The green came, and the dead came with it. What's left of the living holds one Safehouse, and everyone who walks out of it walks the same road: ten floors of overgrown forest with the Horde King waiting at the end.

Aftergreen is a top-down zombie horde-survival roguelite. You get one life, one gun and a map full of branching choices. Everything else you earn on the way up.

Kite, dash, shoot

WASD to move, mouse to aim, hold to fire. Zombies converge from every edge of a procedurally grown arena and they do not stop coming, a late floor throws over four hundred bodies at you in a single fight. Space dashes you clear of a closing circle every five seconds, and it grants no invulnerability: it is a repositioning move, not a get-out-of-jail card.

And if you run too well, the horde stops chasing and starts intercepting. It sinks into the ground and claws back up around you, scattered across the field, ringed, spiralling outward, or split into a pincer with whatever stayed above ground still on your heels. Distance is not the answer to it.

Level up in the middle of the fight

Every kill drops an XP gem. Fill the bar and the fight freezes on three cards: repeatable stat boosts that compound, capped build-definers like Piercing Rounds, Double Shot and Vampiric Rounds, and one-time enhancements to the relics you are carrying. Levels carry across the whole run and reset when it ends, so every run builds a different character.

The trader sells out of the same pool. Cash is a second route to the build you are chasing, and the only reliable one when the cards refuse to cooperate.

Pick your route

The run map branches, and you take exactly one node per floor. Fights pay. Traders sell. "?" encounters trade HP for cash, cash for HP and HP for firepower at rates the shop cannot match. Every route is guaranteed one treasure vault, and lucky ones find more.

Route around the fights and you arrive at floor nine several levels short. The floor does not get any easier for having been skipped.

Relics

Every run starts with one. A camp guard sprints after you at the gate to hand it over, occasionally tripping over the same rock on the way. Frost Rounds turns your bullets icy and slows what they hit. Spiked Collar turns every bite back on the biter at five times the damage. Medic Bot cheats death once per fight and shoves the horde off you as you get up. Mine Bot seeds the ground behind you and forgets about it.

Most of them are locked on a fresh profile, and each one is opened for good by doing a deed the relic itself would have helped you do, including one you can only earn by losing.

The Horde King

Floor ten. A hundred-strong escort and four attacks on four clocks: a royal guard that claws up in a ring around you, a ground slam that draws both its rings for the whole windup, a charge that locks its lane before it runs so stepping out of the corridor actually works, and a volley of three elites hurled at where you are standing. Shoot the one in his fist and the volley ends there.

Take him to a third health and every one of those clocks halves. Put him down and his hoard pours out of the body, one mote of Green Matter at a time, into a chest you have to walk over and open yourself.

Losing is the progression

Depth pays whether you win or die. Green Matter banks between runs and buys permanent ranked upgrades in the Safehouse Armory: eleven nodes, twelve ranks apiece, with a full refund available any time you want to rebuild from scratch. Standing bounties pay lump sums for firsts. The Archivist's Field Records keeps every deed you have not done yet as a blacked-out silhouette, so you always know roughly what is still out there.

Fifteen Strains

Beat the Horde King and the next Strain opens. Each tier adds one new rule on top of every tier below it, they stack, they never replace. By the top of the ladder the dead reanimate where they fall, a third of them sprint, a horde erupts out of the graveyard mid-fight, half your fights are at night with no wave preview, two of your three level-up cards carry a downside, shops and vaults get raided before you can trade, and the King enrages at half health and steals one of your relics every single fight.

Features:

• Twin-stick zombie survival: converging hordes, a five-second dash, and no invulnerability frames anywhere

• Mid-fight level-ups, 1 of 3 cards, stats that compound, specials that define a build

• A branching ten-floor run map of fights, traders, encounters and treasure vaults

• Relics with real mechanics, most of them earned by deeds rather than handed out

• Shielded heavies, punchers that throw from range, cops that radio in squads, and a boss with four telegraphed abilities

• Eight build pads per arena, plant an auto-turret and upgrade it through three tiers while you fight

• Permanent Armory ranks, standing bounties and a relic ledger between runs, with a free respec

• Fifteen cumulative Strain tiers, each unlocked by beating the one below it

• Chunky pixel art with a white sticker cut and a comic halftone print over the whole game

One life. Ten floors. The King is not going anywhere.