Planned Release Date: Oct 19, 2026

About This Demo

Draw 7 letters. Each one is printed on a stock, and the stock is the rule. Spell a word. Deal damage, hang a status, or block what is coming down the street.

Killing a demon only frees the coat. Learn its true name, spell the letters that stick, and banish the thing wearing it.

This demo is the first Neighborhood: the Ink Quarter. Build a deck out of the alphabet and spell death to a city that stopped reading.

I wrapped the fight in art deco and filled the room with foxtrot, jazz, tango, torch, and every maqamat I could get my hands on. Then I called it a day.


Your Deck Is the Alphabet



There are no cards with abilities: There is only you and your letters. Spell words, awaken spells, use paper stocks to enhance your letters and bring pain to the demons who made humanity their illiterate, morally bankrupt slaves. (Y'know, the usual.)

A City That Stopped Reading



Humans lost "The Word" and the demons moved in, shut the presses and stayed. Every run is a new day and the same day: the streets of the Ink Quarter are laid out differently. Take the risky road or the safe one, I don't judge, but do stop at the Printhouse or the Speakeasy for your own sake, on your way to the big bad (low key making sense) evil bosses of the neighborhood.

Learn Its True Name



Killing a demon only frees the body it wore. It walks off and finds another. Every demon hides a true name. Spell words that share its letters, see what sticks, and whisper (or shout to let it all out) to banish them from this realm to wherever they came from.

Paper Decides What a Letter Does


Every letter is printed on a stock, and the stock changes what the letter does. Iron letters make block instead of damage. Most stocks are worth the Ink. A few are Devilish, and ask for more than that... (A wishlist, a purchase, a like or subscribe or some ink.)

A love letter to every word and deckbuilder that came before, a manifesto to us all for what is to come and hopefully a lesson (good or bad, don't care) for those who come after. (Goosebumps...)

The demo comes with:

What you get when you Spell Death:

• Two Lettercasters, Compositor and Etymologist - each with their own way to spell, or to damage.
  
• First Neighborhoods, The Ink Quarter
  
• 130 Lexicon spell effects to find, wake and carry into a fight. (Be it with a demon or your partner, or both)
  
• 23 paper stocks to print your letters on that change how letters behave (for better or for worse)
  
• 43 events that can help or harm you. (Developer's note: Mostly harm you.)
  
• Nearly 200,000 legal words
  
• Descension (Or ascension, depending on how you look) to 1, where the boss stops arriving alone, or caring for what you have to spell AND requirement to banish some fools along the way before you arrive there.
  
• My deep gratitude

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Yes, Spell Death was made with AI. On purpose, out loud. Why? This is a game about a city that stopped reading. The demons here don't eat anyone. They need us. They keep the presses running, they copy everything and read nothing, and they are always hungry for more text. Sound familiar? I paid one to help me make this.

Not made with AI:
- The taste, the design, the systems and the balance. 10+ years of making mobile games and 30 years of collecting cards, building decks and theorycrafting.
- The dictionary: a human-made list of about 196,000 words. (Even TRAGI. I still don't get TRAGI.)
- Your words. Nothing is generated while you play. No suggestions, no autocomplete. There never will be.

Made with AI:
- Illustrations: image models, then picked, retouched and composed by hand.
- Music: an AI music tool, directed by my taste for oriental and arabesque music and my obsession with the art deco and noir era.
- Sound effects: most are synthesised from code, just math and stubbornness. A few come from the same AI music tool.
- Code and some text: much of it drafted with an AI assistant, then edited, broken and fixed again by me.


So I'm not standing outside the city pointing at it. I live here. A game about the trap, made from inside the trap. Art or hypocrisy, your call. (I've made mine.)

The line, for me and for the game: a tool is fine, a proxy is not. The machine can draw a street. It doesn't get to do your reading, your thinking or your spelling.

Still hate it? Fair. Spell something mean at it. It's a word game.