How to Play Vigil

Vigil is a survivors-lite arcade game set in a candlelit crypt. You control a robed keeper holding a lantern. Move with WASD or the arrow keys — your speed is physics-based with acceleration and friction so the keeper slides gracefully through the arena. The wards orbiting around you do all the fighting: aim nothing, click nothing, just stay mobile. Enemies stream in from every edge of the 640px stone arena. Your job is to survive wave after wave, outlasting the darkness long enough to bank enough Wax to strengthen the keeper permanently.

Each 30-second wave throws a fixed composition of enemies at you, with enemy health and speed scaled up on every wave. Shade Wisps arrive from wave 1 — small, quick, beelining straight at you. Shade Brutes join at wave 2: slow and tanky, and a hit from one costs 22 HP. Shade Specters join at wave 4 and are the fastest enemy in the game, flipping their approach angle every 1.4 seconds so they close on a zig-zag. When an enemy dies it drops an amber ember (an XP mote) that drifts toward you once you are inside its magnet radius. Collect embers to level up, which opens a boon pick: choose one of three (or four, if you have the Augury tree node) temporary buffs for the rest of that run. A wave ends when its 30-second timer runs out — not when the arena is clear — and you advance to the next wave and bank that wave's Wax.

Wax is the permanent currency. It banks at the end of every run no matter how far you got, and between runs it is spent at the Warden's Tree, where every purchase carries into every future run forever.

Controls

• WASD or Arrow Keys: Move the keeper — wards auto-attack and auto-orbit; no aiming needed
• P or Escape: Pause — click or tap the PAUSED overlay to resume
• ? key: Open the help overlay during play or between runs (it pauses the run while it is open)
• R or Space (on the between-runs screen): Start a new run immediately
• Mobile: Use the D-pad in the bottom-left of the arena (four directional buttons, 56px each)
• Upgrades button: Open the Warden's Tree from the menu or between-runs screen

Ward Guide

Vigil ships with one ward active from the start and three unlockable via the Warden's Tree. All wards auto-attack and auto-orbit — you equip them, the game uses them.

• Ember Ring (always active): Fires a single glowing ember at the nearest enemy every 1.4 seconds, dealing 18 base damage. It is your workhorse throughout the whole game. The Ember Mastery tree node boosts damage by +12 per level, and at level 2 it fires a second ember on a slightly offset angle, which often clips a neighbouring enemy when shades are packed together.
• Frost Sigil (unlocked via Warden's Tree — Wards branch): Fires a slow-moving ice bolt every 1.8 seconds that deals 14 damage and applies a 40% speed reduction to the target for 1.2 seconds (extended to 1.8 seconds at tree level 2). The slow effect dramatically improves your ability to kite brutes and clusters. Frost Sigil requires Ember Mastery level 1 to unlock.
• Void Lance (unlocked via Warden's Tree): Fires a piercing lance every 2.8 seconds that crosses the whole arena and deals 35 damage to every enemy it passes through. It is the anti-cluster ward: line up a group of brutes and one shot damages all of them. Tree level 2 adds +15 pierce damage. Requires Frost Sigil to unlock.
• Soul Flare (unlocked via Warden's Tree): Detonates a burst at the keeper's exact position every 4.5 seconds, hitting every enemy within 100px — the ward's 80px base plus the +20px its tree node grants the moment you unlock it. It deals 25 damage to all of them at once and flashes the screen. Soul Flare is the close-quarters ward, and it goes off on cooldown whether or not anything is near you. Requires Void Lance to unlock.

Wax and the Warden's Tree

Wax is earned at the end of every wave — 15 Wax for waves 1-3, 25 Wax for waves 4-6, 40 Wax for waves 7-10, then 60 at wave 11 and 5 more for every wave after that — plus a small bonus for each enemy you kill along the way. All of it banks to your permanent wallet the moment the run ends, whether you cleared eight waves or died in the first one. The only Wax you ever miss is the end-of-wave payout for a wave you die partway through.

The Warden's Tree has three branches and every node in it is permanent once bought. The Wards branch is the offensive spine and unlocks in a fixed order: Ember Mastery, then Frost Sigil for crowd control, then Void Lance for pierce damage, and finally Soul Flare for close-range AoE. The Body branch is survivability: Stone Rite adds 25 max HP per level across two levels, Fleet Step adds 18 px/s of movement speed across three, and Wax Seal regenerates 1 HP per second whenever no enemy is within 100px of you. The Rite branch amplifies everything else: Ember Pull adds 30px per level to the 80px ember magnet radius, Ward Tempo multiplies every ward's cooldown by 0.88 at level 1 and 0.77 at level 2 (12% then 23% faster from your whole loadout), and Augury turns every level-up into a pick-four instead of a pick-three.

Tips and Strategy

• Never stand still: every enemy steers toward wherever you currently are, so a wide circular strafe strings them into a tail behind you and keeps embers inside your magnet radius. Brutes move at 38 px/s against your 220 px/s top speed and can be walked away from all run; wisps and specters are what force direction changes.
• Buy early, and buy in order: Ember Mastery 1 is the cheapest real damage increase at 80 Wax; take Stone Rite next so you live long enough to farm, then Ember Pull so embers reach you. The tree inflates — every level bought anywhere adds 7 Wax to every other node's price — so the order matters. Ward Tempo is the sleeper pick once three or four wards are equipped, since the cooldown cut applies to all of them.
• Soul Flare is a timer, not a trigger: it detonates every 4.5 seconds at wherever you are standing and nothing sets it off early, so the play is to be inside the cluster when the cooldown comes up rather than kiting away from one.
• Boon priority on level-ups: Swiftness (+20 speed, four stacks) and Vigor (+20 max HP, three) keep you alive early. Kindling stacks with Ember Mastery for single-target damage. Revival is single-stack — take it the moment it appears.
• Specters are what Frost Sigil is for: wards fire at where a target is standing, not where it is heading, and specters flip their approach angle every 1.4 seconds, so plenty of shots miss. A 40% slow drags the zig-zag down far enough for your other wards to connect.
• Kills pay twice: every kill adds Wax on top of the per-wave payout, and your score is waves cleared × 10 plus total kills. The wave ends on its 30-second timer however many shades are still alive — but the wave payout only lands if you are alive when it expires.

What Makes Vigil Different from Other Survivors Games

Most survivors games (Vampire Survivors, Brotato, and their many derivatives) use a long-session format: one run lasts 20-30 minutes, builds escalate exponentially, and the endgame is measured in hundreds of enemies on screen simultaneously. Vigil compresses this into 3-8 minute runs with a much gentler enemy density. That makes it more appropriate for short browser sessions and also changes the strategic texture: in Vigil, individual boon picks matter for the whole run because you don't have 50 of them to dilute them; in classic survivors, a single pick is a rounding error.

The Wax banking mechanic is also a deliberate departure. Many survivors-lite browser games use "meta-currency" that resets partially or locks behind a daily cap. Vigil's Wax is simpler: every Wax earned stays yours forever. This means new players progress visibly from the very first run, and late players can build toward genuinely powerful combos without artificial grind gates. The three-branch tree (Wards / Body / Rite) is designed to have no trap choices — all paths are useful, and the branching requirement (Frost → Lance → Flare) naturally guides players from single-target through crowd-control to AoE without requiring them to read patch notes to understand what to buy first.