Mournwell
A short room-by-room action game you play in the browser: fight down two depths of a haunted well, pick up relics that change how you shoot, and ring a toll bell that costs you health but hits everything in the room.
Play it: keyboard on desktop, two thumbsticks on a phone. No install, no account.
A chamber on Depth II with two ashmoths and a chimewraith. The bell rings about four seconds in: resolve drops by 15, the shots in the air vanish and every enemy takes 45 damage. Recorded from the dev build in headless Chromium; I used the dev build's test controls to jump straight to that chamber, and a small script pressed the keys.
How to play
| Desktop | Phone / tablet | Does |
|---|
W A S D | left stick | move |
| arrow keys | right stick | cast in that direction (hold to keep casting) |
Space or the TOLL button | TOLL button | ring the bell |
Esc or P | PAUSE | pause |
Each run starts on Depth I, the Bell Archive: 5 to 8 chambers, one treasure room and the Tollmother waiting in the room farthest from the start. A combat chamber seals its doors until everything in it is dead. Beat the Tollmother and a well opens in the floor; step in and you drop to Depth II, the Drowned Belfry with your relics and remaining resolve, into a new layout and a second, angrier Tollmother. Beat her and the run is won. You can type a seed on the title screen; the same seed gives the same layouts and rewards.
The toll bell. Ringing it costs 15 resolve (out of 100). Every enemy in the chamber takes 45 damage and freezes for a moment, and all enemy shots in flight are swept away. It then needs 8 seconds of silence before it rings again, and it will not ring if 15 resolve would kill you. 45 damage kills a siltling in the first few chambers outright and takes a big bite out of everything else; on Depth II enemies are tougher, so it softens a room rather than clearing it, and against a Tollmother it buys you a breather rather than a win.
Enemies
| Where | What it does |
|---|
| Siltling | both depths | wobbles toward you, then lunges |
| Wickspitter | both depths | keeps its distance, glows, then spits a three-shot fan |
| Knellguard | both depths | armoured from the front; lines up and charges, and is stunned if it hits a wall |
| Ashmoth | Depth II | darts at angles around you; bursts into a ring of slow embers when it dies |
| Chimewraith | Depth II | fades out (you cannot hit it then), reappears beside you, glows and fires two aimed shots |
| The Tollmother | end of each depth | three phases: aimed fans, then rings of shots plus helpers (siltlings on Depth I, ashmoths on Depth II), then fast rings |
Relics
Eight relics drop from chests, the treasure room and the occasional kill. Duplicates stack.
| Relic | Effect |
|---|
| Iron Lament | more damage, heavier shots |
| Quickwick | faster casting |
| Longglass | longer range, faster shots |
| Mudrunner Soles | faster movement |
| Blackwax Knot | more maximum resolve, and heals the difference |
| Twin Rune | three shots per cast, then five |
| Briar Eye | shots pierce through enemies |
| Compass Moth | shots bend toward enemies |
Run it locally
Needs Node.js 22 or newer.
git clone https://github.com/appleweiping/mournwell.git
cd mournwell
npm ci
npm run dev # http://localhost:4173
npm test # unit tests (Vitest)
npx playwright install chromium
npm run test:e2e # plays the game with real keyboard and touch input
Everything you see is drawn with Phaser graphics calls and every sound is synthesized with the Web Audio API at runtime; there are no image or audio files. How the code fits together is in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.
Credits
The room-clearing structure is borrowed from The Binding of Isaac. The characters, art, sounds, names and numbers here are original. Mournwell is not affiliated with Edmund McMillen or Nicalis.
License
MIT. Phaser and EventEmitter3 notices are in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
