Description
You wake up in a prison cell. The only way out is up through the castle, room by room, and the Warden is waiting at the top. Wardenfall is a third person melee game with light and heavy attacks, blocking, dodging and posture, a bow and a handful of spells, in a torch lit low poly castle. It runs in a browser tab, costs nothing, and ends in about one to two hours.
The design follows one constraint: a first run has to fit in an evening. Dying sends you back to the menu, but the rooms you cleared stay cleared.
History
The first plan, written on 24 July 2026, had one room, one player and waves of enemies. The castle came only once the sword felt right. The combat slice took four days; August brought forty-five numbered versions with rooms, a reactive soundtrack, shrines and boons, a bow and magic, traps and Challenge Mode. From September the game moved to a ticket-by-ticket workflow where a human plays every preview build before it ships, and more than seventy changes went out that way. The project now has over three hundred recorded design decisions and some 2,700 automated tests. Every batch of changes gets patch notes on the devlog; the longer story is on the game page.
Features
- Light and heavy attacks, block, parry, dodge, and posture on both sides of the fight.
- Hitstop that freezes only the fighters involved, so a hit lands without the whole screen stuttering.
- Every attack except a boss's can be blocked, every attack can be dodged, and enemies telegraph which is which.
- Shrines to rest, level up and spend points in a skill tree; boons to collect along the way.
- A bow and a handful of spells next to the sword.
- The Warden, a horned boss whose unblockable attacks set his fists on fire.
- Challenge Mode with stackable curses and a clock, for players who have finished the game.
- Keyboard, gamepad and touch controls; nothing to install, no account.
Screenshots
1200 by 776 JPEG. Click a screenshot for the full-size file.
Logos and icons
Credits
- Alexis Rivard: game design and playtesting
- Olivier Rivard: engineering and tooling
Contact
Email hello@onesitting.studio, or see the contact page. You can record, stream and write about the game without asking. The kit for our second game is here; the studio boilerplate is on the press page.