Arrow keys or WASD walk. Space is the blade, and it is also how you talk to people and open a strongbox. E uses whatever is in the second slot. Enter opens the satchel and picks what goes in that slot. P pauses, and F plays it full screen. On a phone there is a pad on the left of the screen and three buttons on the right, the top one being the satchel. The pad comes off whenever the game puts a panel up, because you tap the thing you want on it.
The story
A courier called Nyx runs the night route through the Mirror under the observatory and back, the way couriers have since somebody set the glass there. Nobody asks what is carried. Tonight the glass takes her and does not put her back. She comes out in a Los Angeles that never happened, with signage grown into the hills like coral and something very old wound round the dome.
The Mirror on this side is dark and eight Neon Shards are missing out of its frame. Every one of them is in a building with something sitting on it. The old courier on the ridge came through in 1984 and has been waiting for the second one ever since, which is a long time to keep a ridge.
How it plays
Forty-eight screens of overworld, eight dungeons underneath it, and a hundred and four rooms between them. Every dungeon has a map, a compass, keys for its locked doors, a fob for the door with the dragon on it, and one thing in a strongbox that the next dungeon expects you to be carrying. Cans open cracked walls. Boots make shallow water a floor. The flare lights the rooms that have no light in them and sets brush on fire if you ask it to.
It saves as you go. Closing the tab costs you one screen, and dying costs you the walk back rather than the run. Bosses stay dead. The shard waits on its plinth until you pick it up, so leaving the room after the fight does not lose it.
Some of what you need is behind a wall that sounds hollow. Marisol will tell you that on the Boulevard, and Sunny will tell you where one of them is, and neither of them will tell you twice.
The art
A hundred and thirty-nine sprites, drawn for this page at sixteen pixels square with thirty-six colors to choose from, and the bosses at thirty-two. Nothing in it comes from anywhere else. The palette is the same one the rest of the site runs on, which is why the whole thing looks like it belongs here rather than in a museum.