I made Proscribed for EdenSpark Game Jam #4, where the theme was Forbidden Knowledge. You climb a tower full of banned books with a satchel on your back, and the satchel does the fighting.

Every item in it runs on its own timer. Swords hit, rosaries heal, the crossbow makes things bleed, and the tomes do stranger things. You never press an attack button. Your job is to decide what goes in the satchel, where it sits and what gets left behind.

The whole game lives inside one old leather book. Press Play and the cover swings open. Your satchel is written on the left page and the tower on the right, in ink on worn paper. Going into a fight turns the page.

In a fight each side gets a page, and the page tears a little more every time that side loses health. Whoever loses has their page ripped out of the book. Finish the climb and the book shuts on its back cover.

The tower is 30 stages split into 10 acts. Each stage shows three rooms and you walk into one of them: an armory, vestry or library where a wheel picks your loot, a monster, a rival scholar, or the Confessional. Every third stage has a boss waiting.

The wheel stops on one item. Take it, or reroll and that slot turns into a skull for the next spin.

You start with three candles. A lost fight blows one out, and when the last one goes out the climb is over. Get past stage 30 and you can keep climbing for as long as you last. The Records screen keeps your best runs.

Tomes come sealed. A sealed tome works at half strength and its curse stays asleep. Double-click it to read it and you get the whole thing, curse included, plus some Heresy. Heresy never goes back down, and once you have 3 or more the Inquisition starts sending patrols after you.

How much you read decides which of the four endings you get. Read nothing and you walk out Faithful. At 12 Heresy the last boss changes, and I'll leave that for you to find.

A tome you've read stays known in later climbs, so next time you can see its curse before you break the seal.

Fights play out on their own at 1x, 2x or 4x. The ink ring around an item fills up as it gets ready, then it fires. Some of the bosses are old satchels of yours: three are built from your earlier climbs, and two are the satchel you were carrying a few stages back.

• Click an item to pick it up, click again to put it down
• R or right click turns the item you're holding
• Right click an item to read its full rules
• Double-click a sealed tome to read it
• Put spare items on the Discard while you're in a room. They burn when you leave.
• P pauses

Windows only for now. Unzip the folder and run run.bat. The engine ships inside the folder, which is why the download is bigger than you'd expect from a 2D game.

It's also on EdenSpark, where you can play it straight from the launcher: Proscribed on EdenSpark.

Made by miiuni in EdenSpark. It's a solo entry.

Everything in the game was made during the jam. The only outside pieces are the fonts, the SoundFont, the audio plugins and the Freesound recordings listed below.

• Fonts: Monomakh and Galmuri (SIL Open Font License 1.1), and a few symbols from DotGothic16 (OFL 1.1)
• Instrument samples from the MuseScore MS Basic SoundFont (MIT), based on FluidR3
• Music made with Surge XT, TDR Nova, TDR Kotelnikov, OrilRiver and Valhalla Supermassive
• The room ambience is built from CC0 recordings on Freesound

I'd rather be clear about this. The sound effects started as ElevenLabs generations that I cut, layered and mixed in code. The code and most of the in-game text were written with Claude, an AI coding assistant. The book, the item sprites, portraits, UI art and music were made without AI image or music generation.