The Madness of Xarquul

The cavern is wrong. Passages fold back on themselves, gravity picks a side of its own, and everywhere hangs the smell of scorched stone and fear-sweat. This is no natural place, but a labyrinth molded to the madness of the creature that rules it. Whispers in the dark speak that name with a shudder: Xarquul.

He is afraid, terrified, of everything and everyone, and that paranoia shapes his entire realm. What Xarquul fears becomes real: walls that snap shut like jaws, doubles of his own intruders, floors that open onto nothing. His eyes never sleep, and every ray, petrification, disintegration, paralysis, is another way for you to die before you so much as see him.

You navigate the impossible geometry of the cavern, survive the tilting gravity and the mirror-traps, defeat the monstrosities his fear brought to life, and search for the blind spot in his all-seeing defenses. Along the way you unravel what once frightened Xarquul so badly that he buried himself alive down here.

At the heart of the labyrinth waits the eye tyrant himself: a floating orb of flesh with one great, loathing central eye and ten stalks that each carry a different death, hanging in a space with no up or down. What he fears becomes real, and he fears you now most of all. Will you snuff out Xarquul's ten eyes one by one and break his reign of nightmares, or will your death be the next one he imagines and so makes real?