Chaos Lab top-down survival shooter

New in 0.5.0 — chaos with fewer popups

The first player feedback prompted a rethink of the opening minute and upgrade choices.

• Compact perk cards: choose with Z/X/C while combat continues. Each selection leaves 20 seconds before another offer; earned choices remain queued.
• A gentler first minute: slower enemies and a gradual crowd buildup. Levels arrive less often and perk descriptions are shorter.
• Weapons and ammo sit at the bottom center. Empty weapons are highlighted; key 4 selects the ammunition-free crowbar.
• New animations for all four weapons, casings and smoke, damageable monitors and panels. Russian voices react to events with fewer repeats.

Development history with game captures →

Where this project actually is

Chaos Lab is an early single-player prototype. Version 0.5.0 revises perk choices, the opening minute and the weapon bar, with new animations and arena reactions. Animation and balance are still evolving.

What you actually do

You walk into an endless municipal town with a shotgun, a crowbar, a nailer and a flare gun. Clerks, technicians and inspectors come to meet you. Every level-up offers three perks, and the interesting ones do not make you stronger — they make your bullets behave strangely, often at your own expense. Pellets that come back. Blasts that catch their owner. Children that split again.

Then you die, usually to something you built yourself, and the Incident Report names the cause, prints an award for whatever you did most stupidly, and lists the perks you were carrying. Restarting is immediate.

Colour is the mechanic

A projectile's colour comes from what it is currently doing, never from the perk that made it do that. Stack four perks and you get a colour you have not seen before, which is the point: the screen has to stay readable while a hundred enemies are on it.

• Player, ivory with a cyan visor
• Enemies, brick red
• Ordinary and homing pellets
• Explosions and hazard markings
• Burning and recursive children
• Anything that can hurt you
• Aged concrete infrastructure
• Dirty olive municipal fittings

The game renders at a logical 640 × 360 through a fixed isometric camera — about twenty pixels to a world unit — so legibility is a matter of pixels rather than polygons.

The season cycle

Four weeks, repeating. The order is the whole design: perks are played before they are voted on, never pitched and then built.

1. Week 1 — Trial. Three gated candidate perks are live in the game, playable and temporary.
2. Week 2 — Vote. The three switch off. A week of absence is what makes the vote a decision rather than a formality.
3. Weeks 3–4 — Settled. The winner joins the permanent rotation, and the next three candidates are generated and gated during the quiet stretch.

The build carries the schedule as data and derives the phase from the date, so a season turns over without shipping two builds a week. A copy that is never updated can still tell it has run out of season — the schedule knows the date its own cycle ends, offline.

The vote page lists Season 1's candidates and says exactly what state the round is in.

How a perk gets in

1. Propose. A locally run language model turns a one-line idea into a candidate resource. Generation happens during development; the model writes data, never code — a perk has no field in which code could go.
2. Import. A whitelist, not a reader. An unknown lever name is refused rather than mapped to zero, an out-of-range value fails in a second, and duplicate identifiers are checked against the shipped catalog.
3. Gate. Schema, values, then a headless run with the perk stacked to its limit. The verdict rests on counted work — projectiles requested, pool occupancy, the share the safety layer refused — so it is the same on any machine.
4. Trial, then vote. Survivors ship, live for a week, and switch off before anyone votes on them.

Two rules that will not change

A third rule is the developer's rather than the community's: content added by vote is still content the developer is responsible for, and a perk that wins and then proves broken must be removable.

What the game and this site send

The game can ask a server once at startup whether a newer build exists. It is a plain GET of a small static file: no identifiers, no query string, nothing about you. It never blocks startup, fails silently when there is no network, and downloads and installs nothing — at most it shows a button on the title screen that opens a link in your browser. It checks only https://chaoslabgame.ru/updates/latest.json and can be disabled in your settings file.

This site uses an aggregate download counter and cookie-free 3check analytics. No accounts or payments. The update manifest is documented on the build page.

Feedback and suggestions

Found a bug, dreamed up a perk, or want to share your impressions? Send us a message on Telegram.

Feedback and suggestions on Telegram

Before your first run

How do I download and launch Chaos Lab?

Visit the Windows download page, extract the ZIP and run ChaosLab.exe on 64-bit Windows 10 or 11. The game is free and needs no account or installer.

Can I play offline?

Yes. Runs are single-player and work offline. The optional update check can be disabled in settings.

What do weapon perks change?

Ricochets, piercing and homing alter actual projectile behavior and combine with other effects. Browse the perk catalog. Choose with Z/X/C while combat continues; switch weapons with 1–4.

Is it similar to Crimsonland?

The shared starting point is top-down shooting, crowds and arena survival. Chaos Lab focuses on an industrial laboratory, caricature voices and combinations of bullet effects. It is an independent early prototype, not a Crimsonland sequel.

See updates and development screenshots for the changes so far.