STAREDOWN
A stealth roguelite where the thing hunting you is learning. OKO is a giant eye run by a real neural network. It builds towers, sends smaller eyes to look, and nothing tells it where you are. It works that out itself, and it gets better at it.
STAREDOWN is a stealth roguelite. You're small, you're hungry, and the food is out there in rooms you can't see into. OKO is the eye that hunts you. It doesn't hunt alone — it builds towers to watch, and sends smaller eyes out to look — but it's all one thing. One brain, a real neural network, learning you while you play.
IT LEARNS YOU
Nothing is turning a difficulty slider up behind your back. The eye's brain is a small neural network and it trains on you as you move. Break for the same doorway every time the beam sweeps, and it starts aiming at that doorway before you move. Dodge left twice and it starts leading left. The habit that saved you ten minutes ago is the one it's counting on now.
EVERYTHING IT KNOWS, IT FOUND
In most games the engine tells the monster where you are and the monster pretends to search. OKO actually searches. It can't see through walls. It's genuinely blind for the moment its eye is shut. Sound reaches it through the doorways, so a closed room muffles you and an open one doesn't. You leave marks wherever you go — you can see every one of them — but it only ever learns about the ones something of its walked past. Its towers spot you and it knows immediately. The smaller eyes can't do that. They have to carry the news back. So when one of them sees you, you get a choice: run, and accept that it'll know the moment that thing gets home, or go after the thing carrying it.
RED LIGHT IS DEATH
Red is the only colour OKO uses, and its gaze is the beam. If that light finds you while you're moving, it locks on and charges — and when it reaches you, you're not hurt, you're dead. There's no health bar and there's no second one. What you get is the moment between the lock and the lunge, and whether you're out of the way by then is your problem. Stand still and it never locks at all, so you freeze when the beam comes round, you move while it's blind, and you take the food you need before hunger takes the decision away from you. The smaller ones don't kill you outright. They grab you, and you have to break the hold — lose that and you're just as dead. The difference is that you got a say in it.
EVERY RUN, A NEW EYE
Runs are short. Learn the rooms, plan a route past the gaze, fill your quota, find the way down. Die and the run resets — and so does the eye. The next one has never seen you before. Everything it knows about you by the end of a night, it learned that night. Get through the whole campaign and the staredown is finally over.