There is no art here. Every frame is real three‑dimensional geometry lit by your lamp, measured, and printed as one of thirteen characters ordered from dark to bright:
.,-~:;=!*#$@
Bright surfaces get @. Dim ones get . Unlit ones get nothing at all. Distance, angle and your lamp decide which.
It is made of the same light you are. That is the problem.
Wash it in your lamp and it stops resolving. Leave it in true dark and there is nothing to resolve either. It only prints where the light landing on it falls in the middle of the ramp — the greys, the grain, the : ; =.
Which means every lamp setting is blind to a different shell of the room:
The nearer it gets, the lower you must burn. A bright lamp is also what it hunts you by: it notices HIGH from fourteen metres and DOUSED from two.
Your own lamp is no shield. Fire you did not carry is. A thrown flare burns a hole in the dark roughly four metres across that it will not enter, for about forty seconds. A standing brazier holds about two. Note that the same glare hides it from you.
A bell lands somewhere else and rings, and it goes and looks there. Doors can be pulled shut behind you. Crouching is nearly silent; running is the loudest thing you own.
Each Ring is sealed by its Wheel. Find three Bearings, seat them in the Housing, and the Wheel will turn. Then cross under its plumbs to the hub.
Wait for one to swing past and be well clear before you go — and do not stop in the middle. Six Rings down is the Core.
Oil burns whether you are moving or not. Three wounds and the dark keeps you. Every Ring you clear closes one wound.
Only one thing down here is this colour.
Density changes how many characters the world is drawn with. Denser is sharper and slower; coarser is grainier, faster, and arguably worse for you.
Pages recovered from the Ring. Found pages persist between descents.
Only rooms your lamp has touched are drawn. Press M to mark the ground where you stand.