PARRYGON

Keep an eye on your wall

Every side belongs to somebody, one of them is yours, and you do not get to leave it. The orbs are loose in the middle.

Whatever you fail to catch eats your armor. When the armor is gone, the side is gone. Not damaged, gone: the arena throws it out and rebuilds tighter. That goes for everyone. Tear a wall off somebody else and the room shrinks just the same. Lose your last wall and you are out.

Four buttons

• Steer along your wall. The deflector carries momentum. Where the orb lands on it, and how fast you are moving when it does, decides where it goes. You aim with your feet.

• Parry inside a tight window. Land it and the orb charges. Only a charged orb breaks a core, cracks an armored sentinel or punches through an armored wall. The tighter you cut it, the harder it comes back.

• Dash along the rail, with a moment of invulnerability, for when the trouble is at the wrong end of your seat.

• Pulse, a shove in every direction. Costs energy, buys room.

36 levels across six zones

Signal, Fracture, Vortex, Ember, Null, Apex. Every zone ends on a multi phase reactor duel. All of it built by hand, none of it rolled by a generator, and hard on purpose. Outlast the clock, hold integrity, clear the swarm, break the core.

What is coming for you

• Eight arena shapes from three sides to twelve: polygon, star, ring, superellipse, blossom, gear, spiral, lens. Some rotate. Some pulse. Some shrink while you are standing in them.

• Eight kinds of orb. The heavy one only slows down when you block it. The splitter becomes two the moment you parry it. The phase orb passes straight through a deflector that did not parry.

• Ten field devices: post, gravity well, repulsor, rotor, mine, brake field, accelerator, portal pair, charger, cutter.

• Six machines, including weavers that patch a core faster than you can break it, and sentinels that nothing but a charged orb will touch.

• Walls with opinions: armored, volatile, self healing, anchored. Each one changes which side is easiest to give up.

• Run rules that take your tools away: no dash, no pulse, glass walls, blackout, high gravity, and a tempo that climbs for the whole run.

After the campaign

Arcade. Four endless arenas on an escalation ladder that keeps turning the room into a different room. Rivals sit all around you. How many of them you outlast is your score. With Steam leaderboards.

Versus. Two to four people on one machine, six arenas, and a pressure curve that settles it inside five minutes. Quiet open, waves that pack in closer, the chamber draws in, then sudden death.

Six rigs for the deflector, unlocked with stars. Each one moves length, speed, parry window, dash charges and scoring.

31 achievements. The last one asks for the other thirty and marks the game one hundred percent finished. Think you can get there?

Your eyes, your rules

Neon lines on black under an eighties tube: scanlines, curvature, colour fringing, grain. Every part of it has its own slider, and every slider goes to zero. So do shake, hit stop, impact flash and orb trails. Three graphics presets cover everything from an old laptop to the full spread.