MainFrame Escape

You're a process. The machine you're running on is infected and you want out.

Mainframe Escape is a twin-stick roguelite that takes place entirely inside an old PC. Floors are circuit boards. Walls are heatsinks. The enemies are malware. You're a CPU die with a gun and a heat problem.

HEAT IS THE WHOLE GAME

Every shot heats you up. Between 70% and 99% you do 30% more damage, so thats where you want to live. Hit 100% and your gun locks out and you lose a point of damage for the rest of the run. A shot fired from under 90 stops at 90, a shot fired from inside the band is the one that locks you. So every trigger pull past 70 is a decision. Some parts only work hot. Some weapons fire your heat instead of bullets. Some abilities spend it.

Every part you pick up draws watts, and only a power supply adds any. Take everything and you brown out.

HACKING IS AN ARCADE GAME

Locked doors, lockers, wallets, secret panels, a better price from the shopkeeper. All of it is hacked, and every hack is one of 18 tiny games on a green CRT. No timer. One try. Fail and the lock is dead for the floor. There's a games folder on the desktop if you want to practice.

BUILDS YOU CAN SEE

Parts change what your bullets do, not just how big the number is, and the bullet is drawn as whatever it does. Three parts from the same architecture give you a set bonus, five give you a bigger one. You'll know your build from watching yourself shoot.

EVERY FLOOR HAS A BOSS

Ten floors down to THE SOCKET. Floors 2 through 9 each pick one of three bosses, and each boss has a room built for how it fights. One of them doesnt fight at all. He plays games. He cheats.

THE WAY OUT IS A CHOICE

Kill the boss on the socket and it opens. Walk through and you win. Or dont, and keep going into the floors underneath, which your build picks for you. Five architectures, five floors, five endings. And one more.

Between runs theres a rig to build, in bitcoin you mined on the way down and lost if you died before you banked it. And a vendor who takes your leftover credits, because they're worth nothing to you dead.

ALSO

- Six playable processes, each with its own gun and its own rules

- Challenge runs that name what they'll do to you before you take them

- Random floor rules past floor 3, rare, named when they land

- Secret rooms with clues left on the board if you look

- Full controller support, rebinding, colorblind filter, HUD and menu scaling, steam deck friendly

- Seeds, so you can replay a run or hand it to someone

- Its all drawn in code. No sprites. Thats a choice, not a budget.

Its an alpha. Everything I wanted in the game is in it now, and what it needs is people playing it and telling me what's wrong. Saves carry across versions.