STARKNELL: Space Autobattler

Every jump ages your captains. Old age kills mid-run. Death is permanent.

STARKNELL is a dark retro-CRT roguelike autobattler. You command a doomed deep-space expedition through the green-phosphor terminal of its own mainframe — routing a fleet across a branching sector chart, reading the casualty telegrams, and spending the only currency that matters: time.

THE CLOCK IS THE ENEMY
Every jump and every engagement ages every captain by a year or more. A lifespan is consumed within a single run. Old age kills mid-run, and death — by age or by fire — is permanent.

BATTLES YOU COMMAND, NOT PILOT
Assemble a fleet under a command-capacity budget. Set your rows — vanguard draws fire, screen intercepts, rear stays protected — then commit. Combat resolves in real time, full-colour pixel art under a CRT shader; you intervene only through captain abilities. No unit micro. No retreat.

THE SECTOR SPEAKS
Many nodes are not battles. Anomalies, derelicts, distress signals: branching text encounters with uncertain outcomes, and quest chains that resolve jumps later. What you choose persists.

THE CONTINUANCE PROTOCOL
A recruited Oracle hull can research the one technology that cheats the clock: a cybernetic conversion worth twelve years, carrying one concealed side-effect per procedure — revealed only after it is applied. At the end of the sector, the Provenance Ark reads your crew manifest for the oldest name.

BETWEEN RUNS
Two things persist. Unlocks widen what can appear — new hulls, captain archetypes, encounter packs. Standing doctrine is the other half: every expedition earns authorizations, spent across a sixteen-node tree and reassigned for free before the next one, so it is a shape you chose rather than a checklist you grind. Every run still starts from a fresh fleet. The memorial wall remembers everyone.

A run takes 10 to 25 minutes. An adaptive darksynth score follows you down.

ONE PRICE, FOREVER
• No ads
• No in-app purchases
• No account, no sign-in
• Fully offline — play anywhere
• Buy it once; own all of it