About The Last Wick
A free, text-driven, turn-based fantasy RPG that runs entirely in
your browser. No download, no account, no cost.
The Last Wick is a single-player role-playing game about carrying a
light through a world that lost its sun three centuries ago. You are the twelfth Keeper:
the person holding one of the last matches in existence. The wick has been carried by
eleven people before you, and every one of them is still inside the flame, arguing about
what the light is for.
One pool for everything
Most role-playing games give you two numbers: health to survive with, and mana to act
with. Separate pools mean spending mana is never really a decision — you simply spend what
you have. The Last Wick gives you one. Ember is your health, your fuel and your
ammunition at the same time, so every spell you cast shortens your life. There is
no free action and no safe turn.
Around that single pool sit four systems, each of which turns a number into a
choice:
- Ash — residue left behind when light is spent. Ash pays for Rites,
the largest workings, so burning Emember wastefully is sometimes exactly right.
- Stance — a free dial you turn every round. Bright deals half again
as much damage and takes half again as much; Dim makes you slow and very hard to kill.
Steady is for people who have not worked out what they want yet.
- The Dim — a clock that rises every round and multiplies everything
the creatures do. Tending pushes it back, but the rise accelerates the longer you stand
in it, so nobody outlasts it forever.
- Temper — every creature and every working has a nature. Matching it
bites deep; the wrong light may as well be thrown water. Since you carry only a few
Keepers, you will often be holding the wrong light.
The eleven Keepers
Every dead Keeper leaves behind two workings and one doctrine, and you can carry only
two to four of them at a time. That is the entire build system, and it is also the story:
choosing who to listen to is choosing what kind of Keeper you become. The Kindler says
burn it. The Tally says count it. The Vigil says stand still. The Cartographer spent four
hundred years drawing a road around the truth, and the Ninth is still alive.
Five chapters
- The Wick Changes Hands — a waystation, three bodies, and one
lantern that chose the nearest warm one.
- Coldwater — a town that never went dark, in a world where light has
to come from somewhere, and two hundred years of arithmetic nobody wants to say out
loud.
- The Cartographer's Road — the only road through the Dim, four
hundred years old and wrong in places on purpose.
- The Ninth — a city of permanent noon, lit by draining the
hearths of everybody else, kept by the only Keeper who never put the wick down.
- The Long Night — a ring of standing stones, a hole in the ground
with a hand's width of light coming out of it, and the first Keeper, who put it out
and has been sitting there ever since wondering whether he was right.
Four endings
What you did with the wick, and what you were carrying when you got there, decides how
the chronicle closes. There is no correct answer and no way to see all four in one
playthrough.
Frequently asked
- Is it free?
- Yes — free to play and free to finish. Reviving after death is currently free as
well, while the chronicle is in its first printing.
- Do I need to install or sign up for anything?
- No. It runs in any modern browser on desktop, tablet or phone. Progress is saved
automatically, so you can close the tab and pick it up later.
- How long is it?
- Five chapters, 61 scenes, twelve scripted battles and four endings — roughly two to
three hours for a first playthrough.
- Is it suitable for younger players?
- Yes. It is PG throughout. People die and it matters, but nothing is depicted that a
fourteen-year-old should not read.
- Does it work without JavaScript?
- You are reading this page, so yes — the story and systems above are described in
plain HTML. Playing the game itself needs JavaScript enabled.