Breakup

Climb twenty neon towers, shatter the crystals hidden in them, and get past the seven things guarding the way up.

This is a brick-breaker that won't sit still on one screen. Every level is a tower — fifteen bricks wide, up to sixty rows tall — and the camera climbs it with your ball. You are not here to clear the wall. You are here to find the crystals buried in it, while the tower throws chain explosions, enemies and one very tempting bad power-up at you.

Twenty-seven levels. Four worlds. Seven bosses. About an hour to reach the end of it, and a high-score table that knows whether you played it or just survived it.

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Break the crystals, not the wall

Every tower hides crystals. Shatter all of them and the level ends, whatever else is still standing. Everything else in there is either in your way or a weapon.

• Steel never breaks. It isn't an obstacle, it's the shape of the room — and in Bastion or Foundry, learning to bank off it is the level.
• Explosive bricks take their neighbours with them, and those take theirs. One good shot into the right cell of Furnace brings down half a tower you had budgeted five minutes for.
• Gold pays 500 for a single hit. Tough brick takes three and pays 300.
• Crystals are 1000 each — and they are the exit.

The combo is the real game

Every brick you break before the ball returns to your paddle raises a multiplier, one step every five bricks, up to 5×. Each link in the chain rings a semitone higher than the last, so a good run climbs a scale instead of repeating a noise.

That is the whole scoring game: a tower taken in one long, greedy chain pays several times what the same tower pays played safe. Everyone at the top of the score table is someone who stopped touching the ball.

Nine capsules, and the most common one is a trap

About one brick in five drops something: expand, laser, catch, extra life, multiball, slow, fireball, a barrier across your floor — and shrink, in the same capsule, out of the same bricks, dark red with an exclamation mark on it, and the single most likely thing to fall.

So the capsule drifting down at you is a decision, and you have to make it while it falls. Dodging a power-up is a skill this game will teach you.

Four kinds of enemy, none of which can kill you

A drifter wanders the field. A diver comes down at your paddle in a serpentine line. A splitter breaks into two smaller ones when you hit it. A saucer shoots — and its shot costs you no life, it shrinks your paddle, which is worse and lasts longer.

What all four really do is stand exactly where your ball was going. You can laser one (400), hit it with the ball or catch it in an explosion (300), or just drive the paddle straight into it — 50 points, the cheapest and by far the most satisfying.

Seven bosses, and no two fight the same

Every third level the climb stops and something is waiting at the top.

A boss is this game's own vocabulary turned against you: a crystal — the thing every other level asks you to break — sitting behind a ring of armour plates that look like bricks and orbit it. A plate takes your hit and gives you nothing. The crystal is the only thing that counts, and the only way to it is a gap. Land enough hits and the ring slams shut, faster, throwing out anything caught inside. Three phases each, and the arena escalates with the boss.

The Warden turns one slow ring and shoots what you can see coming. The Gyre spins hard the other way and its plates take three hits. The Brood barely has a ring — it fills the field with enemies instead. The Binary puts a second ring inside the first, turning against it, so a gap is two gaps that have to line up. The Pulsar breathes its ring open and shut and fires in every direction at once. The Stalker comes down the screen after you. The Sovereign does all of it.

Four worlds, twenty-seven names

Cyan Dawn, Emerald Drift, Ember Fields, Violet Void — each with its own palette, its own sky and its own four music tracks.

You start on First Steps, a straight and honest wall. You end on The Core: sixty-three rows, three saucers, and three crystals buried in the middle of it — and then The Sovereign. In between are Honeycomb, The Vault, Furnace, Meteor Rain, Colossus, Nebula, Dark Lattice, Stormfront and fifteen more, and none of them is the same idea twice.

Three lives for the whole run, and every level you finish pays 500 for each one still in hand — so the run that never dies is worth thousands more than the run that scrapes through. The level select unlocks as you go, so anything you have reached you can drop straight back into. The score table keeps your best five runs and the level each one ended on.

Controls

• Mouse or arrow keys move the paddle — the game follows whichever one you touched last.
• Space or click serves the ball, fires the lasers, and lets go of a ball the paddle has caught.
• Esc or P pauses. F is fullscreen, at any moment.
• Music and sound effects have their own volumes.

Play it with the sound on

Half of what this game does, it does with noise: every brick in a chain a semitone above the last, the crack of a crystal, the jingle when a tower finally comes down.

The soundtrack is nineteen looping chiptune tracks by Abstraction — his whole public-domain album Three Red Hearts — four per world, two more the boss fights share, and one for the menu you will hear more of than you expect.

Free

Free on Windows, macOS and Linux, and playable right here in your browser with nothing to install. Your settings, unlocked levels and high scores are kept between sessions either way.

There is a donate button if the evening was worth something to you, and thank you — but nothing is waiting on it.

Music: Three Red Hearts by Abstraction, public domain (CC0): https://tallbeard.itch.io/music-loop-bundle

Source code, MIT licensed: https://github.com/RobertLib/breakup