Outer Index

Outer Index is where all of this started: a top-down pixel-art horde run through Alderbrook, a Victorian-steampunk town with something wrong under it. You don't have a health bar so much as a grip on things. Sanity drains from full to nothing over about half an hour, and as it goes the world is graded worse in five distinct bands — each one announcing itself with an elite wave. At zero, something comes for you personally.

Power comes from a three-card draft every time you level, and from nothing else. No ultimate, no extraction, no way to bank a run and walk away. You get thirty minutes and whatever you chose.

We're rebuilding Outer Index on our own engine rather than redesigning it — the numbers that made the original run feel the way it did are treated as a contract, not a starting point. That rebuild is currently on hold while the engine and the 3D work take priority. It is not cancelled, and when it moves again you'll read about it here first.

What makes it interesting

• Sanity as the run timer — the clock isn't beside the game, it is the game
• Five Veil bands that each escalate the world and fire an elite wave
• A boss that arrives because you ran out of mind, not because you reached a door
• Detective-horror framing in a hand-made pixel town
• The original design's tuning carried over exactly, rather than re-guessed