Two hours. That is the whole deal.

Fifty levels. One run. Two hours in total, counted while the game is open. The clock pauses when you close the game and resumes when you return. Starting another run does not reset it.

Clear all fifty before it runs out and the game asks you a question it has been building towards the entire time: do you want your money back?

The maze IS the game

There is no fixed path. There is a meadow, a gate they come in through, and a gate they are trying to reach. Everything between the two is up to you.

Every fence you plant makes the road longer. A good maze can turn a twenty-cell walk into a hundred-cell one, and every extra cell is another second your towers get to work. Wall it off completely and the game will not let you — but it will let you get cruelly close.

Eight towers, none of them a stat block

A beehive that throws bees. A bread oven that lobs something heavy and leaves a crater. A quench barrel whose mist hangs in the air and slows what walks through it. A watchtower that hits everything on a line at once. A fire lookout on stilts that lands the single hardest hit in the game. A fire pit whose embers drift upward. A windmill that makes its neighbours better at their jobs. A market stall that just quietly makes you money.

You can tell them apart from across the board, which is the point.

They come on foot, and in armour

Rogues come fast and in ones and twos. Knights and barbarians come slow and take a frankly unreasonable amount of killing. Skeleton minions come in numbers, and mages come with them.

And every eighth level, sappers. Their own species, hauling a keg, far tougher than anything else on the field — and they are not interested in your lives. They want your towers. One reaches a cluster and that cluster is gone: no repair, no refund, no rebuilding it cheaply. Just a crater where your best three towers used to be, for the rest of the run.

And twice in a run, flyers. A flock that crosses the meadow in a straight line, gate to gate, over every fence you laid — the one wave your maze does nothing about. Only the Watchtower and the Fire Lookout can reach them; every other tower says so on its card. You are told a level ahead. What you do with that level is the game.

They arrive in mixed health, too, so they do not all die in the same place. Planning for the front one is how you lose the back one.

Every run is a different deck

Towers and upgrades arrive one card at a time. You never get everything, so a run is a shape rather than a checklist — go wide and take a modifier that pays for breadth, or go deep on three towers and take the one that rewards it.

The board will not hold still

Six times in a run the meadow grows, and never evenly. North first. Then east, then south, then west, then both ends at once, then every side together. You are told a level in advance and it never lands on the same level as the sappers — but knowing it is coming and having a maze that survives it are two very different things.

One rare card grows all four sides on top of that, if you are lucky enough to be offered it.

No catches

• No ads, no purchases, no currency, nothing to unlock over time
  
• Single player, offline, plays in a window while you do something else
  
• Runs on a potato

And if you beat the clock and take the refund: good. That is the deal, and I made it on purpose. Two great hours is what this game is for.

The clock is the only thing this game wants from you.