What is UMBRA — Weave shadows through a temple that burns
UMBRA is a real-time stealth game built on true two-dimensional shadow casting. Every brazier and every lantern-headed Watcher throws a light polygon recomputed against the walls around it, so the dark patches on the floor are real geometry, not painted decoration. You play a creature made of night: standing in light costs sixteen Essence a second and drains your Umbra half again as fast, while deep shadow gives both back. Nothing in this temple switches off. If you want a corner to go dark, you have to change what stands between that corner and the flame.
Six chapters run from one locked door to the Lantern Keeper. Violet umbral seals only charge in near-total darkness, so most rooms come down to shoving a stone pillar into the column of light falling on the rune. Later you unlock Void Step, Shadow Bolt, Eclipse and the Wraith, and spend power points on one of three branches: Umbra for reserves, Wrath for damage, Veil for movement. A full run leaves five or six points and a branch costs seven, so you will never finish two. Progress saves chapter by chapter.
How to play
- Move with WASD or the left half of a touch screen, aim with the mouse, and keep off the lit floor: Essence only comes back in shadow.
- Left click slashes, right click fires a Shadow Bolt, Space is Void Step, Q is Eclipse, R throws a Wraith, and E drops what you carry.
- Push the stone pillars with your body. A pillar between a brazier and a violet seal darkens the rune; one full second in the dark opens its door.
- Walk into the rift once the objective is done. Each level gained is a power point; press Tab to spend it on Umbra, Wrath or Veil.
Strategies that work
- Every seal sits in a column of light with something pushable nearby. In Chapter I the central brazier falls straight onto the rune below it, and the hall's only pillar starts about a hundred and ten units left of that line. Shove it right until it blocks the flame.
- A Watcher's cone is its eye and its lamp at once. In the dark it only notices you within about a hundred and twenty units. Step into the beam and it picks you out from over four hundred. Void Step is invulnerable and refunds sixteen Umbra if you land in shadow.
- In the Kiln braziers die for good. Eclipse reaches two hundred and sixty-five units for thirty-eight Umbra, on a nine-and-a-half second cooldown. Stand just north of the central block, midway between the two middle braziers, and one Eclipse takes both. Long Eclipse reaches four hundred and ten and takes three.
- Carrying the Light Shard makes you a lamp roughly a hundred and ninety units across, and no seal within about a hundred and forty of you will finish charging. In Chapter IV, leave the shard on the floor, darken the rune, open the door, then come back for it.
- The Keeper stands in its own glare and takes twelve per cent damage unless stunned, and Eclipse is your only opener: three point two seconds. Your reach is a hundred and twenty-eight units, so strike from its outer edge, because at sixty the dimmed halo still cancels Umbral Fury.
A little history
UMBRA was written for puzzle-me.com and has no older ancestor to point at. Its engine is the visibility polygon: from each light source the game fires a ray at every wall corner in range, sorts the hits by angle and fills the resulting fan. The same routine draws fog of war in strategy games and the sight cones of top-down stealth. What UMBRA changes is the reading. Stealth usually treats light as information and darkness as risk; here darkness is your bloodstream and light is the only thing that kills.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to install anything, and does it work on a phone?
No install, no account, no plugin: UMBRA is one page that runs in the browser. On a touch screen the camera pulls back so you see a beam coming, and the keyboard becomes a thumbstick on the left with six ability buttons on the right.
How is the score worked out?
Nine hundred per chapter cleared, twenty per kill, fifty per brazier snuffed, a hundred and twenty per level gained. Victory adds two thousand five hundred plus a speed bonus that fades after twenty minutes. Each death costs three hundred and fifty, and one score is posted per run.
Is every run of a chapter the same?
The walls are. The six chapters are hand-built, so the temple you learn today is the temple you come back to — that is the point of a stealth game, where knowing the room is half the skill. What changes from run to run is the guards: where each Watcher starts its beat, which way it faces, the moths' jitter, the Keeper's volleys. Umbra has no daily challenge for exactly this reason — a daily board has to be a different board, and these rooms are meant to be learned.
