The Long Reach
For a long time the only answer the Warrens accepted was a blade and the courage to walk into range. That is no longer the only answer.
This is a run through the current build, showing the two systems that just landed together: bows and the magic that comes out of a book. Between them, the corridor stopped being a thing you cross and started being a thing you use.
Drawing a Bow
Shortbows, longbows, and composite bows are two-handed, which means committing to one. Press and hold the attack button and the bow draws, then stays drawn for as long as you care to hold it. It never looses on its own, never fires because you held too long, never punishes you for waiting. Let go and the arrow leaves.
That patience is the whole appeal. You can stand at the mouth of a corridor with the string back and your breath held while something shuffles toward the light, and choose the moment yourself.
After a shot the bow needs to come back around before it can draw again. Agility shortens that window, so a nimble character gets more shots out of the same corridor than a heavy one does. Press early during the recovery and nothing happens. The input is ignored rather than stored up, so you never get a ghost shot firing off a beat after you gave up on it.
Where You Point Is Where It Goes
This one took the most work and is the easiest to miss in the video, because when it is right it looks like nothing at all.
Chainwatch Descent renders through a raycaster, which means the world is genuinely flat. Looking up and down is a trick, a vertical shear of the horizon rather than a real camera tilt. Arrows used to fly along that flat plane no matter where you were looking, so aiming down at something and watching the shot sail off at eye level was a small, constant betrayal.
Arrows now carry the same slope the view does. Aim at the floor and the arrow strikes the floor. Aim at the ceiling and it buries itself up there. Point at a monster at any distance and any angle, and the arrow goes to the crosshair, not near it.
Two things follow from that, both on purpose. A steep shot stops where it meets the ground, so firing at your own feet does exactly what firing at your own feet should do. And monsters are now checked against how tall they actually are, so an arrow sailing a foot over a crouched, small thing passes cleanly over it instead of politely counting as a hit.
Choosing What You Shoot
Wooden, iron, and broadhead arrows do very different amounts of damage, so the game never picks for you. Drag a stack from the backpack onto the rail down the left side of the screen and it binds to a slot. Number keys jump to a slot, cycle keys step through them.
The rail binds to a specific stack rather than to an arrow type, so if you are carrying broadheads in three separate stacks, they can sit in three separate slots. Shoot a slot dry and it clears but stays selected, and the bow will not fire until you move to one that still has something in it. Nothing is ever auto-selected. If you are empty, you know it, because the shot does not happen.
Arrows fly straight from the crosshair and stop at the first wall or the first living thing. A miss is gone. Vendors stock ammunition, chests hold it, and monsters have a small chance of dropping some, but there is a real cost to spraying.
Books You Can Read
Magic is not a class you choose at the start. It is loot.
A spellbook is a gemmed tome that turns up like any other item, sitting in a chest or lying on the floor where something used to be. Red for fire, blue for frost and lightning, green for poison, purple for arcane. Each one wants a certain amount of Intelligence behind your eyes before the writing means anything, from a fairly modest requirement on the poison tome up to the harder ones.
Read a book you qualify for and the spell is yours. Permanently. The tome is spent, but the knowledge survives everything after it, including the Chain dragging you back to the entrance with the whole Warren rebuilt behind you. Whatever else you lose down there, you keep what you learned.
Casting
Knowing a spell is not the same as being able to throw one. You need a focus in your hand: a wand, a rod, an arcane scepter, or a staff. Each pushes your Spell Power further than the last, and the staff pushes it furthest, which is the trade you make for filling both hands with something that cannot parry.
There are five bolts in the build right now, and they are deliberately not reskins of each other:
- Fire Bolt hits hard and leaves the target burning afterward.
- Frost Bolt trades a little damage for locking the target in place.
- Poison Bolt is the cheapest to learn and takes its time.
- Lightning Bolt is the fast one, and it wants the most Intelligence.
- Arcane Bolt reaches farther and flies quicker than anything else you own.
Every cast spends mana, and mana does not come back quickly. A long fight becomes an accounting problem: two more bolts, or save it and close the distance with whatever is in your off hand.
One Rail, Three Jobs
The strip down the left of the screen sorts itself out based on what you are holding. Hold a casting focus and it fills with your known spells. Hold a bow and it fills with your arrow stacks. Draw a sword and it disappears entirely, because there is nothing to choose.
It is a small piece of UI, but it is the thing that makes swapping between the three styles feel like one game instead of three bolted together.
Try It
The build in the video is on itch.io. If you have been playing as a melee character because that was the only option, there are now two other ways to argue with a Warren.
The Warrens keep getting deeper. More soon.