▶ NOW SHIPPING // iOS + ANDROID
STARKNELL
Every jump ages your captains.
Time is the only currency.
A dark retro-CRT roguelike autobattler. You command a doomed deep-space expedition through the green-phosphor terminal of its own mainframe — routing a fleet across a branching sector chart, reading the casualty telegrams, and spending the only resource that matters. Every jump and every engagement ages every captain by a year or more, a whole lifespan is consumed inside a single run, and old age kills mid-run. Death — by age or by fire — is permanent. The one way to cheat the clock is a forbidden cybernetic conversion whose true cost stays redacted until it isn't.
Out now on the App Store and Google Play. Mobile went first, which was not the plan. A desktop release on Steam and a free capped browser demo on itch.io are what we want to build next — no date, and no button here until there is a real store page behind it. One flat price on every store: no ads, no in-app purchases, no account, no sign-in, and nothing that needs a signal.
▶ THE LOOP
HOW IT PLAYS
A run takes ten to twenty-five minutes and ends one of two ways. You assemble a fleet, pick a route, commit to a battle you cannot micromanage, and pay for all of it in years off your captains' lives. An adaptive darksynth score follows you down.
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THE CLOCK
TIME IS THE ENEMY
Every jump and every engagement ages every captain by a year or more. A whole lifespan is consumed inside a single run, so old age is not a distant threat — it kills mid-run, on the chart, between battles. Death by age and death by fire are equally permanent.
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THE FLEET
ROWS, NOT UNITS
Assemble a fleet under a command-capacity budget — every hull you take is a hull you didn't. Set your rows before you commit: vanguard draws fire, screen intercepts, rear stays protected. The battle honours that arrangement exactly.
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THE BATTLE
COMMAND, DON'T PILOT
Combat resolves in real time — full-colour pixel art under a CRT shader, on a deterministic seeded simulation. You intervene only through captain abilities, at the moment you judge is the moment. No unit micro. No retreat.
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THE SECTOR
MANY NODES ARE NOT BATTLES
Anomalies, derelicts, distress signals: branching text encounters with uncertain outcomes, and multi-step quest chains that resolve jumps later, long after you've forgotten what you agreed to. What you choose persists.
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THE TEMPTATION
THE CONTINUANCE PROTOCOL
A recruited Oracle hull can research the one technology that cheats the clock: a cybernetic conversion worth twelve years, carrying one concealed side-effect per procedure — revealed only after it has been applied. At the sector's end, the Provenance Ark reads your crew manifest for the oldest name.
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BETWEEN RUNS
VARIETY, AND WHAT YOU AUTHORIZE
Two things persist. Unlocks widen what can appear — new hulls, captain archetypes, an encounter pack. Standing doctrine is the other half: every expedition earns AUTHORIZATIONS, spent on a sixteen-node tree and reassigned for free before the next one — a shape you chose, not a checklist you filled. No fleet, no captains and no banked salvage cross the gap; every run starts fresh. The memorial wall remembers everyone.
▶ THE HONEST BIT
ONE PRICE, FOREVER
STARKNELL is a premium game and nothing else. No ads. No in-app purchases. No account, no sign-in. Fully offline. There is no subscription, no season pass, no currency, no energy meter and no DLC bait — none of those things were built, so none of them can be added by an update you didn't ask for. You buy it once and own all of it.
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DESKTOP
STEAM
Windows and macOS, still to come.
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DESKTOP // DEMO
ITCH.IO
Alongside Steam, plus a free browser demo: the first four columns of the sector, with real battles, real encounters, real aging and real deaths. The Ark keeps the rest.
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MOBILE
iOS + ANDROID
Out now on the App Store and Google Play. Paid up front, with no in-app purchases to configure and nothing to restore.
Mobile is live. Desktop is intended, not dated. Current prices are on each store page.
▶ ONE CODEBASE
WHERE IT RUNS
Built with Flutter and Flame: one codebase across iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and the browser. The simulation is pure Dart and deterministic — bit-identical on a phone and in a browser tab — which is why the same seed produces the same expedition everywhere.
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PLATFORMS
DESKTOP, POCKET, BROWSER
Windows and macOS on Steam, still to come. iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets, out now on their own stores, in portrait or landscape. And a capped web demo on itch.io that will run in a browser tab with nothing to install.
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THE TERMINAL
A CRT YOU CAN TUNE
The whole interface is the expedition mainframe: green phosphor, scanlines, curvature and teletype. The full-screen CRT shader has lite and off modes and degrades itself automatically on hardware that can't carry it, so the effect never costs you the game.
▶ ON THE RECORD
IT COLLECTS NOTHING
STARKNELL has no server, no account, no analytics and no crash reporter, and it makes no network requests at all. Its Android manifest declares not one permission — not even INTERNET — and its iOS property list declares no usage strings, so there is nothing for the app to ask you for. Your expedition, your unlocks and your settings are written to your own device's storage and stay there; deleting the app deletes all of it. Purchases are handled by the store you bought from, and we never see payment details. The full, plainly-worded details — including how to erase every byte it stored — live on the privacy page.
▶ WHO MADE THE NOISE
CREDITS
Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio. Sound effects by Magic Sound Effects. Pixel art curated from licensed CraftPix packs. Everything else came off our own line.