Moshpit EliteConcept 12Run structure Playable

The Wristband

One night, laid out as a dungeon. A festival already has locked areas and a key to get through them — the wristband is the dungeon key, and it was there before anyone thought about Zelda. Play a night: the line, the side stage, the green room, the main stage, closing time.

Festival map—

Click a lit room you can reach. The map fills in as you walk it.

HP 5 CROWD 30 CASH 0 WRISTBAND no DOORS

What each game is actually lending

Zelda — a place, not a listA dungeon is rooms with identity, a locked door, a key, and a boss behind it. That is what turns "wave 3" into somewhere you were. The festival already has the grammar: gates, wristbands, backstage.

Brotato — the loop and the shopFight, survive, spend, fight harder. The between-rooms beat is where a run becomes a build instead of a difficulty curve.

Balatro — the build is the scoreYou assemble a hand and the hand is what plays. That is THE_SETLIST.md already: your arrangement is both the build and the run, and a safe one loses.

The three fit because a festival night is genuinely all three at once: a place you move through, a night you survive, and a set you assembled. Nothing has to be bolted on.

Where the progression was missing

Inside one night — rooms open up, the wristband gates the back half, and the set you drafted in the line is the set you play on the main stage. That is a Zelda dungeon's shape and it is what this prototype is testing.
At the end of the night — the comic. You never lose; the night ends some way, and the way it ended is the record. Five endings here, and which one you get is read off how you actually played rather than off a win flag.
Across nights — this is the layer that is genuinely absent today. Every ending should unlock something in the programme: a card, a venue, a band member, a page. Balatro's whole retention engine is that the menu fills in.

Which makes the codex the progression screen, not a reference book. Brotato's item menu tells you what a thing does. A tour programme that fills in as you play tells you what you did — entries start as locked silhouettes, gain a line the first time you meet the thing, and gain another the first time it kills you. The gallery already exists as 10_the_liner_notes.html; this is what turns it from a gallery into a save file.