lock-on
An elebe game
System: Escape
Seven floors down. Find three keys — or circle a gate and skip past them.
steer with the cursor, WASD or the arrows · hold click to slow the world down · space drops a snare · three lives
on a phone — drag anywhere to steer · double tap to drop a snare
how to play, below, or press h anywhere
- loading…
// system: escape
You are the glitch
- Every floor opens pulled back for a beat. Read it there — where the doors are, where the gate is.
- Point where you want to be. The glitch walks there. It has weight, so it arrives a beat after you ask.
- Hold the left button to slow the world. Your hand keeps full speed and the camera stops drifting, so you can thread a line that will not hold still otherwise.
- Get down. Three keys open a door, or one sealed gate skips you past several floors.
The controls
- mouse
- steer by pointing. The dotted line shows what you are pulling.
- hold left
- slow the world down. It runs out — the bar on the right is what is left. Brush past something close enough to have had you and it pays you back.
- WASD / arrows
- steer without a mouse.
- space
- drop a snare.
- 123
- take that upgrade, when a wing offers you three.
- esc
- back to the menu. It ends the run.
- r
- run it again, from the scorecard.
- m · f · h
- mute · fullscreen · these pages.
- phone
- drag anywhere to steer — the glitch follows the distance your thumb travels. Double tap to drop a snare.
Two ways down
Every floor has doors. Three keys open the plain ones and take you down a single floor — the safe road, and three errands.
A sealed gate opens for nobody. You open it by circling it, and it does not drop you one floor but several — the deeper it goes, the more laps it asks for.
What is chasing you
The longer you stand on a floor, the harder it hunts — that is the lock-on bar filling under the scoreboard. It does not slow down when you do.
- ●●●
- three lives. Caught costs one and puts you back at the top of the same floor. The run ends when the last one goes.
- snare
- space, or the button — pins whatever is chasing you and buys room.
- surge
- a shard on the floor. Freezes every creature for a beat.
- coil
- another snare for your pocket.
Extermination
The third mode turns the room around: you came back as the hunter. You still have no weapon. The floor kills — you decide what walks into it.
- Six zones, each running a bugged generator. That is what the bugs are coming out of.
- Charge a square — stand on it, or keep crossing it on the run. Standing is faster; crossing is what you do with a crowd behind you.
- Lead them through it. The square eats its fill, and the generator dies with it. The zone goes dark and stops sending.
- Three generators down opens the way into the annex. All six opens the sub-level, which is worth more. Cross, and take one of three upgrades.
Version 4.0
v4.08 Oct 2026plays differently
The daily is the same system for everybody, at last. This room built its floor from your device's own date while the board files runs by UTC and the other two rooms agree with UTC — so for the hours where those dates differ, east or west, you were running a system nobody else had and being ranked against them anyway. One date now, the archive's.
v3.05 Oct 2026plays differently
Winning the daily is the only thing that hands you a card now, and it hands you the next one in order — worst to best. Going deep in ENDLESS is written into your file instead of paid in art, Extermination keeps a count of everything the floor took off the board, and losing the daily is a debt: the archive is owed this room until you finish it, name the cursed file, or let a day pass.
v2.15 Oct 2026same hands
The scorecard hands the run back as three lines you can paste anywhere: how far you got, how that sat against everyone who ran the same system, and nothing at all about how the building is put together.
v2.026 Sep 2026plays differently
One steering law: the glitch walks the way your cursor sits from IT, the camera never lets go of the centre, and the browser never takes the pointer. The same circle drawn anywhere on the floor now means the same thing.
v1.125 Sep 2026same hands
The floors are a building, designed by the thing hunting you — and Extermination opens behind it, where you come back as the hunter and the floor does the killing.
v1.023 Sep 2026the room opens
The wings and the currency come out, and the left button becomes a pedal you hold to slow the world instead of a click.
A first number that moves means the room plays differently and these pages are worth reading again. A second means there is more of it, or something is mended — your hands still work.