Starfall: Nox Archives

The harbour is sealed. Whatever came down is still moving.

Nox Harbour was cordoned off after something fell into the bay and started growing inside the people who were near it. You are not the rescue team. You are the investigator sent in afterwards — to find out what the cordon is really holding back.

Ten minutes a run. Go down, keep moving, shoot, and come back with the record. Or don't come back.

What you actually do

Keep moving. Top-down survival action, played in portrait. Your gun fires on its own; your feet are the skill. WASD or arrow keys on desktop. On a phone, a stick appears wherever your thumb lands.

Ten minutes, three bosses. Stage bosses at 3, 6 and 10 minutes. The clock stops while you fight one.

Pick three, every level. Sample-ups between waves open a three-card choice. Weapons and support gear, five slots each, five levels each.

Seventeen evolutions. Five of them are full attack transformations — the Judgement Blade, the Collapsing Maul, the Railgun, the Shadow Tactic Blade, the Breaching Axe. Plus prism shields, drones, elemental payloads and everything else.

The contamination lock. Don't move for five seconds and you get a warning. Ten seconds and it starts eating 3% of your maximum health per second. Shield won't stop it. Armour won't stop it. A boss fight is not an exemption.

Six investigators, six different games

• Raine — service pistol, spotter drone, sample collection. The one who plays it safe.
• Gia — folding shotgun, field medic, close-range clears. Heals a team she doesn't have.
• Clay — tactical rifle, heavy armour, sustained fire. Walks into things.
• Krauser — combat knife, hit-and-run, health back on hit. Never stops moving.
• Ella Fletch — hunting crossbow. Only uses her own bows and bolts; everyone else's loot is junk to her.
• Vern Obsidian — fists and qi. Hidden. Grows on his own track and takes nothing from the common pool.

Unlock Vern by clearing the first five chapters with Raine, Gia and Clay.

Twelve sectors

Nine story chapters — a harbour police station, a quarantine block, a deep-research facility, a fog-shrouded island, a crimson castle, a shopping mall, an amusement park, an international airport, a military exclusion zone.

Two hidden ones you have to survive your way into: a village that only appears after fifteen minutes out in the expedition, and an orbital station. And one side chapter that opens only for Ella.

Cross-zone expedition

Five connected zones on a single map, roughly three times the size of a campaign stage. An event fires every ninety seconds — supply drop, bounty hunt, anomaly surge. A zone lord every three minutes.

You can extract any time after the three-minute mark, as long as you're standing in the central depot and not mid-boss. Stay longer than you probably should and you'll find what's at the far end.

Between runs

Mastery levels open long-term specialisations. Research splits three ways — expedition scanner, trauma layer, weapon calibration bench — five ranks each. Relic sets trigger at 6, 12 and 24 pieces. Thirteen hidden investigations are buried in the maps, and most of them want you to stand somewhere specific for a specific number of seconds.

Leaderboards are local. There is no account system and no cross-device sync — your save lives in this browser.

Sound

The entire score and every effect are synthesised live in Web Audio. No sample files, no licensed soundtrack. The new thirty-second cold open runs once per session, muted by default, and you can skip it.

Before you play

• The interface is Simplified Chinese. Menus, upgrade names, relic names and the in-combat contamination warning are all Chinese. See Language below.
• Portrait is the intended orientation. Desktop and mobile both work.
• A run is ten minutes. An expedition is longer.

Language

The game interface, item names, upgrade text and every in-combat warning are Simplified Chinese only. There is no English UI yet. This store page is in English; the game inside it is not.

If that's a blocker for you, please say so in the comments — it is the single biggest thing standing between this build and a wider audience.

Credits

Scene atlas: Kenney — Roguelike Modern City (CC0). Attribution and the original licence file ship inside the game folder. All sound and music are synthesised at runtime; no third-party audio is bundled.

Feedback

Found a bug, a soft-lock, or a run that felt unfair? Post it in the comments. Anything that breaks a save goes first.