk. Stay glued to him.

A little history

Grimvault was written for this site; it has no older version and no folklore behind it. It borrows from two families that rarely share a screen. The real-time crawl through a lit circle of darkness, with loot on the floor and levels earned by killing, descends from Rogue in 1980. The block-and-plate floors are Sokoban, the warehouse puzzle Hiroyuki Imabayashi designed for Thinking Rabbit in 1982, where a crate only slides forward and a crate in a corner is lost. The view uses the old two-to-one projection, sixty-four pixels wide per tile and thirty-two tall.

Frequently asked questions