Keymancer: A Vim Roguelite

hjkl TO MOVE. i TO TYPE. dd TO WIN.

Keymancer: A Vim Roguelite is a roguelite where every keystroke is a real Vim command.
You don't need to know that to play. You'll know it anyway by the time you win.

Cross a procedurally built world with hjkl. Crash into monsters. Press i and win
fights by typing the names of your attacks faster than they can swing back. Then get
strong enough to stop fighting altogether and start deleting the map.

COMBAT IS A TYPING DUEL

Your hero swings on his own, and swinging on his own loses. Enemies wind up in the open,
shouting what's coming. Your only answer is to press i and start typing.

• Letters turn green as they match and gold when the name is complete. Enter fires. Stay in Insert Mode and keep casting
  
• A typo costs the beat, not health. You stagger for a moment while their bars keep filling
  
• Spam one move and it decays: 80%, then 64%, then 51%. Rotate three and you stay at full power
  
• Bosses clone, reflect, lock, heal and summon, and announce every bit of it first
  
• Esc leaves Insert Mode. Nothing does it for you. That reflex is the whole art

ADVENTURES YOU FINISH. A GAME YOU DON'T

Half Minute Hero pacing: no fat, no downtime, no walking between the good parts.

• A full adventure per run: three zones deep, drawn from six, every floor sealed until its boss falls
  
• Shrines deal a new hand of attacks and Vim commands every run. No two loadouts play alike
  
• Merchants always stock more than the purse can carry. Every buy costs another
  
• The ceiling keeps climbing. Same fight, fewer keystrokes, once you know it cold

A run is under an hour. The run that beats you tonight is the one you dismantle in nine
seconds a month from now.

THEN YOU BREAK IT

Cast cleanly and the Fluency Meter climbs. Charge it, outgrow the monsters in front of
you, and they flicker, dissolve, and re-render as glowing text with a cursor beside it.

Because they were never monsters. They were a line.

dd deletes the whole line before the fight starts. x shaves one enemy off the
end. 3dd takes three lines. u undoes it when you get greedy. Line them up and one
edit clears the room. The meter drains as you walk, and bosses are immune, so use it or lose it.

DEATH IS THREE KEYSTROKES

:q! Run over. What survives is your .vimrc, a persistent upgrade screen laid out
as a config file that carries across every run you'll ever play. You don't level a character
here. You tune the machine you fight with.

AND YES, IT'S ALL REAL

Every key is a real command from Vim, the editor engineers have argued about for forty
years. Insert Mode types text. Normal Mode edits. :w saves your run. Nothing is
fake-Vim: what you learn here works in your editor tomorrow.

• 25 incantations to type, from jab to kamehameha
  
• 30+ real Vim commands to draft, from x and dd to ciw, V and :%s
  
• 6 zones, 30 bosses, 3 zones per run
  
• Keyboard only, by design

[h1]hjkl to move. i to type. dd to win.[/h1]