The horde is not coming for you.

There is a boat in the river, and it does not run. Later, there is a car in a forest, a snowmobile on a mountain, and a gun in a bunker big enough to clear a horde on its own — once you fix it.

Every chapter gives you one broken way out and a night that is already coming. The dead want the vehicle. You are just the thing standing in front of it.

One pile of scrap. Two jobs.

Scrap is the only currency in the game, and by day there are exactly two things to do with it: build defenses, or walk to the vehicle and pour it in. Hold to pour, let go to stop.

Pour too much and the night arrives at an undefended camp. Build too much, and you are still here on night twenty, watching the pile you needed get chewed back down. That decision is the game, and you make it every single day with the light going.

The nights never stop.

There is no “survive seven nights” counter. Nights keep coming and keep getting bigger until the vehicle runs — and then you win in daylight, get in, and drive to the next chapter.

Every night is authored, not rolled. Night nine is the same night nine for everybody: the same monsters, out of the same gates, in the same order. If two people compare notes about night twelve, they are talking about the same night twelve. Dying on it means something.

Build a camp that has to hold

Eight buildings, each with exactly one job.

• Spikes cut and slow, holding the horde inside your firing arc.

• Barricades are the only thing that stops anything. They kill nothing — they close a gap you cannot cover and buy the guns behind them time.

• Turrets shoot on their own until the magazine runs dry. A Depot reloads everything near it, and buys back the walk.

• Floodlights light the ground and extend the reach of every turret and mortar standing in them.

• Mortars are slow, long, and stop caring what is in the way.

• Mines hit once and hard. They do not know who you are.

• Rigs pay scrap at every dawn, and pay more the further out you dare to put them.

Slots are limited, so the camp is an argument you keep having. You can strip a building you already paid for and take half the scrap back — which means the camp that got you through night two is not the camp that survives night fifteen.

Four survivors, thirty-three cards

The Drifter, the Mechanic, the Hunter and the Warden each start with a different problem. Leveling up mid-fight deals you a choice of upgrades from a deck of thirty-three, so a run bends toward the gun, the camp, or your own legs depending on what you are handed and what you are willing to gamble on.

What is in it

• A four-chapter campaign: a riverbank, a forest, a mountain pass, and a bunker

• Twelve more standalone maps, four of them with alternate layouts

• Six kinds of death, including a boss every fifth night

• Eighteen achievements

• Steam Cloud saves, so a run follows you between machines

• Full controller support, and it runs on Steam Deck

• Hand-drawn pixel art, an original chiptune score, and no third-party engine anywhere in it