How to play
Everything you need for your first session: making a character, the controls, how fights work, what happens when you fall, and where your progress is kept.
First steps
- Open the game. Choose Play in your browser, then New character on the title screen.
- Make your character. Build a name from the approved name lists, pick a look, then take the free Fate Draw: its odds are shown before you draw, you get two free redraws, and you may keep any of the three results. Choose an origin, a starting weapon (sword or rifle) and answer one personal question.
- Wake at the Crossroads Lantern in Sable Crossing. The Crossroads Sign points the way: north to the Misremembered Keep, east to Lantern Ford and the Memory Forge, west to Margin Wood, south to the Red Orchard.
- Practice on the Training Post in the village, then talk to Mara Venn. What you promise her matters later.
- Head out. The compass and the map (M) show the places you have discovered. Your Chronicle (J) records what happened to you.
- Lost? Press G (Guide me). A marker floats over your current objective, a faint trail lights the roads to it, and the narrator tells you how far it is and which way. A new story objective is announced the same way. Each part can be switched off in Settings → Readability & Accessibility (the spoken directions under Audio).
Controls
Click the game to capture the mouse; press Esc to release it and open the menu. Keyboard and mouse bindings can be changed in Settings → Controls. The gamepad layout is fixed in this version.
| Action | Default |
|---|---|
| Move | W A S D |
| Look and aim | Mouse |
| Sprint | Left Shift |
| Jump | Space |
| Dodge | Q or Left Alt |
| Light attack / fire | Left mouse button |
| Heavy attack / braced shot | R |
| Guard | Right mouse button |
| Technique (Gravity Chamber) | E |
| Reload | V |
| Interact / talk | F |
| Lock on | Middle mouse button or T |
| Next / previous target | X / Z, or the mouse wheel while locked |
| Shift lock (face where the camera looks) | Caps Lock (on a Mac it can take two presses: rebind it in Settings) |
| Swap weapon | C |
| Map | M |
| Guide me (show the way to your objective) | G |
| Chronicle | J |
| Quick chat | B |
| Control hints | H |
| Menu | Esc |
| Action | Button |
|---|---|
| Move / look | Left stick / right stick |
| Jump | A |
| Dodge | B |
| Interact / talk | X |
| Technique | Y |
| Light attack / fire | RB |
| Heavy attack / braced shot | RT |
| Guard | LB |
| Lock on | R3 (press the right stick) |
| Next / previous target | Flick the right stick while locked |
| Sprint (toggle) | L3 (press the left stick) |
| Quick chat | D-pad up |
| Swap weapon | D-pad down |
| Reload | D-pad left |
| Menu / map | Start / Back |
Button names follow the Xbox layout. On a PlayStation controller: A = Cross, B = Circle, X = Square, Y = Triangle, LB/RB = L1/R1, RT = R2, Back = Share or Create, Start = Options. The Chronicle, control hints and Guide me open from the menu, and shift lock is switched in Settings → Controls.
Touch Experimental
A virtual stick on the left, action buttons on the right, a Guide button that shows the way to your objective, and dragging on the right half of the screen to look. Button size is adjustable in Settings. Touch has not been tested on real phones or tablets yet.
Fighting
- Read the telegraph. Every enemy attack draws a shape on the ground before it lands, with an icon, a word, a sound and a caption. Amber attacks can be guarded; red attacks must be dodged.
- Guard and dodge. Guarding at the last moment is a perfect guard. Dodging through an attack costs stamina, and so does sprinting.
- Break their posture. Hits and perfect guards wear down an enemy's posture. When it breaks, the enemy staggers and you get exactly one riposte.
- Two weapons. The Crossing Blade has a three-hit light chain and a heavy strike. The Ironweather Longrifle holds six rounds; its braced shot uses two.
- Gravity Chamber. Your technique spends Focus to make a space heavy: enemies inside slow down, their wind-ups stretch out, and they lose posture faster.
Death and respawn
When your health runs out you fall, and after 4 seconds you rise again at your bound lantern with full health. Use a lantern anchor to make it your respawn point: Crossroads Lantern, Ford Lantern, Keep Gate Lantern, Cracked Lantern and Ashford Lantern.
There is no death penalty in this build. In co-op, the rest of the party keeps playing while you wait.
Saves
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They stay in this browser
Saves live in this browser on this device. Nothing is uploaded, and there are no accounts or cloud sync.
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Moving to another device
Open Import / Export from the menu to download a save file, then import it on the other device or browser. Import shows what it will change and asks before overwriting anything.
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Backups and recovery
Each save keeps five rolling backups. If a save is damaged, the game sets the damaged copy aside and restores the newest good backup, and it tells you when it does.
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What can erase them
Clearing this site's data, some browser clean-up tools, private or incognito windows, and browsers that remove data from sites you have not visited for a while (Safari can do this after 7 days). The game asks the browser to keep its storage when it can, but an exported save file is the only copy you fully control.
In co-op the host's browser keeps the realm (the shared world and its history), and each player's browser keeps their own character.
Accessibility
Open Settings from the title screen or the menu. You can remap keys and mouse buttons, reduce motion and flashing, turn down camera shake, switch the telegraph colors to high-contrast or deuteranopia palettes, scale text and subtitles, show speaker labels, show on-screen cues for sounds, and turn on timing and aim assists.
Voices
Characters speak their lines aloud, and a narrator reads what you examine, the clues you find, the places you discover and, with their Listen buttons, your Chronicle, your quests and what your character sheet lists. The words always stay on screen. The voices are your browser's own speech voices, so they sound different on each device, and a browser without speech voices simply shows the text. FIRSTWAKE itself sends nothing anywhere for this, but some browsers make their voices through their maker's online service (Chrome's Google voices, Edge's Online voices); when that service cannot be reached, the game switches to the voices on your device. Turn the character voices or the narration off, or change the voice volume and speech speed, in Settings → Audio; Test voice plays a sample.