The Mood Never Cools

Somewhere on the HUD, in small text, there's a single word: Curious. Kill enough things and it becomes Watchful. Keep going and it's Annoyed, then Angry, then Furious. That word is the Labyrinth's Mood, and it's the closest thing the game has to a difficulty dial — except you turn it yourself, and it never turns back down.

The rule that makes it work

Only kills raise it. Not depth, not time, not damage taken — kills. And it does not cool off on its own. The only way it resets is beating a boss, and even that only sets it back to Curious, not below.

That asymmetry is the entire point. A cautious, sneaking run and a loud, kill-everything run are not just different playstyles — they're different conversations with the thing hunting you. Fight everything in your path and by depth four it's furious, and it stays that way for the rest of the run whether you keep fighting or not. Sneak past what you can and it stays docile, genuinely, all the way down — which is its own kind of hard, since starving a build of kills starves it of the gold and drops those kills would have handed you.

Why "never cools" and not a decay curve

I went back and forth on this. A Mood that drifted back down over time would be more forgiving, and more standard — most heat/alert systems decay. But decay turns Mood into a timer you wait out, and waiting isn't a decision, it's a tax. Monotonic Mood means every kill is a choice with a permanent cost attached, which is the only version of this system that actually makes you think about whether a fight is worth having.

It also produces a stat worth bragging about that wasn't there before: winning at peak Curious — the Ghost board on the weekly challenge — means you went the entire descent, boss included, without the Labyrinth ever raising its guard past the very first tier. That's not a score. That's restraint, provable after the fact, same as everything else that gets submitted here.