Blackmere

Blackmere is an action platformer set inside a fortress that was built and sealed nine hundred years ago, with all of its stonework laid in a single day. Fourteen people opened it before you arrived. The player enters through the same doorway long after their lamps have gone out, following the notes they left scratched on walls as they went deeper. There are thirty seven of these notes, found on doorframes, ration tins and the armour of a dead enemy, and all of them are optional. Read in sequence, they form one continuous account of what happened to the original group.

The central mechanic is the Black Sun, an instrument the expedition carried down. Rather than casting light, it briefly reveals terrain, so ledges, floors and entire routes only exist while it is active, and the player has to move during that window. It is one of four weapons alongside the Regent’s Cleaver, the Warding Bolt and the Splinter Lance. Only the sword is available from the start; the others are picked up where the expedition dropped them, and no further weapons appear after the fifth chapter. Extended use of a weapon upgrades it into a stronger form. Kills accumulate towards a choice between three rites, which are permanent for that run, and there are eight rites in total, so a single descent will not show all of them.

The game runs across twenty one chapters split into three acts of seven, with an encounter at the close of each act, and there are three bosses that share no attacks between them. Areas include a flooded archive, a sluice, a kiln, a ropewalk and a submerged choir. There is no map and no waypoint system. Movement is built around fast acceleration with a modest top speed, a pivoting turn, a jump float that must be triggered deliberately and a short second jump intended for recovery. The dash attack is a horizontal lunge that damages everything it crosses and recovers faster for each target struck. Eight enemy types each behave differently, from a Bulwark that must be lured into a wall to a Scuttler that moves along ceilings. Blackmere supports keyboard and mouse or gamepad and uses waystones as checkpoints.