Reliquary

You walk a ruined cathedral one tile at a time, and the rule is the whole game: you have no mana and no spell list — you carry relics, and each one can be used a fixed number of times before it shatters and is gone for the rest of the run.

Your staff does 4 damage. It is weak on purpose, and against a Glass Wraith it does nothing at all — the first swing passes straight through it and the game says so, so you find out what relics are for without spending one to learn it. The swing still costs you the turn. The strongest relic in the cathedral, the Martyr's Nail, destroys any single enemy outright, including the boss, and it has one use. Every fight is the same question: is winning this worth a piece of your power?

How it plays

• Turn-based across five naves of a 20x20 grid, generated from a fixed seed as a floorplan rather than a maze — a central nave, two aisles, an arcade of piers, three to five chapels and a transept. Turning costs nothing, so no relic is ever spent in a panic.
• Six kinds of relic, with 5, 3, 3, 2, 2 and 1 uses. You start with none and carry four at a time; find a fifth and you choose what to drop. Each is drawn in the HUD as a rose-window roundel that loses a segment every time you spend it, so counting the intact glass is counting what you have left.
• 24 HP, and the only healing in the game is a relic — 8 HP a use, five uses, then it shatters and you are down to whatever the cathedral hands you next. No rest, no regeneration, no potions, so your health is a consumable too.
• The Glass Wraith is immune to physical damage, so hoarding your offensive relics is punished as hard as spending them. Every nave is generated with at least one offensive relic in it, checked across 250 generated naves.
• Enemies wind up one turn before they strike. Shift on that turn takes the hit to 0 damage.
• The Hollow Bishop holds the Rose Window with 30 HP and calls in more Choir every 3 turns, up to four of them. Across 50 seeded test runs, a bot that spends relics freely wins 44 of them; a bot that never spends one reaches the Rose Window 48 times and beats the Bishop 6.

Each nave has its own colour of glass — blue, red, green, gold, then violet — and it is the only saturated thing in the frame. The stone is matte and near-black, and the light that reaches the floor has come through a window first.