As with combat, you’re occasionally able to interact with the world around you by typing out the action you want to perform
Your first task in this lexical dungeon crawler is to acknowledge your resurrection at the hands of its eponymous necromancer. He has reanimated your band of heroes for his own nefarious purposes, and soon has you scouring the dingy caverns of your former resting place for an assortment of fantasy institutions: hidden chests hold valuable loot, anthropomorphic creatures stand ready to poke you with their spears, and sacred altars need toppling. It’s a surprise, then, to learn that all this originated in more swashbuckling surroundings.
“We started to make a game in which you commanded a cartoon pirate ship by shooting things with your pistol,” co-designer and writer Lee Williams tells us. The idea, he says, was to knock words out of other characters’ sentences to change their meanings. “Then we ditched the gun and came up with a system that allowed you to steal and replace words to fit the story. It was getting away from the pirate theme at speed by this time, so we switched to fantasy – a game about mages using words to affect their environment and fight enemies.” The final touch was to make the characters undead and introduce a narrator. “Then,” he says, “we were away.”