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🔦 Tower Escape
Cross the dark courtyard to the gate without being caught by the tower's searchlight. Standing still makes you invisible — movement is what gives you away, and letting go of the controls is your defence.
- Up to 4 players
- Party game
- In your browser, free
- With friends or against bots
The rule the whole game is built on
A tower watches the courtyard from above. A fan-shaped searchlight sweeps the ground, and you have to reach the gate at the far end. The light does not catch anyone who is standing still: detection only happens while you are actually moving, and stopping is instant.
That is what turns a race into a reading exercise. Running in a straight line is the fastest way across and the easiest way to get caught; the players who win are the ones who learn to anticipate — to stop before the light arrives, not after.
Controls
- Computer: WASD or the arrow keys to move. Space to stop deliberately.
- Phone: an analogue stick in the corner, and an explicit STOP button next to it.
- Losing window focus — switching tabs, answering a message — freezes your character. That is not a penalty; it is the same defence happening on its own.
The light warns you before it catches you
The visual promise is literal and it always holds: solid yellow catches, dashed does not. Before each sweep the beam appears faint and dotted, already at the angle it is about to fire from — that is the warning, and it detects nobody. The red of a capture does not catch either.
Both exceptions favour the runner, which is the only reason they are allowed to exist. On top of that the game forgives a margin at the edge of the beam: the server catches less than the drawing suggests, never more.
Getting caught does not end you
Anyone spotted returns to the last checkpoint they crossed — there are four lines along the courtyard — and is frozen for two seconds. This is a race, not an elimination game: knocking someone out on their first mistake would kill the pace of the match.
But here is the detail that changes everything: a capture stops the light, not the watching. When someone is caught the beam locks where it was and the guard shouts — and it keeps catching anyone still walking inside that frozen light. Using someone else's mistake as your window to run is exactly what does not work.
The guard's mood
Every cycle the tower announces a mood with an emoji, and it changes how the light behaves:
- 😴 Sleepy — sweeps slowly. This is the window to cover a lot of ground at once.
- 👁️ Alert — sweeps fast. Here it pays to stand still and gain ground in small pieces.
- 🌀 Paranoid — reverses direction halfway and feints: it dims without going out, and keeps catching.
- 😠 Angry — after catching someone it sweeps that same region again. Getting out of there matters more than moving forward.
No mood shortens the dashed warning. However agitated the guard gets, you always have time to stop.
The courtyard is not an empty field
Crates, barrels, rocks, low walls and pillars block your path and cast shadow: if a piece sits between you and the tower, the light cannot reach you. It is the game's only concession to actually hiding.
Obstacles are dense near the start and sparse near the tower, and that is not decoration. Far away the beam is wide and its edge flies past, so only cover saves you; near the tower it is narrow and slow, readable — a piece there would cast a shadow long enough to turn the endgame into a stroll.
The gate is always exposed. There is no route that arrives hidden.
The real decision
The beam is narrow and slow near the tower, wide and fast at the far end. Because it pivots up there, the top corners are the least-swept parts of the courtyard — and that is where the clever route comes from: climb tight along one side, where the light takes longest to return, and cut across to the gate only at the end.
The first player to escape starts a twelve-second countdown for everyone else. Anyone who was playing it safe has to decide, right then, whether to trade safety for speed. In measured matches, half of all escapes happen in the twenty seconds after the first one.
Against the bot
The three levels differ in what the bot sees, not in how fast it moves. The easy one only sees the current beam and takes 200 to 700 milliseconds to react, so half the time it stops too late; the normal one predicts where the light will be, with error; the hard one reads the future and prefers gaps with shadow when the detour is short.
Measured over three hundred matches: the easy bot is caught about three times and escapes 45% of the time; the hard one escapes almost always, and usually arrives first.
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