HOURFALL

You have no health. You have a clock.

A top-down action-RPG where damage is measured in seconds off your life, and
every cooldown you skip is paid for the same way.

You are the Hand, wound this morning out of 2 minutes and 50 seconds of three
women's lives. Getting hit spends seconds. Killing pays seconds back. Descend the falling tower, FLOOR 05 down to FLOOR 00, and decide who is in the room when you reach zero.

Made for GMTK 2026 - theme COUNT DOWN. Playable in your browser, or download for Windows.

Your life is a clock

There is no health bar and no potions. One number sits at the top of the screen, it only ever falls, and every verb in the game is priced in it. When it hits 00:00, the run ends, but zero is the event the whole game is about, not a "Game Over."

MOBA-flavored action, aimed with the mouse

Move on WASD, aim everything at your cursor, click to strike, Space to dash through danger. Four unlockable abilities SEVER, TOLL, REWIND STEP and the HOURFALL ultimate, each with its own cooldown you can burn. Read the enemy telegraphs (cones, lines, and the Bell Caster's ring with a safe centre), grab the time-crystals your kills drop, and interrupt spawn portals before they open.

Romance three companions who rebuild your character

Between floors you climb into the Sanctum, a visual-novel hub with three women who wound your clock: Verity the Winder, Odd the Archivist, and Rook the Last Bell. Follow one, talk to her (your replies are choices in her voice), and she reshapes your run: 

• Verity permanently unlocks abilities
• Odd grants powers like life-steal while she walks with you
• Rook buffs your stats and turns a low clock into a damage build. 

Raise her affinity and she says new things, but the Sanctum clock keeps draining while you listen. You can't max all three in one run. Pick a person.

Controls

Action	Key	Costs time?
Move	W A S D / arrows	no
Aim	Mouse	no
Strike	Left Mouse	no
Dash	Space	no
Ability 1	Right Mouse	only if you BURN it early
Ability 2	Q	only if you BURN it early
Ability 3	E	only if you BURN it early
Ultimate	R	only if you BURN it early
Interact	F	no
Pause	ESC	no

Credits

Pixel art Craftpix.net (hero, enemies, tileset, props, UI kit, crystal & gift icons, bitmap font), under the Craftpix licence. The Timekeeper is a recoloured derivative of Craftpix's Orc3 rig. 

Companion portraits "Girl Sprites for Visual Novels (Full edition)" by Pepo Kukuru (@CucurbitaPepo5) — CC0 1.0.

UI icons game-icons.net by Delapouite, Lorc, Sbed and Skoll CC-BY 3.0.

Music Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) - CC-BY 4.0

"Ossuary 1 - A Beginning", "Achaidh Cheide", "Volatile Reaction", "Clash Defiant", "Bittersweet", "Anxiety". Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 International - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sound "Wind Loop" by AntumDeluge, looped from a recording by InspectorJ (freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/376415/). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Further sound (CC0 1.0) - Kenney, rubberduck, JaggedStone, AntumDeluge, yd, bart, thebardofblasphemy, artisticdude, pyranostudios, isaiah658, MidFag. 

Credits font "Pixel Operator 8" by Jayvee Enaguas (HarvettFox96) — CC0 1.0.