AN ARENA SHOOTER
Something is on Mars, and it keeps sending more
Your ship keeps its momentum, everything on the floor tells you what it is about to do, and a run is a build you put together one card at a time until it stops being enough.
One file. Nothing to install. It updates itself and keeps your shortcut where it is.
02 / EVERYBODY'S RUNS
2 RUNS ON THIS BOARD
Every finished run files itself here, on the board for its mode and its difficulty. A star is a pilot who has put a Discord account behind the name.
The board did not answer just now, so these are the last rows it gave us, read at .
LATEST FILED
326,700
201,600
| # | PILOT | SCORE | WAVE | TIME | KILLS | BOSSES | SHIP | RUN | WHEN |
|---|
SHOWING 2 OF 2THE GAME SHOWS THE SAME BOARD ON ITS RESULTS SCREEN
03 / WHO IS FLYING
7 NAMES ON THE BOARD
Every name that has ever filed a run, with what it has done. Look one up, or open any name anywhere on this page.
Type at least two characters. Results appear below the field.
The board knows your runs. It does not know your pilot: everything below lives on the machine you play on, and the game is the only thing that can see it. These rows are what your profile could look like here one day. The numbers in them are invented.
Achievements are awarded and kept by the game, on your machine. Nothing about them is sent anywhere.
Your tree is part of your profile, not part of a run, so a filed score carries none of it.
A run files its score, its wave and its ship. What you drafted along the way stays with the run, on your machine.
The board counts your kills. It does not count them by colour - that tally is kept where you play.
The results screen names it after every run, and then that is the end of it - nothing about how a run ended leaves the machine.
04 / IT MOVES LIKE THIS
RECORDED OFF THE GAME, NOT ACTED
Four seven-second loops, straight off the canvas the game draws. No cuts, no captions over the top, nobody playing badly on purpose.
A near-black room, neon, and everything coming at you.
Every body owns a colour, and a run is partly the act of learning them.
The run is built out of what you pick.
05 / BROWSE IT
EVERY PIXEL AND EVERY SOUND MADE IN CODE
Every kind of enemy owns a colour and a rule, and learning them is most of the game. Chasers hunt, drifters bounce, snipers keep their distance and charge, the coil splits wherever you shoot it. Every aimed shot draws its line before it fires.
A wave ends, three cards come up, you keep one. Cards stack, open other cards, and turn into a build that runs away with you - so the field grows with it, and a maxed gun never turns the floor into target practice.
Five arenas, one every five waves, warmer and more broken each time. Cover drifts, rocks fall out of the sky with two seconds of warning, and a comet the size of a boss crosses the whole room while you decide where not to be.
Four ships that play nothing alike - two with guns, one that flies a wing of drones, one that has no gun at all and rams. Three difficulties beside them, and a talent tree you fill by earning achievements rather than by playing far.
Every finished run files twice: to your own machine, and to a global board every copy of the game can read. Four of the five modes keep a board a difficulty, every row says which ship flew it, and a linked pilot gets a star.
There are no art files and no audio files in the download, because there are none anywhere. Every shape, glow, particle and note is drawn or synthesised while you play - which is why the whole game is one small executable.
Pick the mode, then the ship. Every one of them is played on NORMAL, HARD or DIRE, and four of them keep a board of their own - the lab is the one that is never filed.
Waves until you fall. A boss every fifth, a card every wave. The game as it is.
Three minutes. Lives are never lost - a hit only breaks your combo - so the only thing worth doing is killing faster.
The bosses back to back with nothing in between, one card a fight, packs from the second.
One seed a day. The same waves, the same floors and the same hands for everybody, and your first run of the day is the one that counts.
Any boss, any tier, on an empty floor, as many times as you like. The fight you keep dying to, on demand. Never filed.
Toggles you set beside the difficulty, for when you want the game to be less reasonable. Your run still files, tagged, so nobody thinks you took the easy line.
One life. That is the whole rule.
No cards. The ship exactly as it comes, for as long as that lasts.
Comets from the first wave, three times as often.
Everything is thirty percent faster. Including the things behind you.
Every arrival is an elite, and their affixes stack twice as fast.
The gun gets a magazine and a reload to manage, and brings the reload cards with it. On any difficulty, including NORMAL.
Same controls, four different games. Two of them do not have a gun.
Faster, with the dash back sooner. The one that rewards never being where the shot went.
Heavier rounds, and a tenth slower for them - it trades speed for weight. With MAGAZINE on it carries half again as many.
