A game of alchemy of the soul, in the sense of Magnum Opus (The Great Work) and hermetic tradition.
The sephiroth have correspondances to planets among other things. The birds have symbolical meanings in alchemy.
You start as a black crow jumping around the hexagonal map, first collecting gems, and then other things that are related to the ten holy sephiroth.
You advance on the Tree of Life and try to reach the Kether (crown) state through Understanding (Binah) and wisdom (Chochmah) and other sephiroth, starting from Malkuth (Kingdom).
Take care to keep the tree in balance – otherwise you might slip back levels and revert to previous stages on the tree and as a symbolical bird.
When you reach Kether, you win.
To keep balance, you need to have a solid base.
So always collect at least the same amount of things related to lower sephiroth as those related to higher levels. This also keeps the sephiroth horizontally balanced on the Tree of Life.
Chaos ensues, if you accidentally collect more things on the higher levels – and you slip down back to a lower level, that still has balance and support of the Foundation. You lose the things collected above that level.
The basic movements are UP and DOWN arrow keys, and the A, S, X, Z keys for diagonal movements.
Movement gets easier as you progress: On Yesod (Foundation) level, you can wrap around the board edges, and on Tiphereth level you can move sideways with LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys.
Find Alchemy on Itch or play the game in your web browser on the Tic-80 site,
or play just the bare html game at http://composed.nu/alchemy/.
Source code is available on Github:
https://github.com/peterhil/alchemy
This is a Lisp Game Jam submission originally done in 10 days. I did not have time to do many things on version 0.1.0, like announce winning the game on reaching Keter.
The game is written in Fennel Lisp. Includes some obscure complex mathematics and weird emanations of forms.
Run tests with the fennel command:
fennel spec.fnl