Saint Ambrose burying ground, and you are the only one on shift.
Something got into the crypt under Saint Ambrose and now nothing down there is staying down. You have a belt-fed gun, a coach gun the sexton kept behind the vestry door, and the ground between the lych-gate and the church porch. The swarm does not stop and it does not thin out — the wave number is how hard it is pushing, not a gate you clear.
STORY & LORE
The ground
Saint Ambrose is old enough that the graves are stacked. A yew avenue down the middle, chest tombs with the lids slid off, iron railings along the west side that keep out everything except the things that do not need to walk, and a gravel apron at the south end over the undercroft. The church stands at the north end with the porch open.
Why you are alone
Nobody else took the shift. There is no radio, no relief and no bell to ring except the one in the tower, which rings itself every fifth wave whether you want it to or not.
HOW IT PLAYS
Four kinds of dead, and they play differently
The zombie walks straight at you and soaks damage — leaning, dragging, jaw open. The ghost ignores the railings and the headstones entirely, drifts a foot off the ground, and goes half-transparent when it is not actually on you. The vampire closes in bursts rather than at a constant speed, so it is never simply a faster zombie. The mummy is enormous, slow, and its wrappings take nearly half the damage off anything that hits its body — which is what the head is for.
The belt
The machine gun holds a hundred and fifty rounds of link and the box in your coat refills itself between bursts, so it never truly runs dry; what it costs you is the three seconds it takes to feed a new belt in. At close range it goes through the first thing it hits and into the second. The coach gun is two barrels of buckshot for whatever got close enough to matter, and its spare shells come back far more slowly.
Where they come from
Off the ends of the ground, in over the railings, out of the crypt doors, and up out of the chest tombs — never out of thin air three feet behind you. Every fifth wave the bell goes and the crypt opens properly.
Somewhere to fall back to
The church is open: a nave with ranks of pews, a lit altar at the east end, lancet windows, and a vaulted roof that changes what the gun sounds like. The undercroft below the gravel is lit by sconces and lined with tombs. Both are a chokepoint and a trap, in that order.
Everything is drawn, not sampled
Walls, ground, roof, headstones, yews, the four kinds of dead and the gun in your hands are all painted into one software framebuffer by hand — no textures loaded, no WebGL, nothing allocated per frame. It runs at a locked frame on a machine with no graphics card worth the name, which is the point: a swarm of thirty is exactly when you cannot afford a collection.
WHAT COMES OUT OF THE GROUND
Health and speed scale with the wave number; the mix tips further towards the fast ones the longer you last.
| Kind | Health | Speed | Damage | From wave | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zombie | 52 | 1.05 | 7–12 | 1 | Walks straight at you and absorbs a lot doing it |
| Ghost | 34 | 1.85 | 5–9 | 2 | Goes through railings and stones; half-visible until it strikes |
| Vampire | 78 | 2.35 | 13–19 | 4 | Closes in bursts, then resets and comes again |
| Mummy | 190 | 0.70 | 18–26 | 6 | Wrappings shed 45% of body damage. Aim higher |
WHAT YOU CARRY
| Gun | Belt | Rate | Damage | Reload | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Belt | 150 | 640 rpm | 17 | 3.2s | Punches through the first one into the second |
| Sexton's Coach Gun | 2 | 95 rpm | 15 ×9 | 1.6s | Both barrels, close up |
VERSION HISTORY
- Genre moved from Shooting to Shooting › FPS. Categories are two levels now — overarching genres with sub-genres beneath them — so this is a more precise shelf rather than a different one: the game still appears under Shooting.
- Rebuilt. The old version was flat brown untextured walls, a green rectangle for a gun, and one kind of enemy that floated.
- It is a churchyard now: yews, chest tombs, headstones that lean where the ground gave, iron railings, a lych path, a moon and low cloud, and Saint Ambrose itself at the north end with a lit nave and a crypt underneath.
- Four kinds of dead instead of one, and they fight differently rather than just looking different.
- A belt-fed gun that effectively never runs out, and a coach gun for the ones that got past it.
- The dead no longer float. Everything stands on the ground it is actually on; the ghost hovers deliberately, and by a foot rather than a body height.
- Mouldy green stencil for every readout, scratched rather than typed, and deliberately not lined up — each panel leans its own way.
- Locked 16.7ms at 1280×720 with sixteen of them on the ground at once.