Knell

Knell is a survival game in which you play the last keeper of a parish struck by plague. Each night, you ring the passing bell for the dead as required by your office, but the bell has begun calling something back. You must survive from the first toll until matins, through twenty minutes of darkness filled with threats that seek to extinguish your candle.

The bell and its dead

The bell tolls every minute, and each toll brings worse dead. Elites arrive at the fifth and fifteenth tolls; the Tolling Ones, which the bell named directly, appear at the tenth toll and the last. The night changes as it grows harder: early dead fade into chaff as new silhouettes answer, and after the fifteenth toll the churchyard floods with walls and rings of hundreds.

Rites and relics

You wield eleven weapons drawn from grave-rites and sexton's tools, including the censer, salt ring, coffin nails, holy water, a corpse-candle sent out hunting, and the knell itself. Pair a rite with its matching relic to evolve it into something the parish never sanctioned.

Candle and progression

Your health is the Wick, and damage gutters it. Souls from slain enemies drift as vigil lights; you can gather them and lay them to rest to grow stronger. If you fall, ash swept from the churchyard can buy permanent restoration in the Reliquary, which has ten tracks to deepen and six keepers to bring out of the dark. Each keeper holds the bell differently, and restoration gives you a longer fuse for the next vigil.

Survive beyond dawn

If you survive until dawn, you may keep walking into the endless dark, where the challenge compounds without mercy. Every endless run ends, and how far you get is up to you.