How to play
- Goal
- Break every shard in the sky.
- How it ends
- The sky is cleared when the last shard is gone; the run is lost when the third skiff is broken or at dusk, two minutes in.
- Record
- For every sky, the ten best scores and the ten fastest clearings, each proved by replaying the run.
- Turn with ← → (or A D) and burn with ↑ (or W); the skiff keeps drifting when you let go. On a phone drag anywhere: the skiff turns to the way you drag and burns when you push further.
- Hold Space (or the Fire button) to loose bolts. The lantern holds eight and refills only while you fly, so keep moving. Shift (or Blink) jumps you a short way forward through a closing gap.
- Break every shard before the third skiff is lost and before dusk at 2:00. Breaks that follow each other within 1.7 seconds build a chain worth up to five times the points.
Controls
| ← → · A D | Turn the skiff |
|---|---|
| ↑ · W (hold) | Burn; let go to drift |
| Space · J (hold) | Loose bolts |
| Shift · K | Blink a short way forward |
| Drag | Steer to the way you drag; push further to burn |
| Fire · Blink buttons | On a touch screen: hold Fire, tap Blink |
| P · Escape | Pause (the run then counts as practice) |
| R · ↻ | Start the sky over |
The eight painted skies, the effect sprites and the sounds come from the Morass warehouse; the music, "Shardfall", was composed for this game. The simulation uses whole numbers only and a run is just the controls the skiff answered to, 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.shardfall.v1. A reach's painted sky is fetched when you open a sky of that reach. A gamepad works when one is connected. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
Watch how to play
About Shardfall
A drift-and-split shooter in the line of Asteroids, set in the night over the Starward Reach. Your skiff turns, burns and keeps drifting when the burner is off; every edge of the sky leads to the opposite edge. A bolt splits a big star-shard into two middle ones and a middle one into two small ones, so the sky gets busier before it gets empty.
The lantern at the prow holds eight bolts, and the wind feeds it: while you fly one comes back every half second and a bolt that hits comes back at once, but a skiff that sits still gets nothing back. Break shards one soon after another and a chain multiplies the points, up to five times. Later reaches add iron shards that take two bolts, ember shards that burst and take their neighbours with them, seekers that come for you, wraiths that cross the sky loosing bolts at where you are, and sigils to fly through: Spread, Aegis and Chrono.
There are 64 skies in eight reaches, and every one ends: its shards and wraiths are counted (a parked skiff cannot clear one), and dusk falls at two minutes. Each sky was cleared by a planning bot before it shipped and keeps two Top 10s, best score and fastest clearing; every run on them is re-played by the site before it is ranked.
