Ultrakill

A retro-styled shooter built on one rule that rewrites everything else: you recover health by being close to enemies when they die. Retreating to heal is impossible, so the correct response to being badly hurt is to attack something — which makes this one of the most aggressive shooters ever designed. Everything else supports that. Movement is extremely fast with dashes and slides, weapons have alternate behaviours that interact with each other, and the scoring rewards style — variety, speed and risk — rather than simple completion. The result is a game where the defensive instinct is actively punished and the learning curve is largely about unlearning caution absorbed from every other shooter. It is difficult, it is demanding on reflexes, and it is precise enough that the difficulty never feels arbitrary. Levels take a few minutes with many attempts, there are ranks to chase, and the progression is the player rather than the character. It needs a keyboard and mouse and a reasonable frame rate to be playable properly, runs in the browser without a download, and is unlike anything else available this way. It is worth saying plainly that this is an unusually demanding game to find running in a browser tab. The frame rate holds, the controls respond, and nothing about the port feels like a compromise — which is the whole reason to play this version.