Escape Space

About the game

Escape Space mixes three arcade classics in one top-down game. You are a small paddle floating through the rooms of a space station, and you move it freely in all four directions with the arrow keys. In your way are comets: touch one and it wakes up, and from then on it bounces around the room like a Breakout ball, with a trail of sparks. Your job is to keep them in play and aim them.

Each level has a short list of objectives, shown at the corner of the screen. Some comets have to be pushed into goals, round gates that swallow them one by one; others have to smash every brick in the room. When all objectives are complete, the exit opens, and you have to reach it before the timer on top of the screen runs out, or the shuttle will leave without you. Force fields, walls and ball launchers add pinball-like trouble along the way.

The look is a dark space station seen from above, with a drifting starfield and a little pseudo-3D depth in the walls, and a soundtrack by Andrey Avkhimovich plays in the menu and in the levels. The game has two levels, with a tutorial in the first one that explains the controls and the objectives with messages on the floor. It is an older free game by Hugo Locurcio, made with Godot, and the whole project is open.

Playing it here

Click Play and wait for the page to load (about 23 MB, downloaded only when you press the button). Choose Play in the menu. The game needs a keyboard; a gamepad also works if your browser sees it. Press Esc to pause. The Quit button of the menu does nothing in a browser. Settings (volume, video options) are kept in your browser.

Controls

Tips

Wake the comets first. A comet only moves after you touch it. Touch the ones you need, then think about where each one should go.

Aim with the paddle. The paddle keeps its momentum while you move, so how you touch a comet decides where it goes. Practise sending one at a goal across the room.

Watch the clock. The timer on top of the screen does not stop. Finish the objectives, then go straight to the exit.

Read the floor messages. The first level explains most of what you need.

FAQ

How many levels are there? Two. The first one doubles as a tutorial.

Is progress saved? The settings are; levels are not, each visit starts at the first one.

Does it work on a phone? No. There are no touch controls.

Is it really free to share? Yes. The code is MIT, the art is CC0, and the sounds, music and fonts are under free licences, all listed below.

Credits and licence

Escape Space was made by Hugo Locurcio ("Calinou") and contributors: programming and 2D art by Calinou, particle sprites by Kenney (CC0). The code is under the MIT licence and the art under CC0. It runs on Godot Engine 3.5.3 (MIT).

• Music by Andrey Avkhimovich (https://avkh.bandcamp.com/): "Through Blazing Moons", "Step Forward" and "Parking Dancer", Creative Commons Attribution.
• Menu sounds by rhodesmas ("Tap 01") and DrMinky ("Menu screen mouse over"), Creative Commons Attribution, from freesound.org.
• Ball and brick sounds by aust_paul and SanitysPrime, CC0, from freesound.org.
• Goal sounds: made for this site, CC0.
• Fonts: IBM Plex Sans Condensed and IBM Plex Mono (Copyright 2017 IBM Corp.), SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Smoothing plugin by Lawnjelly, MIT.

The two goal sounds of the original, whose author and licence could not be verified, were replaced with new ones, and the name of that author was removed from the credits screen. The licence texts, the notices of the libraries inside the Godot engine and the source of this build are linked from this page.