AURUM
A physics merge game. Substances fall with true weight into a glass vessel; two of a kind, met, glide together and fuse into the next and rarer form: eleven forms, from Moonstone to living gold. Every union sings, and the work you do is written into the sky.
Every law in this vessel was written for it.
AURUM does not use its engine's physics. The matter is solved by code written for this one scene: a hundred steps a second, with fourteen more inside each of them. The reason is one your eye can check: every substance is painted exactly at the edge the solver uses, so any compromise inside it would be a visible lie.
Keep the work below the brim.
Matter falls where your finger asks. Three rare reagents fall now and then, the alchemists' tria prima: Quicksilver raises what it touches by one form, Sulphur leaps it two in a blaze, Salt dissolves it back into Essence.
And one real decision runs through every night. Working the vessel heats it: heat rises only while you are truly merging, and faster the nearer to the brim you dare. Pour it off and bank it, or ride it and lose everything the night has made.
- Moonstone
- Pearl
- Champagne
- Honey
- Amber
- Marigold
- Copper
- Carnelian
- Garnet
- Radiant Gold
- Aurum
Only the first five ever fall. The rest you have to make.
The melody leaves its chair empty for you.
Every union plays a note. The eleven forms are eleven degrees of one pentatonic scale, chosen so that no cascade can ever sound wrong, and a chain climbs the scale as it grows. The note does not sound the instant matter meets: it waits, to the sample, for the music's next grid line, so what your hand makes lands in time with the piece that is playing.
Six pieces were composed for AURUM and travel inside it. While you play, each piece empties the chair of its own lead melody: the written line falls silent, the accompaniment thins, the bed plays on, and your merges, already in the key, already on the grid, take the seat. When the night ends the piece returns whole, and the record turns to the next.
Three notes carry the whole signature: base matter, noble, gold. The phone taps the same three in your hand.
As above, so below.
Eleven substances, and eleven stars. The first time you forge a new matter, a spark leaves it, climbs and ignites as a star, which then burns in that substance's own colour behind every screen of the game, for good. Beneath the horizon a dawn deepens as the Great Work advances, so the night itself warms while you work.
The campaign is that sky, not a list of levels. Sixteen stages are sixteen stars in the four constellations of the Magnum Opus. Clear a stage and light travels the connector to a star not yet born, which arrives in a white strike and settles into its chapter's colour. Complete a chapter and the figure is drawn, and speaks.
No ads. Ever.
Not a policy that could be revised later. There is no advertising code in this game and no advertising library in its manifest; the one seam that could ever have carried one was deleted rather than left switched off, and an instrument in the workshop checks every build for both.
What money buys is look, sound and identity: beauty, never power. Every ability that decides a night is earned inside that night. Nothing sealed is ever sold. And what you buy, you then raise: a collection matures through play alone, and nothing can hurry it. You raise a companion; you do not buy a skin.
Any collection may be worn free for a single run, once ever, before you decide.