What is Oxidawn
Oxidawn is a side-on run through three sectors of a machine world that has been left out in the weather — Rust Jungle, Sky Foundry, Core Bastion. You move right, you shoot what moves, and roughly every fifty seconds the level stops being about reflexes and starts being about attention. There is a broken bridge that needs two switches shot in mid-air, a security lock that has to be reasoned out, and at the far end a Titan with nine hundred points of armour and a fan of plasma aimed at where you are standing.
The three locks are the spine of it. The Memory Lock flashes a sequence across four crystals and asks you to shoot them back in order. The Routing Lock shows a pattern above the gate and gives you three levers to toggle until they match. The Sync Lock spins three rotors through four colours and wants each one shot at the instant it shows the colour the gate is asking for. A wrong move resets the lock, and while you are working the sector keeps sending drones at you. Nothing about it is on a timer, but nothing about it is quiet either.
How to play
- Move with A and D or the arrow keys, jump with W or the space bar, aim with the mouse and hold the left button or J to shoot. Shift dashes, and the dash is the only moment in the game where nothing can hurt you — a sixth of a second of invincibility, on a cooldown just under a second. On a phone there are five buttons: two to walk, one to jump, one to fire and one to dash.
- Every kill adds to a combo that multiplies your score, up to eight times, and the chain breaks two and a half seconds after the last kill. Enemies also give experience, and every level lets you pick one of three augments — more damage, faster fire, an extra projectile, piercing shots, a bigger hull, life stolen from damage dealt, a shorter dash cooldown.
- Weapon pods drop from enemies and from every lock you break. Pulse is the default: twelve damage, six shots a second. Scatter throws six pellets of nine. Lance does thirty-four in one line and punches through three extra enemies. Nova Seeker fires three homing rounds of fourteen. Pods run out, so use the strong ones on the Titan and not on drones.
- The Titan is not a damage race. It hovers and fires a spread of plasma at you every couple of seconds, summons riflemen at both ends of the arena, and periodically teleports to one side and charges across it twice. The charge is what kills people: dash through it. Below thirty per cent armour it fires half again as fast.
Strategies that work
- Break the combo chain as little as possible. The multiplier is one plus a quarter of your kill streak, capped at eight, and it applies to every point you score including the eight hundred for a lock and the five thousand per sector for the Titan. Clearing a group of five in eight seconds is worth more than clearing the same five spread over a minute.
- On the Sync Lock, shoot the rotor a fraction before it reaches the colour you want. The rotors turn at different speeds — the third is more than twice as fast as the first — and the shot takes time to travel. If you keep locking the wrong colour on the fast rotor, you are aiming at where it is instead of where it will be.
- Plated Vitals is the augment that keeps a run alive. Twenty-five extra maximum hull and twenty-five healed on the spot is a quarter of your starting armour, and the Titan's charge costs twenty-six. Damage augments are tempting on level two; by the third sector, where the Titan has nineteen hundred and eighty armour and the arena is full of riflemen, survival is what is scarce.
- Use the dash to cross the plasma fan, not to run away from it. The fan is five to eleven shots on a fixed spread, so it has gaps, and the dash carries you nine hundred and forty pixels a second with no hitbox at all. Dashing forward through the fan puts you under the Titan with your cooldown already running; dashing backwards just delays the same problem.
- Do not fight the Titan from the far wall. The arena is roughly a thousand pixels wide and your shots live one and two fifths of a second — Pulse crosses about thirteen hundred pixels in that time, but Nova's homing rounds travel at little more than half that speed and die before they arrive. Stay in the middle third of the arena and both the fan and your fire have to travel the same distance.
A little history
The run-and-gun side-scroller is one of the oldest arcade shapes there is, and its usual problem is that it only ever asks one question: can you keep moving and keep hitting. Oxidawn keeps the shape and interrupts it three times per run with something that has nothing to do with aim — a sequence to memorise, a pattern to match, a rotor to time. That structure has more in common with an action-adventure than with the arcade original: the fighting is the road, the locks are the doors, and the Titan at the end is a test of what you learned along the way rather than a wall of health. The augment draw between levels comes from the modern roguelite, but with the run kept short enough that a bad draw is a bad ten minutes and not a bad evening. The one deliberate cruelty is the dash: it is the only invincibility in the game, it lasts a sixth of a second, and almost every death in testing was a player who had it available and did not use it.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a time limit?
No. Nothing in Oxidawn is on a clock — you can stand still and study the pattern above the gate for as long as you like. What you cannot do is stand still safely: the sector keeps sending drones while a lock is open, and the combo multiplier decays two and a half seconds after your last kill. Time is recorded and shown on the leaderboard, but it does not end your run.
What happens if I get a lock wrong?
The lock resets and you start that puzzle again — the Memory Lock replays its sequence, the Routing Lock keeps whatever lever positions you left it in, and the Sync Lock releases every rotor you had already locked. Getting it wrong costs you time and whatever the drones do to you while you are recovering, but the gate itself never becomes unopenable and there is no limit on attempts.
What is the daily challenge?
The same three sectors for everyone on Earth, generated from the date in UTC: the same lock sequences, the same lever pattern, the same rotor colour, the enemies in the same places, and the same three augments offered at each level. It turns over at the same instant everywhere and does not read your computer's clock. Your score is submitted once, when the run ends — whether you finish the third Titan or die in the first sector.
