You are a white dwarf: a burnt-out stellar remnant, small, dense, and mostly harmless. The rock field around you does not care. It closes in from every direction, and it gets worse with every minute you stay alive.

White Dwarf is a top-down survival shooter about holding onto a piece of empty space for as long as you can. Your weapon fires automatically at the nearest target, so the only things you control are where you stand and when you spend your cooldowns. Everything else comes down to the choices you make along the way.

The field fills in around you

The first wave is just a handful of slow rocks. Thirty seconds later, faster ones arrive. A minute in, things start shooting back. Then come enemies that shrug off damage until their armor is stripped away, and others that split into smaller problems when they die.

New enemy types arrive on their own timers, and they never replace what came before. They stack. The wide-open arena you started in gradually turns into a maze of narrow gaps you have to keep finding.

Bosses do not leave

Every few waves, the field makes room for something much larger, and each boss demands a different answer from you. Some sit behind a shield and absorb everything you throw at them. Some stay at a distance and bombard you from across the arena. Some overwhelm you with reinforcements faster than you can clear them. Others split into smaller versions of themselves the more damage they take. Figuring out which problem is in front of you is most of the fight.

Here's the twist: defeating a boss does not remove it from the run. Instead, a smaller version joins the regular enemy pool for every wave that follows. Whatever you kill, you keep fighting—in greater numbers, in ordinary waves, for the rest of the run. By surviving, you build the roster you'll face later.

Build it on the way up

Every level gives you three upgrades to choose from. Some simply increase your stats: damage, fire rate, health, movement speed, or pickup range. Others give you an entirely new button to press—an active ability on a cooldown that does things raw numbers never could. Clear the space around you. Blink through a wall of rocks. Turn your own kills into the next explosion.

Take the same upgrade five times, and it evolves into a perk: a permanent, named bonus layered on top of everything those five upgrades already gave you. Committing to a single path pays off far more than spreading yourself thin—and deciding which way to go is the choice you face at every level-up while the field keeps closing in.

Some perks never appear on the upgrade screen at all. Push two specific upgrade paths far enough in the same run, and they fuse into something neither could do alone: movement that leaves destruction behind, shots that change on impact, or abilities that reduce each other's cooldowns. Discovering those combinations is one of the biggest reasons to experiment with new builds.

Save your cooldowns

Your abilities are the buttons you save for when everything goes wrong. They turn the moment you're completely boxed in with nowhere left to move into a clean floor and a few precious seconds of breathing room—but only if you didn't waste them thirty seconds earlier on a threat that was never going to reach you.

Increase their area, shorten their cooldowns, and eventually transform how they work entirely, until the same button becomes a completely different decision than it was on your very first run.

Runs end. Progress does not.

Every run rewards you with Stardust based on how far you made it, and Stardust buys upgrades that persist.

Unlock permanent stat upgrades that improve the numbers you start every run with. Upgrade your abilities so they behave differently—not just better. Spend resources before a run to earn another chance after the wave that killed you, or reroll a level-up when none of the options fit your build.

Pick a better star

You begin as a white dwarf because that's all that's left after a star burns out. Stardust lets you become something brighter: swollen giants, roiling supergiants, and stranger remnants that spin fast enough to carve beams through their own halos.

Each star uses its own custom shader instead of a simple color swap, so every one feels like a truly different celestial object. Matching trails are included as well.

One currency, earned by playing and spent on making the next run stronger. No timers. No daily chores. Nothing to buy with real money. You play. You die. You grow a little stronger. Then you do it again.