How to play
- Goal
- Reach the stair down.
- How it ends
- The hall is cleared when your hero steps onto the stair; the run is lost when health runs out: the hold drains it all the time, and monsters take more.
- Record
- For every hall, the ten best scores and the ten fastest escapes, each proved by replaying the run.
- Walk with the arrow keys or WASD, eight ways. On a phone drag anywhere: your hero walks the way you drag.
- Hold Space (or the Shoot button) to shoot the way you face; your hero stands still while shooting, and a direction pressed with it turns them. Shoot monsters, then the lair they came from.
- Health drains four points a second and monsters take more. Eat the food you find, walk into a locked door with a key to open it, throw a potion with Shift when you are swamped, and step onto the stair to clear the hall.
Controls
| ← ↑ → ↓ · W A S D | Walk, eight ways |
|---|---|
| Space · J (hold) | Shoot the way you face, standing still; a direction turns you |
| Shift · K · E | Throw a potion |
| Drag | Walk the way you drag |
| Shoot · Potion buttons | On a touch screen: hold Shoot, tap Potion |
| M | Hide or show the map of where you have been |
| P · Escape | Pause (the run then counts as practice) |
| R · ↻ | Start the hall over |
The heroes, monsters, lairs, floors and walls are painted art from the Morass warehouse, most of it made for this game; the music, "Keyhold", was composed for it. The simulation uses whole numbers only and a run is just the hall, the hero and the controls the hero answered to, so every browser plays it back identically and the records worker re-plays each one before it enters a Top 10. Your bests stay in this browser under morass.keyhold.v1. A depth's floor and walls are fetched when you open a hall of that depth. A gamepad works when one is connected. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
Watch how to play
About Keyhold
A dungeon crawl in the line of Gauntlet, set in the halls under Korthen. You lead one hero through torchlit rooms and passages to the stair down. Health is the only life you have, and the hold drains it all the time, so every hall is a race you choose how to run: straight for the stair, or through every lair and treasure chest on the way.
Monsters crawl out of lairs while you are near: ghouls from bone heaps, ghosts from cracked sarcophagi, fire-throwing imps from burning rifts, ogres from hide dens. Break a lair and its brood stops. Keys open locked doors, food gives health back, and a potion harms every monster and lair near you; it is the only thing that ends a reaper. Four heroes play differently: the knight is slow and hits hard, the ranger is quick with a light bow, the mage's bolts pass through two monsters to a third, and the cleric gets more from every meal.
There are 48 halls in six depths, each with its own floor, its own darkness and a new monster. Every hall was cleared by a bot as each of the four heroes before it shipped, and no order of spending keys can shut you out of the stair. Each hall keeps two Top 10s, best score and fastest escape; every run on them is re-played by the site before it is ranked.
