First Light: Vagant

You are the last vagant — a wandering lamplighter with no parish — out on the fen the drainage Commissioners cut, ditched, and then walked away from.

Seven iron lamp standards still stand along the water. All of them are dark. Have every one of them burning before the sun clears the bank, or the fen keeps you.

You have five minutes.

What is out there

The Commissioners never left. They are tall, faceless, unhurried, and each one is crowned with an enormous white powdered wig — a jasey. They do not hunt by sound. They come toward light, and you are carrying the only light for a mile.

Which is the problem, because relighting a lamp makes a great deal of it.

The surest way not to be seen is to pull a jasey down over your own head. It hides you almost completely. It also blinds you almost completely, and one step into a ditch leaves it sodden, at which point it hides nothing at all.

The loop

1. Rove out into the dark. There is no map and no waypoint — you navigate by the shape of the cuts and by the lamps you have already lit.
2. Find a ditched standard. Cross the cut to reach it: find the plank, or wade and pay for it.
3. Hold to relight. It spends oil, and it takes a moment you may not have.
4. The lit lamp becomes a pool of safety — refill your oil, dry your wig, breathe.
5. The light you just made is now the brightest thing on the fen, and they have seen it. Hood up and slip away half-blind, or run.
6. Six more times.

Get all seven and the fen comes up gold and you walk out of it. Miss, or get taken, and the Commission enters you in the minute-book: one vagant, of no parish, taken up at the Near Cut. Struck from the roll, and the roll closed.

Controls

Everything is bound to actions, so all three families reach every part of the game.

	Mouse & keyboard	Controller	Touch
Move	WASD	left stick	left virtual stick
Look	mouse	right stick	drag, right side
Run	Shift	stick click / east	Run
Climb	Space	north	Climb
Relight (hold)	E	south (hold)	Relight
Hood on / off	Q or right mouse	west / left trigger	Hood
Pause	Esc	start	pause button
Choose / back	Enter / Esc	south / east	tap the card
Again	R	north	Again

Menus take arrow keys, the d-pad, or a thumb, and the focused item is always visible.

Worth seeing

• The night is warm sodium orange in a world of cold blue-green, and almost everything past thirty metres is fog. You read the fen by silhouette: dead reed, pollarded stumps, collapsed sluice gates, and the pale mass of a wig where there should be nothing.
• The dawn band creeps down the top edge of the screen for the whole five minutes. It is the clock, and it is also the thing you are afraid of.
• Wear the jasey once and watch what it does to your own view. It is the best trade in the game and it is not a comfortable one.
• The Commissioner speaks. He is reading a minute-book aloud, and he is reading about you.

Plays in a browser, in portrait or landscape, on a phone, a laptop or a television.