Last Ember

Hold the light. Outlast the night.

Last Ember is a fast, dark roguelite for your browser. You are a lone lantern-bearer in a haunted wood. Your lantern fires by itself, so all you have to do is move, dodge and choose. Shadows come in waves, you level up, and you build a loadout out of 30 upgrades. How far can you get? There are 100 waves.

What you get

• 100 waves of day and night. The world flips between bright, dangerous day and pitch-black, more dangerous night about every 5 minutes. Different things hunt in the dark and in the light.
• 24 enemy types with their own tricks: chargers, exploders, phasing wraiths, snipers with a laser sight, burrowers, teleporters, poison clouds, summoners and more.
• 10 mini-bosses and 10 bosses. A mini-boss every 5th wave, a boss every 10th, each with its own attacks: beams, bullet spirals, meteor rain, gravity pulls, shields, summons.
• 30 upgrades, each up to level 10: 14 weapons and 16 passives. Bounce bolts, meteors, a freezing aura, homing motes, fairies, powder kegs, thorns, boomerang blades... you can carry 6 weapons and 8 passives, so every run is a different build.
• The Hearth: every run earns Cinders, even the bad ones. Spend them on permanent boons (health, speed, damage, XP, rerolls, an extra life) and to unlock more weapons and passives for future runs.
• A Codex of everything you have to deal with.
• Plays on phones too: drag to move, tap to dash.

Controls

• Move: WASD or arrow keys (touch: drag anywhere)
• Dash (a short untouchable burst): Space or Shift (touch: Dash button)
• Choose an upgrade: click, or press 1 / 2 / 3 (touch: tap)
• Reroll upgrades (with the Second Look boon): R
• Pause / mute / fullscreen: P or Esc / M / F

Good to know

• The whole game is a single HTML file, and all art and sound are generated by code, with no third-party assets.
• Progress (best wave, Cinders, unlocks) is saved in your browser. Use Save data on the main menu to export a backup code or file, and to move your progress to another browser or device.
• The game collects no personal data and has no ads or tracking.
• It is early. Waves 1 to 100 are all in, but balance is rough. Tell me how far you got and what killed you in the comments; that is the most useful thing you can do.

Credits

Design and code: BadDawg. Built with the help of an AI coding assistant (Claude).