Riftward

Past the meridian line, no one is coming.

You fly a warden ship at the ragged edge of settled space. Raiders, cloaked hunters, and things in the dark that do not negotiate are already inbound. Point the nose, hold the trigger, and carve a way through. This is fast, retro space combat first.

Then it opens up. Chart 250 star systems. Trade cargo, run missions, board crippled ships, and lead your away teams down to the surface by hand. Refit your hull, raise a fighter wing, and climb from lieutenant to something the whole frontier has a name for.

There are several ways to play, and the game never tells you which one it believes in. Most captains fight. Some conquer, and not just at the in-game casinos. A few find a third road, one that costs everything and pays in something else. You will know it when you see it.

And there is so much content. More than most people will ever see. A lot of it is tucked away for a certain kind of player, and there will not be many of them. That is on purpose. If you are one of them, you will know.

What is inside:

• Fast arcade space combat: lance, torpedoes, cloak, tractor beam, boarding parties
• 250 star systems and two full campaigns
• 150 plus missions: combat, defense, extraction, and away-team ground operations
• Parley, trade, salvage, and faction politics, with consequences that come back around
• An original soundtrack, more than 130 tracks, all generated inside the game itself
• Playable in English, Spanish, and Portuguese

Riftward runs in any modern browser. It plays best on a desktop or laptop with a keyboard, and it has a new touch layout for phones and tablets (hold the device sideways).

Free to play. If Riftward takes a piece of your evening, a donation keeps the lights on. Always welcome, never required.

Controls:

Desktop (or laptop): arrow keys to fly, space to fire.

Touch (tablet or phone): hold it sideways, drag the left side to steer, and tap the on-screen buttons. Buttons for things like orbit and hail appear when they apply.

Display size (on phones):

Use the fullscreen button on the game frame for the biggest picture. Close your other tabs. On an iPhone in Safari, you can swipe up on the right side after launch, or drag a black side bar outward, and the game fills almost the whole screen.

This is the lo-fi, drift-physics shooter I always wanted to play, with just about everything I have ever loved about games poured into it. Claude built it with me, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is lighthearted and it is G-rated, it is free, and I hope you have fun, especially with the celebrity Easter eggs.

I believe in healing.
I think it can happen in games, the way it can in any art.
Enjoy.

Randolph "Wolf" Shipon
New Jersey


Mirror: also playable (saving your game may work better) at https://wolfshipon.github.io/riftward/ — always the newest build.