Flux Vault

Push crates onto switches, flip gravity to walk the ceiling, and cross a vault of seven rooms before your hearts run out.

Date: 2026-08-05 Genre: puzzle-platformer Status: Playable build

Concept

You're a small circuit-robot loose in a dead vault, and the only way out is through seven sealed chambers. Each one hides a single new trick: a box you can shove, a switch that needs weight on it, a pad that flips which way is down. The feeling I was chasing is the click of a room finally making sense — you walk in confused, and forty seconds later you're standing on what used to be the ceiling.

How to play

Get from the start of each room to its glowing exit. Move with the arrow keys or A/D, jump with Space, Up, or W. On a phone, on-screen buttons appear automatically for left, right, and jump. Walk into a crate to push it — onto a switch to pop open a gate, or up against a wall to climb it and reach a ledge you couldn't otherwise. Step on a purple pad and gravity flips, so you rise to the ceiling and keep walking from there. Touch a spike, a live hazard, or fall off the world, and you lose a heart and restart the room from scratch. Lose all three hearts and the run ends. Press R any time to reset the current room for free.

Core mechanics

• Crate pushing — walk into a box to shove it one tile at a time; use it to bridge height you can't jump alone
• Pressure plates and gates — a crate resting on a plate holds a gate open only as long as it stays there
• Gravity flip pads — reverse which way you fall, mid-room, as many times as you need
• Static and toggling spikes — some hazards sit still, others pulse on a fixed 2-second beat you have to read and time
• Three hearts — hitting anything harmful restarts the room, not the run, so mistakes cost seconds, not progress

Progression & scoring

Each of the seven rooms adds exactly one new idea on top of what came before: movement and jumping, then crate-pushing, then plates and gates, then the gravity flip, then spike timing, and the last two rooms make you chain everything you've learned. Clearing a room pays out up to 1000 points, docked for how long you took and for every heart you lost getting there; string together clean rooms in a row and each one adds a small streak bonus on top. Your best total score is saved locally, so the number chasing you next time is your own.

Look & feel

The vault runs on a synthwave circuit palette — deep navy background, a faint cyan grid, hot magenta crates, amber plates, glowing teal gates, and violet flip pads that spin lazily until you touch them. The exit is a small pulsing green portal you can spot from across the room. Every action gets a matching WebAudio blip: a square-wave chirp on jump, a low thud on a push, a rising chime when a gate opens, a slow sawtooth sweep on the gravity flip, and a fanfare when the vault finally opens.

What makes it fun

• The stepping-stone climb in room two, where the crate only gets you partway and you have to trust the jump off its top to close the rest of the gap
• The moment gravity flips and you're still moving sideways — the room reads completely differently once "up" and "down" swap, and you have to re-aim in the air
• The toggling spikes in the final room punish rushing but reward watching the beat for one extra half-second before you commit
• Losing a heart costs you the room, not the run, so the game stays generous with retries while still making each clean clear feel earned