Bombseeker

Years after the collapse, the resistance started pulling bombs out of the ground. You are a new recruit, posted to a town called Alanther, and the job is exactly what the title says: find the bombs, mark them, and make the roads between towns safe to walk again.

What you actually do

Bombseeker starts from Minesweeper and takes away the mouse. A tile still tells you how many of the eight tiles around it hold a bomb — but you only ever read the tile you are standing on, because reading it means walking onto it. Nothing cascades. There is no opening move that clears half the board for you. Every number you have is one you spent a step to buy, and you are always one step from the last piece of information you can afford to be wrong about.

A bomb kills you outright. The one mercy is that bombs never spawn beside your entry tile, so the first step is free. After that you are working from what the board has told you, walking from the ENTER tile toward the EXIT.

Marking, and what it costs

Each bomb you mark is worth a coin, and finding a safe path through is worth another. Flags come out of the same purse — five coins each from the store, spent when you place one and refunded when you pick it back up. Marking wrong is not just a bad read, it is money you do not get back until you go and retrieve it. Coins also buy weapons; the sword you start with is not the only one.

Where you go

Five tutorials in Alanther, then the campaign runs across eight regions, five levels apiece, picked off a map of the territory: the Gold Coast, the Sands, Lakeside Plains, the Swamps, the Emerald Peninsula, the Forrest, the Tundra and the Dark Forrest. Each brings its own ground to read. Water cannot be crossed at all, so a lake narrows a board into channels; forest crowds it; open sand leaves you nowhere to infer from. Plants on the path can help you or get in your way, but they are never hiding anything: a cactus or a tree is never a bomb.

Where it sits in Aldia

Bombseeker is the first game set in Aldia and the one that established the place — the towns, the roads between them, and what happened to everything else. The three games that follow build on the same world.

Credits

Bombseeker is a game by FiveFour Games, a Rogue Wolf brand. Design, code and the world map are by Austin Adamson.

Character, gear and weapon art comes from Penzilla Design, used under the Penzilla Design Standard Licence: the Ultimate Protagonist pack for the seeker, plus the Ultimate Enemy and Ultimate RPG Icon packs. Those sprites are composited, cropped, mirrored and rescaled for this game; the full list of modifications that licence requires is carried in the game’s own credits screen.

Terrain tiles, plants and puzzle markers are by moebeast25.

The eight-direction character sheet is by AxulArt, via itch.io.

Sound effects and music in the current build were synthesised during development. They are placeholders rather than final sound design.

Built with Godot Engine 4.7 — © Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur and the Godot Engine contributors, MIT licensed.