Creature Blast
Six lanes. One beat. Blast them on it.
Space has gone feral. Furry creatures are closing in from every direction at once, and the only thing standing in the middle is a space rocker with a bass.
Six lanes run out from where you stand. Tap one and a blast goes down it, clearing whatever is on it. The catch is when: every shot has to land on the beat, and a shot that misses leaves you frozen for a full count while everything keeps walking in.
A ring contracts onto the middle and arrives exactly on the beat, so the game can be played with the sound off as easily as with it on.
What's in it
- Music that answers you. A streak of eight brings in the hats, sixteen brings the organ, and twenty-eight brings the tune back an octave down, answering itself two bars behind. Lose the run and the arrangement thins out again. You can hear how you are doing.
- Six areas, six tunes. Each is written in its own scale rather than being the same tune moved up, and each one arrives when you put down the big thing guarding the last.
- Every sound made as you play. Nothing is recorded. Square waves, filtered noise and a saw through a resonant low pass, built the way a console would have built them.
- Haptics, so a perfect shot feels different from a near one rather than merely stronger.
- No account, no analytics, no internet. It works on a plane. The leaderboard is optional and so is signing in to it.
It will never make you lose
Most endless games eventually stop being winnable, because the threat grows faster than anything you could do about it. That is a choice, and usually it is made so that losing feels like a reason to spend money.
This one is built the other way round. Four shots fit in a bar and each clears a lane, so with six lanes any lane comes round every bar and a half. Everything that walks in is given long enough to be dealt with in those terms, and the rule is checked rather than assumed: a simulated player who never mistimes a shot was run for a hundred and fifty hours and never once lost.
Difficulty rides on how much a mistake costs instead. Play perfectly and you can play forever.
Price
Creature Blast is free, with no ads and nothing locked. There is no store in it, and the place a store would be says so.
If you received some value from it, consider paying it forward with a donation to the Mockingbird Foundation, a nonprofit that has put more than three million dollars into music education for kids.
Help
Something broken, or an idea? Get in touch. Also worth reading: what Creature Blast does with your data, which is nothing.