Leech
Latches on and drains until killed. Running does nothing at all.
Free · browser · no download
NEONHIVE
Your weapons fire themselves. Your only job is where to stand. Survive twenty minutes against a swarm that gets smarter the tighter it packs — alone, or with a friend on the same screen.
Works on phones, tablets and desktop. No account, no ads, no in‑app anything.
1–2players, one screen
20:00per run, then the boss
8weapon evolutions
0image or audio files
You never press fire
Every weapon in Neon Hive shoots on its own. That sounds like it plays itself — it does the opposite. With the trigger taken away, the only thing left is positioning, and the game is built to punish a player who stands still.
Kills drop shards. Shards level you up. Each level offers three augments and you can only ever carry six weapons and six passives, so every pick spends a slot you cannot get back. Spreading thin is how runs die at minute fourteen.
Dying still pays. Every run banks cores, spent in the Hangar on permanent upgrades, and three more characters unlock through play. The next run starts stronger than the last one did.
What it looks like
Every pixel is drawn procedurally at runtime — there is not one image file in the game.
Crowding is a mistake the swarm can make
Let too many small bugs bunch into one place and they fuse. Fourteen of them inside a small radius start dragging toward a common centre, glowing brighter as they close, and a second later what stands up is a single Amalgam carrying their combined health.
The pull‑in is a telegraph, not a cutscene. Every bug in it stays killable the whole way, and thinning the cluster collapses the merge and scatters the survivors. A dense swarm becomes a question you answer in about a second: burst it now, or fight what it becomes.
Tier 1
Ten evolutions
Every base enemy has one, earned by bunching up with its own kind. A Swarmer crowd becomes Ravagers that split on death; Splitters become Cascaders that split into splitters.
Tier 2
Chimera & Coil
The Chimera needs three different evolved kinds together — variety, not volume. The Coil needs three Amalgams, and it does not chase you. It cuts you off, dragging a solid trail behind it.
Tier 3
The Big Bang
Three Chimeras or four Coils collapse into a singularity. If you have let it get this far, that is a sentence about how the last five minutes went.
And on Hive Mind, the evolved ones think
The harder difficulty does not add bodies — it changes composition and intelligence. Evolutions arrive at half the clock, enemies hit harder, and evolved types get real behaviour: they lead your movement, flank, orbit and withdraw when hurt.
The Coil turns cobra. It stalks a ring, rears back for a visible, audible 0.45 seconds, then lunges at three times its speed with its aim locked at launch — so it can be sidestepped by a player who reads the tell, and only by that player. Miss, and it spends nearly a second recovering while taking extra damage.
Two players, one screen
Grab a second controller, or share a keyboard, or hand someone half of your phone screen. No accounts, no lobbies, no netcode — local co‑op, the way it used to work.
Stay near each other and you share one camera. Drift far enough apart and it splits into two panes — side by side if you separated horizontally, stacked if vertically — and the layout locks so it cannot flip back and forth while you fight. Come back together and it rejoins.
Go down and you bleed out rather than die: your partner has a window to reach you and get you back up.
Commit to a build
Take a weapon to level 8, max its paired passive, and the next level‑up offers a transformed version. Eight of them, and you will not see them all in one run.
| Weapon | Pairs with | Becomes |
|---|---|---|
| Plasma Bolt | Reactor | Plasma Storm — homing, piercing, detonating |
| Shock Coil | Coolant | Tesla Cascade — chains eight deep, stuns every link |
| Pulse Wave | Optics | Nova Field — erupts outward, huge knockback |
| Nanite Swarm | Ammo Loop | Nanite Cloud — a double ring of drones |
| Rail Lance | Servos | Rail Storm — three lances that split on impact |
| Orbital Beam | Reactor | Annihilator — three beams, burning craters |
| Mine Layer | Plating | Cluster Mines — mines that scatter more mines |
| Cryo Field | Magnet | Absolute Zero — freezes solid; frozen bugs take double |
Five problems, not five health bars
Each specialist gets a scripted introduction on its own before it joins the general mix — so you meet it once in isolation, rather than discovering it inside a wall of forty other things.
Shielder
Bubbles everything near it. Ignore it and the whole pack is unkillable.
Burrower
Untargetable while under, surfaces beneath you. Punishes standing still.
Detonator
A walking bomb with a visible fuse. Kill it at range or wear the blast.
Weaver
Leaves slowing webs that outlive it. Denies ground even after it dies.
Above them: Brood Mothers that spawn swarmers and drop chests, and the Hive Tyrant, which lands at 20:00. Kill it and you have cleared the run.
There is also something hidden out at the edge of the map. It is not announced anywhere, and this page is not going to announce it either.
Controls
Built for phones first, but it does not assume one.
| Keyboard | Gamepad | Touch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Player 1 | WASD | Pad 1 | Left half of the screen |
| Player 2 | Arrows or IJKL | Pad 2 | Right half of the screen |
Solo is unchanged by any of this — player one answers to both key sets, either pad, and the whole screen. Esc pauses, 1–3 pick a level‑up card.
Keep it
Neon Hive is a web app, so you can install it to your home screen and it will run offline afterwards. On iPhone: Share, then Add to Home Screen. On Android: the browser menu, then Install app.
The zip is the whole game as static files — the same thing this page links to. It runs from any web server, or from itch.io.
Questions
- Is it actually free?
- Yes. No price, no account, no ads, nothing to buy. It was built for the fun of building it.
- Will it run on my phone?
- That is the case it was designed around first — virtual joystick, safe‑area aware, and it scales its effects down on its own if frames start slipping.
- Is the co‑op online?
- No, it is two players on one device: same screen, same keyboard or two gamepads. There is no online multiplayer.
- Does my progress save?
- Cores, unlocks and best times are stored in your browser on this device. Clearing site data clears them.
- How long is a run?
- Twenty minutes to the Hive Tyrant, and most runs end earlier than that. On Hive Mind, almost nobody sees 20:00.