Your light is your lifeline
One unreliable candle in the dark. It reveals the dangers ahead, but also gives away your element of surprise. It flickers. It dies. And so might you!
X-STRANDED
A derelict ship. A hive that hunts by sound. One flashlight.
Free in the browser. Keyboard and mouse, desktop only for now.
Lost in the dark, with only a flashlight. The ship is overrun. Something is scampering in the vents. Get to the elevator, and reach the landing dock. Remember, they can hear you…
The hive hunts by sound
Footsteps, gunshots, a slammed door: every noise is a clue they follow. Creep, hide in lockers, or throw a flare and run the other way.
The infection spreads
The dead don't stay dead. Corpses feed the hive, pupae swell and burst, and the deck gets worse the longer you stay.
Every deck is different
Procedural decks across thirteen themes, each with its own event: failing lights, a venting reactor, a specimen loose.
From the decks
The Kestrel Vane
- The ship
- The Kestrel Vane was a deep-haul colony freighter. Somewhere in its cargo manifest was something alive.
- The hive
- A parasite with no stomach of its own. It feeds on anything that lived, swells into a glowing pupa and bursts into spores and newborn mites.
- The dead
- Spores eat a body from the inside. Whatever dies that way stands up again, wrong.
- The way out
- Ten decks up, past the oldest and most-fed thing on the ship, the escape pods wait on the landing dock.
Tech stack
- TypeScript
- WebGL2
- Web Audio
- esbuild
- Cloudflare Workers
- node:test
One small script plus its art, served static from Cloudflare. No runtime dependencies; saves stay in your browser.
- Custom WebGL2 engine
- No game framework: real-time 2D lighting, shadows, an emissive pass and a post pass that tightens as something closes in.
- Deterministic simulation
- A fixed 60 Hz sim on seeded random streams. Same seed, same deck: bugs reproduce, and co-op stays in reach.
- A hive with a brain
- Aliens share what they hear and see, form packs and break down doors. Every bite winds up first, so you can dodge it.
- Positional sound
- Recorded sounds fall off with distance, pan with direction and muffle behind walls, on the same falloff the aliens hear with.
Up next: multiplayer In design
Co-op for 2–4
Share a deck with friends through a six-character room code.
Lockstep netcode
Every browser runs the same deterministic deck; the server only relays inputs. Cheap to run, hard to cheat.
Built for a squad
The hive goes for the nearest or loudest survivor, loot is shared, and a downed partner can be revived before they bleed out.
Solo first
Solo stays the main game and never depends on a server.
Comments
Expect rough edges, missing sounds and balance changes: it's a passion project, and I appreciate your time and feedback. Played a run? Tell me how it went!