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Bitstorm

One button. Hold to climb, release to dive — the cannon never stops. You're the antivirus daemon, and the malware is streaming in. Quarantine charges multiply your score… until you have to spend one.

Bitstorm

You're the antivirus daemon. Hold to climb, release to dive — your cannon fires on its own. Purge the malware glyphs before they ram you.

  • ◈ quarantine pickups bank a screen-clear — every banked charge multiplies your score
  • Double-tap (or Q) spends a charge and wipes the field
  • Three hits and your integrity is gone — grab + patches to heal

Hold anywhere on the field to climb

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What is Bitstorm?

Bitstorm is a fast, original one-button side shooter you play right in the browser. You pilot the antivirus daemon on the left of the field while waves of malware glyphs stream in from the right. The whole control scheme is a single button: hold to climb, release to dive. Your cannon fires by itself — the skill is in the flying, not the trigger. It's a pure arcade high-score chase with a developer-flavoured skin: every enemy is a typographic glyph, and dying is an integrity breach.

How to play

  • Hold — space, W, arrow-up, or a finger anywhere on the field — and the daemon climbs. Let go and it dives. That's the entire control scheme.
  • The cannon auto-fires forward. Line your altitude up with a threat and it dies; miss and it flies past — or into you.
  • Contact costs one of your three integrity points, with a short grace window after each hit. Lose all three and the run ends.
  • Threats come in numbered waves that get faster, denser, and meaner. Clearing a wave banks a bonus.

Know your malware

  • ¤ motes drift straight in — fodder, but they add up.
  • § worms weave a sine wave — lead your altitude.
  • » darts launch aimed at where you were — camping one height gets punished.
  • Ø brutes soak four hits and bulldoze anything in their lane.

Quarantine — the twist

◈ quarantine pickups drift in occasionally. Each one you collect banks a screen-clearing blast, up to three — and here's the dial:every banked charge multiplies all your scoring, up to ×2.5 at a full bank. Double-tap (or press Q) to spend a charge and wipe every threat off the field — it will save your run, but your multiplier drops with it. Hoard for greed, spend for survival; reading that trade correctly is the whole game. Collect a charge while already full and it converts straight into points.

The goal — how to score and “win”

There's no finish line: Bitstorm is a high-score chase. A great run is about three things:

  • Kill efficiently — points only come from purged threats and wave bonuses.
  • Hoard quarantine — a full bank turns every kill into 2.5×.
  • Spend at the last moment — a blast wastes nothing if it saves your integrity.

Your best score, deepest wave, and kill record are saved on this device — the only real win condition is beating them.

Tips

  • Small taps beat long holds — feather the throttle to hover a lane.
  • Darts aim at where you were. Keep drifting and they miss.
  • Park behind a brute's lane and farm the fodder streaming past it.
  • Patches only appear when you're hurt — don't burn a quarantine to reach one.

An original game, built from scratch in vanilla TypeScript — a pure, unit-tested engine core with a canvas renderer and zero runtime dependencies. Not affiliated with any other game.