Emberloop

Emberloop is a free bullet heaven survival game for your browser, on a phone or a computer, with nothing to download. You are a firefly lantern-keeper in a night meadow, holding back the Gloom: clouds of ink-bugs, moth swarms and stranger things that grow thicker every minute. Your weapons fire on their own, so even a first run gets through the opening waves, and the real game is where you fly. It is one of our action games, built to be easy to start and hard to master.

Wherever you fly you leave a burning ember trail. Close the trail into a loop around the swarm and everything inside it flares at once. Bugs that fall to a loop give the most experience and score, and their experience goes straight to you, so loops are how you level up fast and climb the leaderboard, while your weapons keep you alive. A bigger loop around more bugs pays far more, but it also keeps you out in the open for longer, so every loop is a small bet between greed and safety. A loop preview shows what a loop would catch before you close it, the bugs inside a loop about to close are safe from your own weapons until the flare takes them, and a quick dash lets you snap a loop shut or slip out of a tight spot.

Each level-up opens a short draft. Pick new weapons such as Spark Bolt, Firefly Swarm or Arc Lantern, passives that make you faster or your trail longer, and flare charms that change what a loop does: setting the bugs it catches on fire, freezing them in place, growing slowing flowers or pulling every mote inside to you. Max out a weapon, own its partner passive, and the next chest evolves it into something much stronger. Every card shows its exact numbers and the exact odds of being offered, so a good build comes from good choices, not from luck you cannot see.

The First Night is a six-minute run made for newcomers, with gentle rules and a glowing guide around a spellbound swarm that shows you your first loop. Meadow Sprint is a ten-minute ranked run to dawn with a verified leaderboard, and Meadow Night lasts thirty minutes to dawn, then lets you hold the dark for as long as you can survive while new rules arrive every five minutes. Ranked runs are replayed on our servers before they reach the board, so every score on it is real; find more score chases in our competitive games.

On a phone, drag your thumb in the lower half of the screen to fly and flick it to dash. On a computer, fly with WASD or the arrow keys and dash with Space. You can pause at any time and play at one, two or three times speed. The pause menu shows your whole build with each weapon's share of the damage, the Codex (every weapon, evolution, charm, keeper and bug with its exact numbers; evolutions you have not found yet show as riddles) and the settings, from effects and screen shake to a battery saver for long runs on a phone. If you like auto-firing games with a shooter's pace, our shooting games and bullet heaven games collect more of them.

Emberloop is in early access. This first release, First Nights, has the Meadow map, three keepers (two of them earned by playing), the weapons, passives, flare charms and evolutions listed in the Codex, and all three modes with the ranked Sprint leaderboard. New maps, keepers, weapons and modes are planned every three to four weeks, and the roadmap shows what is coming next. Ranked pools change only at the start of a season, so a leaderboard never shifts under you mid-season.