About This Game

Hollin Cross is a quarry town, and under the quarry an old Order buried the town's dead in galleries for four hundred years. Now the bell has started ringing on its own. Every night somebody in town hears their own name in it, and in the morning they go down.

You were taught to ring by the last ringer above, so you go down after them.

Below the Bell is a first-person dungeon crawler on a square grid, played in real time. Before a monster hits you it turns yellow and you hear the blow coming at least a beat before, so you always have time to step aside, turn to face it or raise your shield. You have two hands with their own cooldowns, a weapon in one and a shield, a knife or a hand-bell in the other.

Each spell is a ringing pattern the Order used against the dead, and you start with Rounds and find the others written in books down below. Ringing the bell takes a few beats, and if you move, attack, use a skill, drink something or get hit, it stops. Rounds stops the dead near you for three beats. Plain Hunt shows the path of everything that moves. Stedman opens the shafts under old bell-ropes, and one boss can only be hurt for a few seconds after you ring it. Your teacher never taught you the fourth one, so you'll have to find it yourself. Every boss has a weakness, and you'll find out what it is when you fight it.

Between descents you walk around Hollin Cross at night and talk to people at their doors, like the chapel, the smithy, Nell's lamp-shop and the Wheatsheaf. The quarry gate takes you down, and the crypt stair and the bell tower open as you go deeper. When you light a Homeward Taper down below you go back to town, and you'll come back to the same spot, once.

What this game has:

• 12 floors in three acts, 3 optional floors, and one more floor in NG+
  
• 49 kinds of monsters and 11 bosses
  
• 36 abilities in 3 disciplines: Blade, Bolt and Litany
  
• loot with random stats, and 30 relics from bosses, named monsters, quests and hidden chests
  
• 24 quests from the people still in town, and 4 endings
  
• Step mode, where the game waits for you and only moves when you do
  
• three game speeds, and a Story Mode where you take a third of the damage
  
• neither Step mode nor Story Mode locks anything: every achievement and every ending still counts
  
• rebindable keys, full controller support, subtitles for the bell and every sound you need to hear, reduced flashes and colour marks
  
• English and Brazilian Portuguese

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

Below the Bell is a solo project. The story, characters, level design and game systems are the developer's own. The art, audio, text and trailers were made with the help of AI tools to speed up the work. Nothing is generated while you play.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Constant real-time combat with medieval weapons against the risen dead, skeletons and a few animals. Blows show arcs of blood and red flashes, and old blood and bodies lie on the dungeon floors. The story deals with death, grief and self-sacrifice: people from the town go down to die, among them a sixteen-year-old boy, whose death is told, not shown. Pixel art; violence is shown plainly and never lingered on.