The full machine
Six coupled scalars. Seven rate-controllers. Every feature is an operation on that one shared machine — and every fix you make creates a new problem somewhere else.
The substrate
Everything the game simulates flows into these six numbers.
| Vital | Safe | Driven up by | Pulled down by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energy | High | Power plants × health | Upkeep, leaks, starvation |
| Stress | Low | Every other vital going wrong | Calm, healthy vitals |
| Virus | Low | Viral crisis, ribosome hijack | Lysosome + shredders, antiviral |
| Rust | Low | Mito power (super-linear), overclock | Decay, repair crews, antioxidants |
| Folding | Low | Ribosome output, heat shock, ER flood | ER power, chaperones |
| Materials | Stocked | Membrane nutrient intake | Building proteins, starvation |
The threats
A crisis is a forcing term switched on during the active phase. Each demands a specific response.
| Crisis | Pushes | How to counter |
|---|---|---|
| Viral Infection | Virus up · hijacks factories | Power the wall, post shredders, shut factories, fire antiviral |
| Heat Shock | Folding load up (misfolding) | Flood chaperones to the ER, ease ribosomes |
| Starvation | Energy & materials down | Cut non-essential power, open intake, run autophagy |
| Oxidative Stress | Rust up · corrodes engine & DNA | Don't overclock, post repair to mito, build antioxidants |
| Membrane Breach | Wall health down · toxins in | Build patches, lock the wall, post crews |
| ER Overload | Folding load up (factory flood) | Throttle ribosomes, flood chaperones, let lysosome shred |
| DNA Damage | Nucleus health down | Post repair to nucleus, power it, build a DNA repair kit |
Same-axis pairs are never stacked — two crises that kill the same organelle would be unfair. From cycle 11, every cycle rolls two simultaneous (but compatible) threats.
The roguelike layer
Survive a crisis and you mutate — pick one of three. Pure upside is a bug; every mutation makes you better at one thing, worse at another. Own two of a family and an emergent synergy fires.
★★ Game-changing keystones
Crafted in The Lab, each adds a genuinely new system — not a stat tweak. Each still pays a load tax and a real downside.
Convert viral load into food & energy — but it tears a feeding wound in the wall. The virus becomes your crop; greedy double-crops rupture the membrane.
Discharge stress for a burst of energy, materials and a heal — scaled by how high it was. The meter you used to flee becomes a battery you charge by being in danger.
Freeze all crisis growth for 4 seconds while metabolism keeps running. Charge accrues only under fire — a cautious player never fills it.
Sacrifice an organelle for an instant surge. It then rots for the rest of the run — and two necrotic organelles at once is cascade death.
A second win axis: a bar that fills only on calm containments. Ascend to end the run for a big payout — but each ascension raises your next run's intensity.
Author up to three standing rules the cell auto-fires. Then fight your own autopilot — disable a misfiring rule mid-crisis from the chip strip.
The difficulty engine
Cycles 1–10 follow an authored teaching schedule. Then it's procedural. Difficulty rises to a climax — the cycle 9–11 gauntlet most runs die at — then eases to a sustainable plateau.
Past the gauntlet, difficulty stops climbing. A perfect equilibrium could run forever; one sim run reached cycle 106. Your depth is bounded only by how long you hold the line. And getting stronger raises the threat to match — eventual collapse is the point.
Onboarding & feel
A 7-page tutorial auto-presents on first launch; organelle labels and a crisis briefing teach you as you go.
Failing systems go red and jitter, the wall ramps blue→red, rust spreads a haze, low energy dims the cell. A healthy cell stays calm and blue.
14 soft-synth SFX with matched haptics — taps, builds, warnings, the crisis sting, the contain relief. Both fully toggleable.
Every animation respects the system setting. Tactical mode auto-pauses for a calm, cerebral, zero-time-pressure run of the same game.
Coming soon · iPhone · iOS 18+
No accounts. No data. Just you and a patient that will, eventually, collapse.