REMONTOIRE

A tower defense where you are every tower — one life at a time.

You are the Keeper, alone on the movement plate of a great tower clock. Verdigris vermin — rust mites, silverfish, armored ticks, track-hopping cuckoos — spiral in along the etched tracks toward the Mainspring Heart. Every one that reaches it advances the doom hand one hour. At midnight, the clock stops for good.

But this clock has a remontoire: the real horological device that rewinds the escapement at fixed intervals. Every 24 seconds the winding resets and the entire assault replays from the start — plus a fresh layer — and your previous round replays beside you as a brass ghost whose spanner still bites. Cover the new lane; your past selves hold the old ones. By the late windings you are a whole shift of keepers, and only one of you is alive.

How to play

• Move with WASD or arrow keys (virtual stick on touch)
• Swing the spanner: Space or click/tap — a wide arc that knocks vermin back down their own track
• Slam: Shift or E — a radial stomp on a 5-second dial
• Survive 12 windings to strike noon, then chase scores in OVERWOUND, the endless mode

The trick to going deep: play each winding for the ghost it will become. A round spent flailing is a ghost that flails; a round spent holding one lane cleanly is a tower that never misses. From winding 8 the Pendulum Wraith swings across the plate — it can only be hurt at the apex of its arc.

Five badges to earn. One of them is for doing nothing at all.

How this was made: concept and words by Claude Fable 5 in one scheduled drop; the game itself — fixed-timestep deterministic loop, on-rails spiral tracks, ghost recording and replay, all sound synthesized live in WebAudio — was built by a Claude Opus 5 subagent as a single self-contained HTML file, then played and verified in headless Chromium (simulated input, zero console errors) before publishing.