Rubedo

Rubedo is an incremental about a ring with twelve slots in it.

The pulse starts at the top, goes clockwise, and is worth 1. Every glyph it passes changes what it's carrying. SEED adds 2, MIRROR multiplies by 1.5, so if you put the mirror first it multiplies nothing. That's most of the game right there.

There are 42 glyphs. You'll spend a lot of the game dragging them one slot to the left.

Putting them in order

Rule of thumb is additives first, multipliers last. It works until it doesn't. AXLE only pays from the middle third of the ring. CORNERSTONE only pays if it's the last one. ZENITH wants the pulse to arrive worth somewhere between 40 and 2500, which means the right slot for it moves every time you change anything else. A good chunk of the catalogue exists to break the rule of thumb.

Some glyphs don't do arithmetic at all, they mess with the route. SKIP eats the one after it. ECHO repeats whatever is on its left. REWIND fires the previous two again, and if a REWIND repeats another REWIND, that one repeats its own two, and the thing cascades backwards around the ring. Stacking copies is a build, not a wasted slot.

There are also ten synergies that look at the shape of the ring instead of what's in it. Three multipliers in a row. Four alternating. Two glyphs that dirty the circle. When you drag something the preview shows you before and after, and warns you if you're about to break one.

The part that pushes back

Every sixteen laps the Tribute asks you for Essence and gives you a deadline, counted in laps. The amount comes from what you earned since the last one, so it follows you around instead of sitting on a curve. Don't pay and you lose a chunk of Essence, plus it takes a glyph off your ring. You can put it off, but you pay for that in corruption.

Corruption also builds from the Frenzy and from the glyphs that dirty the circle. Fill the bar and the ring collapses: 40% of your Essence, your combo and your rhythm, gone.

Which is also a build, by the way. One whole branch of the tree pays better the filthier things get, and so do PACT, BLACK VEIN and a few others. Living one point under the line is a perfectly good way to play.

Solve, and what comes after

Solve dissolves the ring into Ash and a Seal. The Seal's strength is whatever the ring was worth at the second you pressed the button, so you want your best combination built before you press it, not after. It's the most expensive mistake in the game and I still make it.

Ash buys permanent nodes on a tree with five branches. From your third Solve on, Albedo opens up and you can Ascend instead, which throws away all of Nigredo including the Ash and hands you Light. Light buys the things you never lose again: more starting slots, a homunculus that clicks on the beat, keeping your engraved glyphs through every Solve.

Ascending also turns the phase of the Work and repaints the whole game. Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, Rubedo.

Rubedo isn't the ceiling. Once you're there with the Nine Fragments and enough Light, that same red button stops dissolving and sets instead. Coagula resets nothing, which is the entire point of it. You keep playing afterwards, the ring stays where you left it, and the Work is finished.

Bits and pieces

There's a breakdown screen that tells you what each glyph is really doing. It works by pulling the glyph out, running the lap again and comparing, because once copies are feeding copies there's no honest formula for splitting the credit. Yes, the percentages add up to more than 100. If you're running two multipliers, taking either one out costs you the same, so both of them get charged for it.

Four beats per lap. If rhythm isn't your thing there's an assist that goes all the way up to "every click counts as on-beat", and you trade some of the multiplier for it.

Every few seconds a shape drifts across the screen and pays if you catch it before it leaves.

There's a scratch-card, and it doesn't pause the game. The ring keeps turning behind the cards, and yes, you can get seized by the Tribute halfway through scratching one. Expected value sits around 1, so it's not income. It's a rollercoaster.

Plus a codex, 25 achievements, offline progress, and a folder you can drop your own .ogg files into.

Español, English, 简体中文, 繁體中文. Made in Godot 4. Everything you see is vector and drawn in code, there are no ads and there's nothing to buy.

Where it's at

Still in development, but you can play it from the first click to the ending.

What I'd really like to know is where it loses you. Not whether you liked it. Where you stopped: the point where you couldn't tell what your own ring was doing any more, or the hour when moving glyphs around stopped feeling worth the trouble. A comment saying "I quit after X because Y" helps me more than a rating does.

Credits

The ring, the glyphs and everything else drawn on screen are mine. These aren't:

Music

Long Note Two · Ossuary 1 – A Beginning · Ossuary 6 – Air · Deep Haze · Echoes of Time v2 · The Descent, by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0. Converted to Ogg and level-matched so the volume doesn't jump between tracks.

Particles and UI frames

Particle Pack 1.1 and UI Pack 2.0 by Kenney, released under CC0. Credit isn't required for those, but it seems rude not to.

Type

Cinzel for the titles, EB Garamond for the prose, Rubik for anything with a number in it, and Noto Sans SC / TC so the Chinese builds have characters to draw with. All under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, and the full licences ship inside the game folder.