Xs of Y: A self-naming roguelike where Lisp s-expressions are the spell system

Xs of Y is an in-progress roguelike that procedurally generates its own title, quest, and rune-to-symbol mappings on every run, turning each playthrough into a fresh act of decipherment. The magic system is a Lisp where spells are literal s-expressions and runes are obfuscated symbols, giving players raw access to the engine while hiding the syntax behind a vocabulary that shifts every boot. The result is an inverted difficulty curve: scrappy survival up front, then increasingly reckless metaprogramming once the player decodes enough of the language.

Underneath the game runs on let-go, the author’s Clojure-dialect compiler targeting a Go bytecode VM, in roughly 6,900 lines with no dependencies, a 6ms startup, and a WASM build for the browser. Conventional roguelike systems — web-trapping spiders, splitting slimes, regenerating trolls, fire that propagates through grass, shoves that send enemies into lava or chasms — sit alongside the Lisp-driven reality engine. The project cites Brogue as its main visual inspiration and ships as a single .lg file run through the let-go toolchain.