Quillstorm

Quillstorm is a free porcupine roguelite for your browser, made in pixel art, with nothing to download. You run and jump across a side-on arena of branches and ledges while critters pour in from the ground and the sky, and your only weapon is your back: every quill you fire leaves your coat. It is one of our action games: easy to pick up, with the skill in how you move, aim and spend your quills.

Your coat is your ammunition. Every shot thins it from Full to Patchy to Sparse, a thin coat slows you down, and your quills grow back on their own when you hold your fire, fastest when you are bare. Curl into a spiked ball with Bristle to roll through danger unhurt, and when your storm meter fills, fire the Quillstorm: every quill in your coat bursts out in a ring around you.

Swarm is the endless mode. Survive wave after wave in one arena while the critters grow in number. Defeated enemies drop experience, and every level and cleared wave offers a choice of cards: faster fire, piercing and bouncing quills, the four elements, baby porcupine companions and many more. A boss arrives every fifth wave, the Armored Badger first and then the Giant Bat, and after wave 20 the Infinite Swarm begins. How long you last there is the real test of a build.

The Expedition is the journey. Cross the Thicket room by room on an act map where you choose your own path: fights, a hedgehog's stall that takes your acorns, strange events and quiet clearings where you can rest or sharpen a pick. Every cleared room offers new picks, relics change the rules of a run, and the Bramble Boar waits at the end. An Expedition is played in one sitting, and both modes have their own verified leaderboards.

The critters each ask for a different answer. Scurriers rush along the ground, swoopers dive from above, spitters lob globs from a distance, shellbacks block shots from the front, burrowers tunnel under your feet, splitters burst into smaller pests, crows drop pinecone bombs and magpies pluck the quills from your coat. Elites, ringed in a glowing aura, carry extra tricks. If you like a tight shooter with a growing build, our shooting games and roguelike games have more.

Pinecones come only from playing. Spend them in the Wardrobe on hats, coats, quill styles, trails, kill bursts and titles for your porcupine, and earn more of them through more than fifty achievements. They change how your porcupine looks, never how the game plays. Quillstorm is just for fun: no ads in the game and nothing for sale.

On a computer, move with A and D, jump with W or Space and hold it for a higher jump, aim with the mouse and hold the left button to fire. The right button or Shift rolls, Q fires the Quillstorm, Tab shows your stats, M mutes and Esc pauses. A gamepad works too. Quillstorm is Desktop only: it asks you to run, jump and aim at the same time, which needs a keyboard and mouse or a gamepad, so it lives on our PC games page with the other keyboard games. On a phone the page tells you it is made for a computer and lets you copy or share the link to open it later.