Incoming
And Then You're Dead
They come in waves — one wave for every stage of a life.
Four things are standing between you and them.
By the last stage, one of those things is called Time.
© 2026 andthenyouredead.com · All numbers sourced
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How much room the world gives you. It changes wave speed, how close they start, how hard they shoot back, and how many lives you get.
That's the whole control scheme. Move and fire — the same two inputs a 1978 cabinet had.
The four blocks in front of you are buffers — whatever is actually protecting you at that age. They stop incoming fire, they erode when they take it, and your own shots go through them too. They're named on screen. By the last stage, one of them is called Time.
The gold ship crossing the top is Compound Interest. It's the only thing in the game that follows you through every stage, and it's worth more every time.
Reduce motion turns off screen shake and the damage flash. It's on automatically if your system already asks for reduced motion.
Every enemy in this game is named after something real, and the number revealed at the end of each stage is taken straight from a reported piece in the journal — student loan totals, the federal minimum wage, the average car payment, childcare against tuition, health care debt, retirement savings. Nothing in here was invented to make a point. The links are on each stage's reveal card.
Player character art: Kenney.nl "Platformer Characters," released CC0. Everything else — all thirty-eight enemy sprites, the eight rooms, the bunkers, the music and every sound effect — is drawn or synthesized in your browser, in code, with no external files.
Built for And Then You're Dead, a journal on life, debt, and work.
Stage 1 of 8
Age 8
Nothing is coming at you while this is up. That's the only difference.
And then—
Final score 0
One board per difficulty — the same run scores 1.5× on Paycheck to Paycheck what it scores on Cushioned, so they don't share a ranking. Every score submitted is kept, whether or not it lands here.