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. Somewhere in level one a shotgun is waiting for you, switch between the two with the 1 and 2 keys. Each level has at least one coloured key to find: blue and red. Pick a key up and the matching door opens when you bump into it, so you can plough straight on. Reach the glowing exit tile to clear the level. Clear level two 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, the shotgun is for tougher monsters and tight spots
• Brutes charge fast and hit hard, keep moving and break line of sight to recover
• Bolt-throwers stop to fire a slow purple bolt, sidestep it and close the distance
• Imps swarm in melee, back away and pick them off before they pile on you
• Pickups respect their cap, health stops at 100 and armour stops at 50, 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 picked three.js and built a tiny grid-based dungeon engine on top of it. 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. Walls, floor and ceiling are flat MeshBasicMaterial planes with hand-painted textures, and monsters are billboard sprites that always face the camera. No external assets are loaded at runtime, every texture and sprite is drawn into a canvas in code. It still feels right at home next to the other arcade games.

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