about
Decay is the fuel, not the wound.
LAST WORDS is a game about the death of language, played from inside it. You are a scribe-deity tending the last library at the edge of a dying world. Every word you speak to act is torn from your living vocabulary — for this run — and your interface erodes in step with what you've spent. You do not lose health; you spend language.
The thesis
Most games treat loss as damage: a bar that empties, a screen that reddens, a number that falls. LAST WORDS treats loss as the economy itself. The only thing you ever spend is meaning — and the interface is honest about it. What you refuse to spend erodes on its own; the Fade taxes hoarding. What you do spend is gone forever, and the evidence is archived, never erased. The library keeps exactly what you refuse to use.
That is the whole game: not a fight against decay, but a negotiation with it. Decay is not the damage. Decay is the fuel.
Why vocabulary-economy
Words are the only currency that is simultaneously scarce, personal, and universal. A coin is fungible; a word is not. Spending HEART to heal is a different act than spending CUP — and the game remembers which one you gave up.
Vocabulary is also the medium of the interface itself. The game's own labels erode as you spend, so the cost of every action is visible in the very text that describes it. No other currency can do that.
What came before
The field was surveyed before a single word was authored. Memory-deletion sims are crowded. Scale-traversal has its canonical work. Meta-save games are bound to desktop files a browser cannot touch. Language-death has been a tabletop and a pedagogy, never a mechanic.
What was open: vocabulary as the sole spendable currency, four spend-verbs, a Fade-tax against hoarding, an interface that degrades in step with your spending, audio that dulls as the language dies, five data-conditional endings, and a cross-session Wall of Consumed Words. That synthesis is LAST WORDS.
The end goal
A complete, beatable, fully-procedural browser game on the Cloudflare free tier: five deterministic endings reachable in roughly an hour to an hour and a half, an engine covered by unit tests, reproducible from a clean clone with no build step and no server. The whole library — code, words, sound — is authored as data, in the open.