Serperwave

Eating doesn't just make you longer. Mystery boxes drop loot that can save your run or wreck it, lethal blocks end it on contact, and a combo meter is always draining in the corner, daring you to chase the risky food instead of the safe one.

Controls

Arrow keys or WASD. Swipe on touch. Hold your current direction to burst forward. Input is buffered two deep, so you can queue two turns into a tight corner and both fire.

The streak is the game

Every piece of food fills your combo meter. Let it drain and your streak dies. Keep it alive and the odds shift: a cold streak pulls mostly junk, but a long one swings the mystery boxes hard toward RARE and EPIC loot. Even the eating blip climbs a semitone with every point, so a good run sounds like one.

20 loot items across four rarities:

• EPIC GHOST.EXE makes you immune to blocks. DATA HARVEST turns every lethal block on the board into food.
• RARE OVERCLOCK ×2, MAGNET, BLUE SCREEN, SLOW.SYS, COMBO LOCK.
• COMMON DEFRAG, SHIELD, TELEPORT, SHUFFLE, flat points.
• BAD INVERT.DLL flips your controls, plus TURBO ERROR, BLOCK RAIN, VHS TRACKING, BLOAT and TAX.

A box never kills you directly, but a bad pull can hand you the shovel.

Scattered between the boxes: apples restore a full heart, stars restore half, flowers pile on score, and if a rainbow PRISM STAR ever appears, grab it, because it skips you straight to the next level.

13 levels, each its own world

MIAMI SUNSET · NEON GRID · TERMINAL · AQUA / 水 · TOKYO NIGHT · MAGIC HOUR · OUTRUN · DIGITAL VOID · VAPOR TEMPLE · SYSTEM OVERLOAD · GAME BOY · GRID HORIZON · LIGHTFALL

Every level brings its own palette, animated backdrop and live soundtrack. Some bend the rules: wrap-around edges turn the walls into doors, and a couple trap the board inside an arcade cabinet or a handheld console, shrinking your space as the difficulty climbs. You should be able to tell which level you're in with your eyes closed.

Three modes

• NORMAL 5 lives. Dying restarts the level. Has a real ending.
• RUNNER No lives. One hit and it's over. Broken-VHS shaders bleed across the screen. Has an ending.
• RANDOM Endless. Random levels, 3 lives, no finish line.

Two full soundtracks to switch between, and a level select once you've earned it.

Built without a single asset file

Fast and light. No sprite sheets. No music files. No fonts. The soundtrack is synthesized live in your browser, a step sequencer with its own bass, lead, pad and percussion voices, retuned for every level. Backgrounds, sprites and the bitmap font are all drawn in code, pixel by pixel. The bloom and CRT effects are hand-written shaders. It runs at an internal 480×270 and scales by whole numbers only, so nothing is ever blurry at any window size.

Accessibility

Respects prefers-reduced-motion, plus a manual effects-intensity setting (0% / 50% / 100%) that scales screen shake, glitch and static. The game stays fully playable with every effect off. Lethal blocks are marked by color and diagonal stripes and a blinking outline, so they read without color vision. Playable with keyboard-only or touch-only.