No gun at all - a wing of drones shoots whatever is nearest, and holding fire makes the whole wing focus what your crosshair is on. Unlocked by flying five drones at once on a ship that has a gun.
No gun either. Fire is a BOOP: a lunge that rams everything on its line and sets off a pulse on the first thing it hits, with two shield charges for the touches in between.
Forty-six cards. Most are plain and good; thirteen only turn up once you hold the card that opens them, and a line card wears the name of its line, so you can see the plan coming.
RAPID FIRE, SPLIT SHOT, PIERCING, RICOCHET, SEEKER ROUNDS, MARKSMAN, OVERCHARGE, SHRAPNEL, ORBITAL, AEGIS, VENGEANCE, EXTRA LIFE, and the rest of the shelf.
Fatter rounds that hit harder, and then rounds that go through a BULWARK's plate and a BINDER's ring half again as fast.
A wingman that shoots what you are not, then three cards that make standing near you a mistake.
Dashing through an enemy destroys it. Follow the line and each blade kill buys the dash back sooner, and the dash starts cutting bosses.
Lightning between whatever is close, and then a version of it that goes hunting the boss.
Chill what you hit, hit chilled things much harder, and let the chill jump from anything that dies of it.
A beam instead of rounds - then longer, hotter, doubled, and leaving things burning behind it.
RAM PLATING, KINETIC RECHARGE, BATTERING RAM, WRECKING BALL, REBOUND and SHOCK PULSE are dealt to the rammer and to nobody else.
You get two a run. Spend them early and the deep drafts are whatever the deck feels like.
A tree of permanent passives in four branches, bought with the points achievements pay. Earn every achievement and you can buy every rank exactly, with nothing left over.
HULL PLATING, THRUSTERS, SECOND WIND - lives, speed, and the first life you lose each run coming back.
CALIBRE, ESCORT, OPENING HAND - damage from everything you own, a drone on any ship, and a card before wave one.
SALVAGE, TRACTOR, MULLIGAN - more drops, pulled from further away, and another re-roll.
SLIPSTREAM, SIEGE PLATING, HANGAR DECK, HEAVY BUMPER - one node a ship, and every one is a trade. The interceptor buys speed with damage, the gunboat damage with speed, the carrier another drone with rate of fire, the rammer a harder BOOP with a longer wait for it.
Seventeen goals on a board of their own, in three columns, each saying what it pays. They are the only thing that fills the talent tree, so the list is what the game still wants from you.
FIRST BLOOD, DOUBLE DIGITS, THE LONG HAUL, PACK HUNTER, FLIGHT DECK, NO MERCY - and WING COMMANDER, which is the one that opens the MOTHERSHIP.
ONE LIFE, AS SHE COMES, WEATHER EYE, RED SHIFT, EVERY ONE OF THEM, COUNTING ROUNDS. Asking for a harder game should pay for something.
UNTOUCHED, IRON SIGHTS, SKELETON CREW, BILLIARDS - the ones you only get by choosing the harder line on purpose. Ten waves on the VECTOR without a scratch is worth four; your first boss is worth one.
One at the end of every fifth wave, in packs of two from wave ten, each with three phases that get worse as its health goes. The wave carries on around the fight.
The zoner. Rings with one lit lane to stand in, and a cage it drops round you while you are looking for it.
Charges, and puts a ring down in the space it has just cleared. The only one whose moves combine.
Sweeps the floor, then fills the cage it made with company.
Beams. It never cages you, because the beams are the walls, and the sweep comes round from behind.
The slowest and the fattest, with the fewest moves of its own: it hatches wasps and lets them do the work.
Every body owns a colour and a rule, and a run is partly the act of learning them.
The dart that hunts you.
The rotor that bounces.
A chain that splits wherever you shoot it.
Bursts into three smaller ones.
The shard a splitter throws off, and the only solid body on the floor.
Keeps its range and charges a shot at you.
A shield in front and a lunge behind it. Steel, and the one dull colour out there.
Raises a ring that eats fire from outside it.
Fences you in with a wall strung between two pylons.
Leaves toxic cloud behind it wherever it has been.
Warps in beside you, and its chain holds on until you dash, walk it off or kill it.
The HIVE's own. Fast, armed and never still.
Planted, never moves, charges in the open and fires one aimed round. Its front is plated and its back is not - and the wave does not end until it is dead.
The mini-boss, once every ten waves. It drills straight through cover, or burns a laser across the floor.
The floor turns over every five waves, as a descent: open space, then the gas, then sodium light under a roof, then the furnace, then the lights going out. Warmer and more broken every step, never brighter - and the music goes with it, into techno and drum and bass.
