Bank and Burn

The grid collapsed forty-one years ago.

What's left are thousands of decommissioned reactor cores, scattered across the dark, still holding a charge nobody is rated to touch. You're a Runner. You jack into a dead core, draw out what it'll give up, and get clear before it goes critical.

Nobody pays you a wage. You keep what you bank. You lose what you're still holding when it blows.

The whole game is one decision, made over and over

Hold to charge. Release to bank. That's it — you'll understand it in three seconds.

What you won't know is when the core lets go. It can't blow before 35%, so the opening of every charge is safe. After that it's reading the reactor: the colour shifts with real failure probability, a hazard band marks where this core most likely fails, and just before it goes it flares and warbles — a warning you can react to, arriving anywhere from a hair to a full second early. It can never be trusted blindly.

Bank low and you'll survive with nothing. Push into the redline and one round pays more than the previous four.

Then it asks you the real question

Clear five rounds and you can walk away — or push into overtime, where the multipliers get serious and the payouts stop being yours. Everything you earn past round five sits in a pool that only becomes real when you cash out. Blow up and the whole pool goes with the reactor.

Cashing out isn't cowardice. It's the only way to keep it.

What's in it

• 8 reactor cores, each broken in its own way — one lies to you, one breathes in waves, one strips its own gauges and leaves you running on sound alone, one grows more dangerous the longer you succeed
• 6 Meltdown ratings per core — a 48-cell certification grid, each level faster and less forgiving than the last, and the top ratings take your safety gear away
• Daily Dispatch — one core, one attempt, identical instability for every Runner in the world that day. Miss a day and the streak resets
• Master a core to claim what's inside it: new Runners, and gear you can wear or set aside
• A story that declassifies as you clear the grid — what the old grid actually was, what happened the night it failed, and what the Bureau has really been using your Dispatch data for

Made entirely out of maths

No image files, no audio files, no engine. Every visual is drawn to canvas and every sound is synthesised live — including an adaptive score that thins out in the menu and thickens as the reactor gets dangerous. The whole game is a single HTML file.

Runs in your browser. Progress saves locally, so it's per-browser and clears with your site data.