How to play
- Goal
- Take every relic in the hall and reach the way out.
- How it ends
- Won when the thief stands on the way out with every relic; lost when a chasing guard catches the thief, or after five minutes when the watch changes.
- Record
- For every hall, the ten fastest escapes and the ten best scores, each proved by replaying the run.
- Walk with the arrow keys or WASD, eight ways. On a phone drag anywhere: the thief walks the way you drag.
- Stay out of the cones of light the guards carry, and off lit floor while a guard faces you: the ring under the thief is blue when hidden, amber in the light, red when seen. Walk into a brazier to snuff it.
- Take every relic, then stand on the way out. Hold Shift (or the Dash button) to run, which guards near you hear; Space (or the Smoke button) throws a cloud that hides you for five seconds.
Controls
| ← ↑ → ↓ · W A S D | Walk, eight ways |
|---|---|
| Shift · J (hold) | Dash: faster, and heard |
| Space · K · E | Throw smoke |
| Drag | Walk the way you drag |
| Dash · Smoke buttons | On a touch screen: hold Dash, tap Smoke |
| M | Hide or show the map |
| P · Escape | Pause (the run then counts as practice) |
| R · ↻ | Start the hall over |
The thief, the guards, the braziers, the floors and the walls are painted art from the Morass warehouse, most of it made for this game; the music, "Shadowstep", was composed for it. The simulation uses whole numbers only and a run is just the hall and the controls the thief 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.shadowstep.v1. A district's floor and walls are fetched when you open a hall of that district. A gamepad works when one is connected. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
Watch how to play
About Shadowstep
A stealth game seen from above, set in the city of Westmark at night. You are a thief. Every hall has a relic to take and a way out, and guards between you and both. Nobody can be fought: the whole game is where the guards are looking and where the light falls.
Each guard's sight is drawn on the floor as the light of its lantern. Inside the bright part it sees you anywhere. The faint part reaches nearly three times as far, and only matters when you stand on floor lit by a brazier, so the dark is cover and a lit room is a risk. Walk into a brazier and it is snuffed for the rest of the hall. Being seen is not the end: the mark over a guard's head fills first, and if you get out of sight in time it forgets. If it fills, the guard chases you and calls the others near; break its line of sight for two seconds, or throw your smoke, and it gives up. A roused guard stands startled for a moment before it runs, and only a chasing guard's touch ends the run.
There are 60 halls in six districts, from a merchant's house with one watchman to the royal vault. Sentries stand and look each way in turn, hounds scent you all round whether you are lit or not, and wardens see in the dark. Every hall has two top-ten boards: the fastest escape, and the best score, which pays for treasure, for raising no alarm, for never being noticed at all, and, if no alarm was raised, for every second under the hall's par. Before a hall shipped, the build searched out a way through it on which the thief is never noticed, walking only, and played that way through the game itself.