The widest room of the run, and the only one that asks nothing. Two files of cold rock and one hot one, dead centre, where every lane crosses.
Deeper into the gas. A ring of rock around an empty middle, two corners of it burning.
Inside now, under sodium light, everything shoved to one side. The first floor where standing east is not the same as standing west.
Three burning rocks in a line across the middle. It has to be crossed, and anything chased across it dies on it.
The power has gone. Rock pushed to the edges, nothing burning, and the widest clear middle in the game for the boss standing in it.
Nothing. It is a free download, there is no account to make, nothing is sold inside it and nothing is advertised in it.
A Windows machine and about a minute. It is one executable - everything it needs is inside the file, so there is no installer and nothing to set up. Windows will show a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen the first time, because the file is not signed: More info, then Run anyway.
Not today. The download is Windows only. It is written in Python and can be run from source on anything that runs Python, if you are the sort of person who does that.
Yes. The title screen checks for a newer build and offers it as a row under PLAY: it downloads, checks itself, and restarts into the new version. Your shortcut keeps working, because the installed file always has the same name.
Any pad your machine recognises, and you can plug one in mid-run - the game notices and says so. Pushing the right stick fires, so it plays as a pure twin-stick without touching a trigger. Keyboard and mouse work everywhere too, including every menu.
Twice. Once on your own machine, signed so an edited file is spotted, and once on the global board that every copy of the game reads. Each mode and each difficulty keeps its own board, and every row says which ship flew it. The board on your own machine is kept whatever happens, so the game is the same game with no network at all.
Bug reports, build announcements, arguments about the turret, and the people who play this the most. It is also where you go if you want a say in what gets made next - most of the roadmap above started as somebody complaining in there.
NITH STUDIOS.
06 / WHAT HAS LANDED
11 SHIPPED
What has actually landed, newest first. Every line here is in the build you can download right now - nothing on this page is a plan, a promise or a date. What comes next gets argued about on the Discord long before it gets written down.
Taking a hit on the frame a splitter went up used to distort, and so did a rock landing on a nest of enemies. Nothing was turned down to fix it. Being hurt also reads louder than being saved now, even on a laptop speaker, and a landing rock and a five-streak have sounds of their own.
v0.42.1The tree used to fill up by playing far. It fills up by playing well now: seventeen achievements on a board of their own, priced by how hard they are, and between them they buy the whole tree exactly.
v0.42.0The board marks a pilot who has proved their name, without ever saying whose Discord it is. Your profile also stopped hiding runs: it shows your best on every mode now, not just on the three difficulties.
v0.42.0Past wave thirty-five a boss used to be homework: no harder, just longer. They hold their health now and spend the difference on being faster and shooting far more. A wave-45 fight went from a minute of chipping to about twenty seconds of genuine trouble.
v0.41.0PROFILE offers LINK DISCORD. The game gives you a six-character code, you bring it here, and the name on the board is yours. It is optional, it changes nothing about how the game plays, and the game never learns who you are on Discord.
v0.40.0A ring appears on the floor, a shadow grows in it for two seconds and strobes at the end, and then an asteroid lands there. It kills everything standing in it, costs you two lives if that is you, and the rock stays where it fell.
v0.39.0DEADLINE, BOSS RUSH, DAILY and BOSS LAB joined SURVIVAL. All but the lab keep a board of their own, and the mutators arrived beside the difficulty for anyone who wanted the rules bent.
v0.38.0The BOOPER has no gun. Fire became a BOOP: a lunge that rams everything on its line and sets off a pulse on the first body it meets, with six cards of its own now and two shield charges for the touches in between.
v0.35.0An arrow on the edge, a lane of chevrons, and a second and a half later a rock the size of a boss crosses the entire arena in a straight line - killing whatever is on that lane, yourself included.
v0.35.0From wave six the field starts wearing affixes - armoured, swift, volatile, phased, shells where you stand, and one that only takes full damage if you actually aim - stacking up to three deep on one body, bigger and nastier a stack.
v0.35.0Asteroids you can hide behind and break apart, short walls, and a room per floor instead of an empty rectangle. The hot rocks cost a life to touch and kill anything pushed into them.
v0.34.0
07 / GO AND PLAY IT
One file, v0.42.1. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, nothing sold inside it.
One file. Nothing to install. It updates itself and keeps your shortcut where it is.
Take the six-character code the game gives you and bring it here.
Bug reports, build announcements, arguments about the turret, and the people who play this the most.