New Year's Eve, 1999. Your PC is overrun.
Pop-ups open faster than you can close them, viruses swarm the desktop, and midnight is coming. You are the mouse pointer, the last line of defence.Pop-Up Apocalypse is a fast action roguelite set inside a turn-of-the-millennium PC. You aim every shot yourself, dash through enemy fire and grab the very windows that clog your screen to hurl them back into the horde. Every run builds a new loadout as you fight through four areas, each ending in a boss. A full run takes about 20 minutes.
Close. Drag. Survive.
- Aim it yourself. Your shots go where you point, and a well-timed dash carries you through a wall of bullets.
- Turn pop-ups into weapons. Grab any window and fling it. Thrown windows plough through the horde, crack whatever they don't delete and break boss shields.
- Keep the CPU cool. Firing nonstop heats up your processor and slows your shots. Fling a window to vent the heat and kick into TURBO.
- Mind the System Load. Every open window strains your PC. Let them pile up and the whole system crashes.
Four areas, four bosses
- My Desktop. Worms, trojans and adware, until the Uninstall Wizard arrives to remove YOU.
- The Web. Dial up at 56K into banner ads, hit counters and homepage hijackers, then bring down the Toolbar Tower.
- The Inbox. 9,999 new messages: chain letters, rubber stamps and auto-replies, then the Mailer-Daemon himself.
- The BIOS. The PC restarts into LemonBIOS Setup, where the Millennium Bug wants to roll the clock back to 1900. Its year is its health: knock it from 1900 to 1999 and ring in the year 2000.
Build your PC
- Five pointers, each with its own trick: the Arrow you start with; the Hand, which grabs further and throws harder; the Hourglass, which slows time around it; the I-Beam, which selects everything it dashes through and deletes it; and the Crosshair, which lands a critical hit on whatever it points at.
- Six start-up programs, from the Clicker and the Spread Sheet to Ping, the Screen Saver, Fatal Error and Deep Scan. Max out the right upgrade and each one evolves.
- Upgrades at every level-up: 25 cards such as Pierce.exe, Firewall, Defrag Dash and a Wireless Drone, with 77 levels to fill.
- PC Upgrades between runs: spend lemons on 11 parts, from the processor to the UPS battery, and watch each one appear in your PC. Later, add-ons join your level-ups: eight cards that change how you play, like Alt+F4, Loopback and Safe Mode.
Past midnight
- Hard and Overclock. Beat the Millennium Bug on Hard, then overclock from 1100 to 2000 MHz, each step adding a new twist.
- Endless runs. Keep going after the year 2000. Every New Year brings the viruses back tougher.
- Daily Run. One setup a day, the same for every player: a pointer, a program, a PC, an add-on, a patch and a bug of the day.
- 56 achievements, and Save & Quit to pick a run up later.
Straight out of 1999
Pixel art on a CRT monitor (set the effect to Full, Subtle or Off), a 56K handshake, chiptune music and a full set of retro PC sounds. Play with mouse and keyboard or a controller, in 11 languages.
