Lonewatch

Lonewatch is a free idle base defence you play in the browser. Your keep is a ring with six gates, and everything that comes for it comes from outside that ring, on every side at once. You have one watcher. They walk — a little over a second from one gate to the next — and that walk is the entire game. You never aim and you never dodge: your watcher and your emplacements fire on their own. The only question the game ever asks you is which gate you are not standing in.

Because of that, reacting is usually already too late. A runner crosses from the rim to the wall in under three seconds, and crossing three gates on foot takes three and a half, so a gate you have to run to is a gate you should have armed an hour ago. What you actually do between waves is spend salvage, and the three things you can build are not a ladder of the same tower — they answer different attackers, and none of them answers everything. A Gun splashes across a whole pack but its hits are small, so armour shrugs it off entirely. A Lance hits once and hard and reaches far enough to touch a siege engine that deliberately parks outside every other weapon’s range. A Press only works at the mouth of the gate, where things arrive, but it ignores armour completely. Building the same thing on all six gates is the fastest way to lose.

The six attackers each break a different plan rather than simply carrying a bigger number. Swarms arrive in a wall of bodies that single-target weapons cannot chew through in time. Brutes wear armour that makes small hits worth almost nothing. Sappers ignore your wall and eat the emplacement instead, so pouring everything into one gate is punished directly. Siege engines stop short and shell you from out of range. Howlers armour everything around them until they are killed. Runners simply outrun you. Every one of those is a behaviour, not a stat line, and each one has a different correct answer.

Wave by wave the ring gets stranger. One night a gate wakes up with no wall at all. One night a supply drop lands and claiming it means standing somewhere for three seconds while the rest of the ring holds without you. Later your emplacements lose half their range in a blackout, a war horn hands the entire wave extra armour and makes small-hit weapons useless for one night, a rockfall seals a gate and crushes whatever you built there, and eventually the big one arrives with an escort. Each of those happens once in a run, so they are events you learn to survive rather than numbers that creep upward.

It is an idle game in one sense: time away still pays. The ring does not fight while the tab is closed, and every visit starts a fresh ring, but once you have held a wave, coming back hands you a pile of salvage for the time you were gone, bigger the further your best run reached, with the option to double that haul. Nothing to install, no account, and no purchase. It runs in a browser on a desktop with a mouse or keyboard, and on a phone with one thumb. Your best wave is stored locally on the device, so the record you set is still there tomorrow.

Tap a gate to send your watcher there — they walk, about a second per gate, and that walk is the whole game: a runner reaches the wall in under three seconds, so a gate you only react to is a gate you have already lost. Keys 1-6 pick a gate, Q/W/E/R/T pick a tool, Space is Rally, Enter sends the next wave early for bonus scrap. Pick a tool from the bar, then tap a gate to build it, and tap that gate again to upgrade it.

The three tools answer different attackers and none of them answers everything: a Gun splashes across a whole pack but its hits are too small to get through armour, a Lance hits once and hard and reaches far enough to touch a siege engine that parks outside everything else’s range, and a Press only works at the mouth of the gate but ignores armour completely. Fix patches a wall that has been chewed open.

Rally, from wave 4, breaks the line at whichever gate you are standing in — it is how you recover from building the wrong thing.

Six kinds of attacker each break a different plan: swarms come in numbers that single-target guns cannot clear, brutes wear armour that makes small hits worthless, sappers chew the emplacement instead of the wall so stacking everything on one gate is punished, siege engines shell you from out of range, howlers armour everything around them until they are killed, and runners simply outrun your walk.

Everything fires on its own — you never aim and you never dodge; the only real question is which gate you are not standing in. The ring does not fight while the tab is closed, but the time away still pays: come back and a salvage haul is waiting to start your next ring, and it can be doubled.