Hit the beat. Build the run.

Duckstep is a rhythm game with a roguelite bolted onto its spine. Gems fall down four lanes (six on the piano stages) and you catch them on the beat — but every clean hit feeds a build. Skills draft mid-run. Your character's power switches on at 25 combo and never switches off. By the time you're deep in a track, half the screen is fighting for you, and the only question is whether you can hold the streak long enough to see what's next.

Your combo is the engine

Everything in Duckstep keys off the number in the corner.

• 25 combo — your stepper's signature power latches on and stays on for the rest of the run. It never drops off on a miss.
  
• 100 / 200 / 300 — that power tiers up. Blaze's fire ring widens. Scholar gains another orbiting tome. Thundor's bolts come faster and reach further.
  
• 400 combo — the game freezes and hands you three cards. Pick an Ultimate. It's permanent, it's run-defining, and it does not stack or evolve — it just changes what the run is.

Miss, and the ladder holds. Whiff repeatedly, and you'll find out how much of that screen was carrying you.

Twenty steppers, twenty answers

Every character plays the same charts and solves them differently. Duckstepper earns autonomous helper ducks that wander the field grabbing gems on their own. Blaze ignites and burns anything near a catch. Ribbit locks a tongue laser up-screen through five tiers. Blackhole periodically swallows every gem inside a growing radius. Snek weaves across the lanes trailing a body that grows and slices. Chubs just gets bigger and pierces straight through.

They're not skins. Picking a stepper picks a strategy.

Thirty skills, drafted live

Clean hits fill a meter; filling it stops the run and offers a draft. Twenty active skills and ten passives compete for the same ten slots — twelve on the six-lane piano stages — so every pick you take is a pick you give up. Stack three copies of a skill and it evolves into a stronger version of itself — Slow-Mo goes from calming the field to nearly stopping it, Second Wind goes from absorbing one miss to shielding three.

Flaming Potion lobs bottles that shatter and burn patches of gems out of the air. Slipstream auto-glides you to the next gem's lane after a Perfect. Gem Vault banks a share of every coin into your permanent wallet, whether the run ends well or not.

Twenty levels, twenty ideas of hard

Twenty levels, each with its own song, its own hand-authored chart, and its own idea of what's difficult.

• Stages have a clear score. Hit it and the run ends in a win, not a death.
  
• Endless tracks never cap. The speed keeps climbing toward impossible and your reward scales with how far you got.
  
• Density stages hold their fall speed low on purpose and thicken the chart instead — chords, jumps and stacked rows until the screen is a wall you have to read.
  
• HYPER unlocks the speed cap and keeps thickening the sheet as the fall accelerates, all of it still locked to the song's own grid.
  
• RAW turns off the passive catch, the skills, and the character powers. It's just you and the chart. Good luck.

Every stage carries three difficulty sheets — Easy, Medium and Hard — authored separately rather than scaled, so Hard is a different chart and not the same one sped up.

Along the way: bomb formations that punish autopilot, bumpers that rotate on a five-second cycle and physically knock gems off course, pill gems, mirrored six-lane piano charts played two-handed, and an endgame tier that runs genuinely faster and denser than anything before it rather than just taking longer.

Level 20: arm it, or lose it

The final stage is the only one that puts a weapon in your hands and a leash on your neck at the same time. Hold a clean streak and the pads light up: your super is armed. Fire it and the character plays the chart for you — every gem it touches lands as a Perfect, for as long as the fuel holds.

Break your combo while it's armed and Final Ascension takes it personally. The character is dragged to the centre of the screen and CAGED — powers off, helpers gone, nothing between you and the notes — until you break out. It is the one level that can punish you for holding a streak badly rather than for missing.

Charts that actually follow the music

Every track is beat-mapped to its own measured beat times, not fitted to a single average BPM. Real recordings drift — a fixed grid can be aligned at the top of a song or in the middle, never both. Duckstep's charts follow the song's actual bars and four-bar phrases from the first downbeat to the last, so a hit that feels on-beat is on-beat.

VS: two players, one screen

Head-to-head across three songs, two full cabinets side by side. A second player drops in by pressing START at character select and takes their own controls — keyboard or controller, either seat, in any combination. The two seats can never share a button: if player one takes the arrow keys, player two is moved to the numpad automatically.

Gems you catch charge a counter; fire it and you drop garbage onto the other field — snapped forward onto the song's own beat grid, so it's dense but never unreadable. Fire into an incoming volley and the smaller amount cancels, Puzzle Fighter style, sending only the remainder.

Counters arm on press and launch on the next beat. The button throbs on the beat while it's armed — that pulse is your timing cue. No second player handy? The same duel runs against an AI across three difficulty tiers, from a scrappy one that drops gems and fires early to one that plays near-clean and hoards for bigger walls.

Unlock a game that keeps growing

Gems buy characters and add new skills to your draft pool. Crowns — the prestige currency, earned from first clears and milestones — buy the marquee steppers and the three legendary Ultimates. Late characters don't sit in a shop waiting; they reveal themselves when you do something specific. Take twenty hits in a run and the vampire shows up. Clear Level 12 or later without losing a single point of HP and the tank does.

No premium currency. No energy bar. Nothing to buy your way past.

Every character, every skill, every Ultimate — everything that touches gameplay — is earned by playing. Gems and Crowns are both purely in-game currency; there's no premium version of either, no energy system rationing your runs, and nothing gated behind a card that isn't your own combo. Buy the game once and the whole roster is in front of you, waiting to be unlocked the same way for everyone.