Lanternbound

A little light. A long way down.

Lanternbound is an illustrated isometric party roguelike that runs entirely in your browser. Gather five adventurers, chart a living dungeon floor by floor, and keep one small lantern burning all the way to the Heart of Night.

One lantern, ten floors

Every descent is a new floor: 14–22 irregular chambers, loop shortcuts, flooded causeways, armories behind guarded keys, and a guardian waiting at the end. Any three cleared encounters earn the seals that open the guardian's gate — the rest of the branches are yours to explore or leave in the dark.

In a hurry? Quick Descent keeps the short three-floor run, about three minutes of active play.

Ten jobs, eighty talents

Warden, Ranger, Mender, Arcanist, Rogue, Berserker, Paladin, Engineer, Druid, Necromancer. Each hero has their own skill tree, a signature ability, and a role in the marching order — melee up front, ranged and support behind. Five cross-job bonds reward a party that actually fits together.

Combat you can read

Initiative is a visible queue, not a burst of numbers. Every actor telegraphs windup, lunge, travel, impact and recovery. Health, sound and recoil all land on the deferred impact, so a strike you queued is a strike you can watch land. Pause freezes everything mid-swing.

The dungeon bites back

Guarded keys open specific armories. Floodgates drain pools and carve new shortcuts. Shrines, bargains, lost libraries, runic forges, stranded recruits and a hidden vault sit off the main road — and some of them are worth the risk. Equipment wears out and eventually perishes. Loot what you can carry, repair what you can't replace.

What's in this build

• Ten-floor expedition or three-floor quick descent, seeded and replayable
• Ten hero jobs with animated cutout sprites — 22 authored frames each
• Fifteen enemy archetypes and ten guardians with telegraphed patterns and phases
• Skill trees, bonds, gear durability, legacy upgrades and post-victory difficulty
• Mouse, keyboard and touch controls; the layout adapts to a phone screen
• Procedural audio and a self-contained build — no account, no third-party CDN

Best on desktop; fully playable on a phone. Keyboard: Space pause · 1–4 actions · Tab floor map · O formation · T talents · B backpack · C codex · H help.

Built with vanilla JavaScript and Canvas 2D. Hero illustrations and the cover were AI-generated for this project; most monster artwork is adapted from CC-BY-SA Flare and OpenGameArt sprite sheets, credited in full inside the game's Art credits and in the source repository. Code is MIT.