SLAG SAINT

One fight. That's the whole game.

Every hundred years the order sends one ward down into the drowned foundry to cool the thing it keeps bound there. The chains held for ninety-nine.

You are the Emberward. Kneeling in a basin of black glass over a lake of slag is the Slag Saint — fifteen metres of scorched bronze with a cathedral bell for a head and a furnace shuttered behind its chest. It has been waiting for this appointment. It is not angry with you. It speaks to you while you kill it, and it thanks you when it dies.

How to play

W A S D	move
mouse	camera
Left mouse	light attack — fast, cheap, small poise damage
Right mouse	heavy attack — slow wind-up, real damage, real commitment
Space	dodge-roll — invulnerable from 0.06s to 0.40s
Shift hold	guard. Release into the strike to parry it
Tab	lock-on (on by default)
E	Quench — only while the saint is broken. 110 damage
MENU	pause, bottom right

Everything costs stamina. Greed is how you die.

The loop

Every attack the saint makes has a wind-up you can see and learn, and the floor in front of it lights with the arc the blow is about to cover. Roll through it, or ring it with a parry, then punish the recovery.

Watch the poise bar under its health. Attacks chip it; a parry takes a third of it at once. Break it and the saint kneels with its chest open — run in and drive the blade into the furnace.

Three phases

1. BOUND — kneeling, still chained, slow and enormous. Cold blue light, steam off the wet glass.
2. KINDLED — the chains snap. It stands up. Light starts coming out of it and the whole room turns the colour of a forge.
3. UNSHUTTERED — the chest opens and it stops being careful.

The damage you do stays on its body, so by the end the fight is written on it.

Worth seeing

• The look up. The arena is a 22-metre circle in a portrait frame; the saint does not fit in it, and the camera cranes to hold what it can.
• The colour travelling across the three phases, from cold quench-blue to ember.
• The tells. Nothing in this fight is unreadable — if it hit you, you were early, late, or greedy.

Headphones

The saint speaks, and it is worth hearing.