Crypt rush

How to play Crypt rush

Crypt rush is a first-person retro 3D dungeon shooter. Walk with WASD or the arrow keys, look around with the mouse (click the screen first to lock the cursor) and fire your weapon with left click or the space bar. You start with a pistol that has infinite ammo but mediocre damage. Deeper crypts hand you a shotgun, a chaingun and finally a rocket launcher; switch with the 1 to 4 keys or the mouse wheel. The crypts are crawling with skeletons: grunts that swarm you in melee, mages that lob purple bolts and axe-wielding brutes that charge. Each level has at least one coloured key to find: blue and red. Pick a key up and the matching door (look for the coloured keyhole) opens when you bump into it, so you can plough straight on. Reach the exit stairs to clear the level. Clear all five crypts for the run win. Press E or space against a door to nudge it open manually if you prefer that. Esc or P pauses the game and lets the cursor go.

Tips

• Open doors by walking into them once you have the matching key, no fiddly use button
• Pistol has infinite ammo, save shells, bullets and rockets for the skeletons that deserve them
• Axe-wielding skeleton brutes charge fast and hit hard, open with the shotgun, melt them with the chaingun or one-shot them with a rocket
• Rockets splash damage everything near the blast, including you, never fire one at point-blank range
• Gunfire is loud and wakes nearby skeletons, pick your moment before opening up
• Skeleton mages stop to fire a slow purple bolt, sidestep it and close the distance
• Skeleton grunts swarm in melee, back away and pick them off before they pile on you
• Pickups respect their cap, health stops at 100 (megahealth orbs overheal to 150) and armour stops at 100, do not waste them
• On mobile the left thumb walks, the right thumb rotates the camera and the centre buttons fire, swap and open doors
• When the cursor unlocks the game auto-pauses, click the screen again to resume

About Crypt rush

Crypt rush is our love letter to the classic mid-90s shareware shooters that ran on every family PC. We wanted something heavier than the top-down arcade titles already in our roster, so we built a tiny grid-based dungeon engine with a deliberately retro look. The trick to the look is rendering the 3D scene into a small offscreen canvas at roughly 400 by 240, then scaling it up with image-rendering pixelated so the pixels stay nice and chunky. The dungeons are assembled from the low-poly KayKit Dungeon Remastered kit (walls, floors, doorways, gates and props merged into a handful of static meshes per level) and the enemies are fully animated 3D skeletons from the matching KayKit skeleton pack, with Freedoom pixel sprites for the weapon viewmodels. Everything ships CC0 or BSD licensed and heavily optimized, so the whole game still loads in a blink and feels right at home next to the other arcade games.

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