Purge
Clear each cycle before the arena fills with corrupted daemons.
The game
Keep the last process alive.
KERNEL PANIC is a fast arena shooter built around movement, aiming, pressure and run-shaping upgrades. The systems are intentionally legible: threats have distinct silhouettes, patches say what they change, and Story is separate from endless play.
Core loop
Purge, collect, overclock.
Collect
Pick up memory motes, build Overclock and turn pressure into momentum.
Patch
Shape each run with kernel patches, programs and different rulesets.
Arena
Pressure is visible.
Cycles escalate, enemies occupy different tactical roles, memory motes reward aggression, and Overclock turns a good stretch of play into a temporary power spike.
Every fifth endless cycle brings a ROOT process. First-sight bestiary unlocks and onboarding hints expose what a new threat does before the game expects you to memorize it.
Modes
Three endless rulesets.
Classic
The full escalating endless run.
Weekly
One seed for everyone, with two traits and its own roster rolled from the week.
One-HP
One integrity point. Recovery and death-save options stay out of the pool.
Difficulty
Easy
Lower pressure for endless modes.
Normal
The default endless tuning.
Hard
Higher spawn pressure and attack cadence.
Programs
Different processes, different tradeoffs.
Programs alter how a run feels without becoming separate classes full of hidden rules.
KERNEL
Four integrity, standard fire, one dash and Overclock.
ProcessDAEMON
Three integrity, two dashes and hot close-range fire with kill-driven dash recharge.
ProcessROOTLET
Five integrity, slower movement, heavy shots and a mote-powered shield instead of Overclock.
ProcessStory
Fifteen fixed stages.
Story uses hand-authored waves, stage-specific presentation and its own progression instead of endless difficulty knobs.
UNIX
/boot → /var/log → /net → /mem → /quarantine → /kernel
Windows
C:\98 → C:\XP → Win11
macOS
/System → /Applications → /Library/Updates → kernel_task
TempleOS
TempleOS::BOOT → TempleOS::GOD
Run knowledge
The current build has 26 patches.
26
Run upgrades can modify movement, projectiles, recovery and interactions between systems.
23
Threat records expose behavior and bug-report flavor once the process has been seen.
5
Small terminal-style milestones are logged into the same diagnostic language as the rest of the game.
Settings and accessibility
Control the parts that matter.
The current tree includes practical input and readability options without claiming features the game does not have.
- Flash intensity OFF / LOW / FULL, covering the full-screen white, the palette inversion, the damage distortion and the CRT flicker
- Text size NORMAL / LARGE / LARGER across the whole interface
- Colour assist: a marker on all 23 bestiary entries, measured against simulated protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia
- Screen shake OFF / LOW / FULL, separate from flash
- Left-handed touch layout, with button size and opacity
- Drag, stick and lock-on aim modes
- Every adjustment reachable from the pause screen, without abandoning the run
- Desktop key remapping
- English and Brazilian Portuguese
Diagnostic terminal
Real commands, not decorative hacker text.
The pause terminal exposes actual run data and recovery tools through commands such as top, dmesg and man <enemy>.
