Twisted Survivors

The plague came out of the dark and took everyone. Not killed. Took. Now they shamble back over the hills in their thousands, wearing the faces of people you knew, and they have worked out where you are hiding.

Twisted Survivors is a dark fantasy bullet hell. Your weapons swing on their own. Your job is to keep moving, keep leveling, and keep breathing until the tenth minute, when the thing behind the plague crawls out to finish you itself.Ten minutes. Then the boss. Then it gets worse.

• The horde thickens by the minute. Something big climbs out of the ground at the third, sixth and ninth bell.

• At 10:00 the realm's master shows up. Kill it and the run is yours.

• Make it past 12:00 and you are in overtime. No end, no mercy, just a number that keeps climbing. See how far you can push it.

Ten survivors, ten stories

Valgar hides behind a shield the size of a door. Fenrik hunts whatever is hunting you. Vorgath bleeds poison when you hit him. Bonebeard came back from the sea and brought his own femur to fight with. Seraphel fell from somewhere very high. Then Liriel, Eldrahn, Steinn, Morrow and Sigrun. Each one starts with a different weapon and a trick nobody else has, and each one has a story you can sit and listen to, read aloud by an old man at the fire.Fifteen weapons, and every one of them can be reforged

Throwing knives become a storm of steel. A heretic's fireball becomes a flame that never goes out. Level a weapon to the top and its last card reforges it into something the horde has no answer for. Rings, tomes and twenty-six stacking relics do the rest. Five weapon slots, five ring slots, and a shop that sells more.Five realms

The Verdant Reach. The Golden Dunes. The Frozen Expanse. Grimhold Castle. The Ashen Waste. Every realm has its own monsters, its own minibosses, its own boss and its own music, and every one is meaner than the last. Clear all three stages of a realm to open the next.The Bonfire

Dying is not the end. It is the shopping trip. The embers you bring back buy permanent stats, a skill tree of weapons, rings, relics and tomes, and the other nine survivors. Gold buys skips, rerolls, banishes and extra slots. The stats screen remembers every kill you have ever made.Bring friends. They will die too.

Online co-op for up to four. One of you hosts, the game hands you an eight-letter code, and a friend anywhere types it in. It all runs through Steam: no extra accounts, no servers to rent, no router settings, no port forwarding, and nobody ever sees anybody's address. Shared souls, shared level-ups, one screen you all have to stay on. When somebody goes down, kneel beside them for three seconds and they get back up. The horde grows for every extra player, so it is not easier. It is just more.No engine. One executable.

Twisted Survivors was written by hand in C++ with no game engine at all. The whole game is a single executable: 480x270 pixel art scaled clean to your screen, hand-cut sprites drawn at full resolution on top, ten original pieces of music, and a narrator with a voice like gravel.