About Orb Splitter
The harpoon-and-bubbles arcade game in the Pang tradition, in the halls of the Westmark Academy. Stray spell-orbs have got loose from the Hold of Restricted Practice, and you are a storm scholar with a staff: walk the hall floor and throw a tether of lightning straight up. Every orb it touches splits in two, the halves hopping apart, down through four sizes until the smallest burst.
Each size always bounces to its own height, the big ones high and slow, the small ones low and quick, so the order you split them in decides whether the hall fills with fast little orbs. Hit the same size again within three seconds and the points double, then ×4, then ×8. Stone ledges catch bounces and stop your tether; crystal ones break; hex prisms fly straight; and the orbs you split leave Twin and Anchor Tethers, a Spark Wand, a Sand-glass that freezes the hall, a Ward, a Shatter rune and gems.
There are 120 stages in eight halls, each with its own painted room, from one orb on an open floor to four or five at once with more arriving; each hall opens when you have cleared three stages of the one before. Every stage was cleared by a planning bot without losing a life before it shipped, and from the second hall on none can be cleared by standing in one place and firing. Each keeps two Top 10s, best score and fastest clear; every run on them is re-played by the site before it is ranked.
How to play
- Goal
- Burst every orb in the hall: each tether hit splits an orb in two, and the smallest burst.
- How it ends
- The stage is cleared when no orb is left; it is lost when the last of three lives goes to a touching orb, or when the hall's sand-glass runs out.
- Record
- For every stage, the ten best scores and the ten fastest clears, each proved by replaying the run.
- Hold ← → or A D (or the steer strip) to walk; press Space, ↑ or W (or Fire) to throw your tether straight up.
- Every orb the tether touches splits into two smaller ones; the smallest burst. Do not let an orb touch you: three touches, or the sand-glass running out, lose the stage.
- Clear every orb to clear the stage. A tether that hits recharges at once; one that misses leaves the staff slow, so aim. Hitting the same size in a row multiplies the points.
Controls
| ← → · A D | Walk (hold) |
|---|---|
| Space · ↑ · W | Fire the tether (hold to keep firing) |
| Steer strip, Fire button | The same on a touch screen: hold left or right of the strip's middle, slide across to turn |
| P · Escape | Pause (the run then counts as practice) |
The storm scholar is a Blender render of the Morass warehouse's rigged storm scholar with a staff added; the orbs, prisms, gems and the marble ledges are Blender renders too, and each hall's backdrop is a warehouse painting. The simulation uses whole numbers only and a run is just the inputs you used, so every browser plays it back identically and the records worker re-plays each one before it enters a Top 10. Your bests stay in this browser under morass.orb-splitter.v1. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
