The Acceding

You are the last Litanist. Under a diocese nobody attends any more, in standing water that catches its interior fire, stands the ASSENT ENGINE — twenty-nine metres of verdigris brass and porcelain that opens for nothing but a correctly spoken litany.

Nine gates. At each one the Engine states a demand. You answer it with three words drawn from a vocabulary of eight. Get it right and it accedes: the grille flares, the valve turns, and the whole frame rises a tier up the shaft.

But it remembers.

The catch

Every word you utter makes the Engine touchier about that word. Say a tender word again and the machine flinches — the column shudders and its patience drains. Fill that meter and it seals; your run ends on whatever tier you are standing on.

And there are only two words to a suit against three slots in a litany. So a gate that says SPEAK ONLY OF WATER cannot be answered without saying a word twice. The repetition is not a mistake you make; it is what the gate demands. Words you leave unspoken cool when a gate opens, so the real game is planning a rotation several gates ahead against demands that force your hand.

The gate above the one you stand on is always shown. That is the whole of your foresight, and it is deliberately not enough.

The vocabulary

Suit	gives	withholds
ASH	RISE	KNEEL
WATER	POUR	DROWN
IRON	OPEN	SEAL
SALT	NAME	FORGET

Every glyph is spoken aloud as you place it. You hear the resaying.

How to play

Pointer only — there is nothing to walk to.

• Click a glyph slab to place that word in the next open slot.
• Click a filled slot to take the word back.
• SPEAK IT commits the litany. There is no undoing a spoken word.
• Watch the small meter under each slab: it is how tender the Engine is about that word. A slab that warns ONE MORE AND IT IS TENDER will cost you.
• Words struck out and marked NOT AT THIS GATE are barred by the current demand, not by anything you did.
• THE ENGINE'S PATIENCE runs along the bottom. It refills a little every time a gate opens, and never any other way.

A run is nine gates and takes a few minutes. There is a title card, an opening descent that tells you what you are looking at, and two endings.

Worth seeing

• The Engine itself. Nine brass drums on a shaft with fire inside them, a porcelain reliquary face on every tier, wax, tarnish and prayer-slips. The camera climbs it with you — by the ninth gate you are twenty-six metres up.
• THE CROWN. The ninth gate, which asks for one word said three times, and what the machine does when it finally opens.
• The Verger, a dead attendant whose recording still plays, who explains the craft in the opening and is wrong about how forgiving it is.
• Everything speaks. The Engine, the Verger and your own voice saying each glyph. Play it with sound on; every line is written on screen as well.

Headphones. Portrait screen. It is dark on purpose.