About EMBERDUST

A small pixel survival game that runs in a browser tab. Free, with nothing to sign up for and nothing to buy.

What it is

EMBERDUST is a top-down survival arena game. You are one small figure in a burning arena; the Blight arrives in waves; your weapons fire on their own and you decide where to stand. Runs last as long as you survive them, and what you learn carries over even when the run does not.

It is played in the browser: no download, no install, no launcher, no account. It works on a desktop keyboard and on a touch screen, and it is the same game in both places rather than a cut-down mobile edition. You can play alone, or with friends using a four-character room code.

A device that has never played starts in a tutorial, and it is a real round rather than a slideshow: the arena brings its own enemies on cue, pauses them while it points at something, walks you through a card, the gems, the dash, the bomb and the screen itself, and then puts a boss in front of you without making you wait three minutes for one. It cannot kill you and it pays nothing — it is a practice round, so a bad first minute never costs anything.

How it is made

One person writes it, in hand-written JavaScript against a single HTML5 canvas. There is no game engine and no framework. The pixel art is not image files — every sprite is a short list of coloured rows in the source, drawn one pixel at a time, which is why the game is tiny and why the whole thing can be served as three small files.

The parts you see are the whole game. There is no hidden build, no premium client, no separate "full version".

What it does not do

This list exists because it is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly:

• No purchases. There is no shop that takes money, no premium currency, no battle pass, no cosmetic you can buy with a card. Embers are earned by playing and cannot be bought, sold, traded or cashed out.
• No ads. No ad network, no interstitial, no rewarded video.
• No accounts. No email address, no password, no sign-in. You type a name for the leaderboard and that is the entirety of the sign-up.
• No third-party scripts. The page loads the game and the hosting platform's client library, and nothing else. There is no analytics product, no social embed, no tracking pixel, no cookie banner because there is no cookie to consent to beyond the platform's own.
• No data business. Nothing about you is sold, rented, profiled or enriched, because nothing about you is collected in the first place.

What it cannot do

Being straight about the limits is more useful than pretending they are not there:

• The leaderboard is not validated. The game runs in your browser and the score is posted from your browser, so the server has no way to know the time was earned. It is a scoreboard, not a competition with a prize.
• Your progress lives in your browser. Embers, upgrades, skins and your best time are stored on your device. Clearing site data wipes them, and they do not follow you to another device. There is nothing on a server to restore them from.
• Names are unmoderated. Anyone can type anything into the name field. If a name on the board is offensive, the person who posted it can erase it themselves, and the board is wiped periodically.
• There is no support inbox. Nothing is collected, so nothing can be lost in a way that a support desk could recover. If the game breaks, reloading the page fixes almost everything, and the reset option fixes the rest.

Why it exists

Because survival arena games are fun, because a browser tab is the lowest-friction place to put one, and because a game with no monetisation is a game that can be balanced for how it feels instead of for what converts.

If you enjoy it, the useful thing to do is send the link to someone and play co-op with them.

Where to go next

• How to play — controls, level-ups, bosses and co-op.
• Privacy — exactly what is stored, where, and how to delete it.
• Terms — the short, plain-language version.
• The game — it loads on that page and there is nothing else to do first.