ONE LAMP

A five-minute horror game you can play right here in your browser. No download.

You are standing in the middle of a round black room holding one lamp.

Whatever your light is touching is frozen. Everything else is walking toward you.

You have 30 degrees of light and 360 degrees of room. That is the whole problem.

▶ Press play above.

The beam bites harder up close

HOLD the button to FOCUS: a narrow, hotter beam that pushes a thing back and finally burns it away. While you focus you are blind to the rest of the room, and the battery drains five times faster. The battery only refills when nothing is close to you — so making space is not optional, it is how you keep the lamp alive.

And the beam burns proportionally harder the closer the thing is. Killing something at the far wall is slow and expensive. Letting it walk all the way in and then lighting it up is fast, worth far more, and exactly as stupid as it sounds.

Here is the catch that makes it a real decision: wide light freezes. So to let something reach knife range, you have to deliberately take the beam off it and leave it in the dark. Holding your nerve is the skill.

Survive from 01:00 to 06:00. Five real minutes.

The dark remembers

Every creature you banish leaves its rule behind. From the second hour, whatever arrives next may be carrying it.

SKELETON KNIGHT — NOW DRAWN TO THE FOCUS

So banishing is never free. The Skeleton Knight gives up nothing. The Lantern Spirit makes your whole night phototropic. The Grave Worm teaches the rest of them to burrow out of your light. You cannot bank safety, only choose what it costs.

Eight things in the dark, eight rules

Six of them obey the rule above. Two of them do not, and finding out which two is most of your first three runs.

One is drawn to light — wide beam, narrow beam, it does not care. It only stops coming when you deliberately look away and leave it in the dark.

One only moves while it is lit. Killing it means feeding it first.

The dial

The strip across the top is every threat you can hear but cannot see, placed at its bearing relative to where you are facing. Far things wobble. Close things do not. It never tells you what it is.

Headphones are recommended. The game is completely fair muted.

A night a day

Everyone gets the same seeded night on the same date. Reach an ending and the game writes you a card you can paste straight into the comments:

ONE LAMP - NIGHT OF 19 SEP
RANK B  04:12  6 BANISHED  2 BLACKOUTS
TAKEN BY: THE LANTERN SPIRIT (BURROWER)

Beat mine. I dare you.

What the paid download adds

The browser build above is the complete Night 1 — all eight creatures, the full five minutes, the daily seed. It is not a demo. The download adds:

• LONGEST NIGHT — dawn stops coming. Each watch keeps every trait you have unleashed and gives you less room to breathe.
• Seed entry — type any seed by hand and replay a night that beat you.
• An offline copy that runs from a folder with no iframe stealing your clicks.
• The SFX bank — all 32 sounds as OGG, licensed for your own commercial projects, no credit required.

Controls

MOUSE left / right ......... turn (further from centre = faster)
A / D or ARROW KEYS ........ turn
HOLD LEFT MOUSE or SPACE ... FOCUS
M .......................... mute
R .......................... retry
C .......................... copy result

Made of things I made

Every creature, wall and icon in this game comes out of asset packs on this same store. If you like how it looks, you can build with the same pieces:

• Dark Fantasy Monster Battlers & VFX — all eight creatures
• Haunted Pixel Tileset Pack — the crypt

All 32 sounds are synthesised procedurally from code — oscillators, noise, filters and envelopes, no recordings — by the same DSP engine behind the Ironbell and GRIMOIRE sound packs.

The lighting, the dial, every visual effect and all of the code are hand-written. No engine, no framework, 1.8 MB, 60fps on a laptop.