About Lastlight
Lastlight takes the one decision most shooters bury underneath aiming and makes it the whole game. Your drone's gun picks the nearest target and fires on its own, so there is nothing to click. What is left is position — and position turns out to be everything, because the core you are defending sits in the middle of the arena and cannot move, the things coming for it walk straight at it, and you cannot be in two places.
A kill drops a mote. Motes are experience, and experience is a choice: every level offers three of fourteen upgrades, and roughly half of them change a number while the other half change a rule. Piercing Rounds, Arc Weld, a Sentry Ring, Overcharge and Siphon rewrite how a fight resolves; Heavier Slugs just makes it quicker. Because you only see a handful per run, the drone you die with is never the drone you started with.
Waves arrive on a budget rather than as a list, so the composition drifts instead of stepping — the first drifters show up alone, runners join at wave three, a hulk at five, and a Breacher comes through every fifth wave and calls in reinforcements while it walks. Six enemy types, each a different silhouette rather than a different colour, because at thirteen pixels on a phone in a dark scene the outline is all you get.
This is the second game on the site built on a renderer rather than hand-written from scratch, and like the first it is one self-contained file with nothing to download after it: every texture is drawn by code at load time and every sound is synthesised sample by sample. There is not one image or audio file in it.
How to play
- Steer with the mouse — the drone accelerates toward the pointer rather than snapping to it, so turning has weight. WASD or the arrow keys work if you would rather push a direction.
- The gun fires itself at the nearest enemy in range. You never aim and you never shoot; you only decide where to be.
- The core at the centre is the run. It has its own health, it takes damage from anything that reaches it, and it recovers a little between waves — never back to full.
- Your drone can be clipped three times. Each hit gives you a second of blinking invulnerability, which is long enough to get out but not long enough to push through.
- Kills drop motes. Flying over one collects it, and a wider collector pulls them in from further out. Motes are the only experience in the game, so a wave you clear but do not harvest is a level you do not get.
- Every level offers three upgrades from a pool of fourteen. Stacking ranks into one rule-changing upgrade is usually stronger than collecting four different first ranks.
- A Breacher arrives every fifth wave. It is slow, it is enormous, and it summons runners while it closes. Unlike everything else it does not spend itself on the core — it stops there and leans on it, so every second you spend elsewhere is paid for out of the core.
- Three missions are drawn at the start of every run. They pay salvage, which unlocks the four alternate loadouts on the game-over screen.
- On touch, drag anywhere to steer. Lift your finger and the drone holds position rather than drifting to where you last tapped.
Five tips that actually move your score
- Stand between the core and the crowd, not on top of the core. Your gun has range; the core has none. Parking on it means everything that reaches you also reaches the thing you are protecting.
- Harvest while you fight. Motes drift toward you only very weakly and expire after twenty seconds. The habit that separates a level-3 run from a level-8 one is sweeping back through where you just killed instead of chasing the next wave.
- Take a rule before a number. Arc Weld or Piercing Rounds changes what a crowd is; +25% damage changes how long the same crowd takes. One of those compounds with every later pick and the other does not.
- Spitters are a problem you have to go to. They stop at the edge of their range and shoot from there, so they will never walk into your gun. Leaving two of them alive is how a comfortable wave becomes a dead core.
- A wraith is a timing enemy, not a fast one. It cannot be shot while it is faint, and it moves fastest exactly then. Do not chase it through the fade — wait where it is going.
- Kill the Breacher before it lands, or you pay by the second. It walks at the core at thirty pixels a second, which means it can be met early. Once it arrives it stays there, draining the core until it is dead, and the runners it keeps summoning are what stop you dealing with it.
