Play Apep’s Eclipse: Defense of the Solar Barque — a free Egyptian tower defense in your browser
Apep’s Eclipse is a browser tower defense game built on the oldest night in Egyptian myth. Ra sails the Solar Barque through the twelve hours of the Duat every night, and at the seventh hour the serpent Apep tries to swallow the sun. In this game he has finally managed it: the night has lasted three days, the barque is held in his coils, and Princess Meritamen — the Sun-Child — is somewhere on the deck. You are Kenamon, an architect-priest of the House of Life. You do not fight the serpent with a spear. You build wards on thirty banks of riverbank and make the dark expensive.
No download, no install, no account. Thirty chapters across four acts of the night, six ward-towers with three tiers each, eight kinds of brood, an endless Eclipse Cycles mode, saves kept on your own device, and keyboard controls if you have a keyboard. It runs on a phone with one thumb.
How to play
- Pick a foundation and raise a ward. Turquoise rings on the bank are the only ground that will hold a tower. Tap one to see what you can afford, or tap a tower in the toolbar and then tap the ring you want it on.
- Watch where the channel bends. A channel that doubles back past the same patch of sand is the best ground in the game, because one tower there fires on the brood twice.
- Spend deben, not hope. Every kill pays you in deben and every wave you repel pays a bonus. Towers can be upgraded in place; selling one returns 60% of everything you put into it, so a wrong tower is a cheap mistake, not a lost chapter.
- Send the wave early when it is safe. The Send button pays you for the seconds you skipped. It is free money on a quiet bank and a disaster on a busy one.
- Keep the flame. Every creature that reaches the Solar Barque puts out part of its flame. You start with twenty. Finish the last wave with any of it left and the chapter is cleared.
The six ward-towers
| Tower | Cost | What it does | Damage | Reach for it when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sistrum Chorus | 60 | Fast single-target rattling. The honest answer to most things. | Physical | The bank is quiet and you need coverage everywhere at once. |
| Scarab Nest | 110 | Lobs a live scarab that bursts on impact and soaks everything nearby. | Physical | The brood comes in a queue, not a crowd. |
| Obelisk of Ra | 180 | A slow sun-lance from the top of a monolith. Longest reach in the game. | Piercing | Ushabti, bas, or anything wearing the serpent’s mark. It ignores armour. |
| North Wind | 130 | Chills a wide ring and slows everything in it to a crawl. | Magic | A heavy wave is coming and nothing you have kills it fast enough. |
| Eye of Horus | 200 | Arcs its damage from body to body, losing a little at every jump. | Magic | The channel is packed and you want one tower to hit six things. |
| Altar of Isis | 150 | Never fires. Consecrates every tower standing near it with more damage and more range. | — | Two rings already share a bend and both are worth more than they cost. |
What walks the channel
| Brood | Behaviour | What it costs you | Answer it with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scarab Swarmling | Weak, quick, arrives in numbers from the first wave. | 1 flame | Anything. The swarm is the tax you pay for the rest of the act. |
| Walking Ushabti | Slow, heavy, and it shrugs off a flat slice of every physical hit. | 2 flame | Obelisk of Ra, or magic damage. Not a wall of Sistrums. |
| Winged Ba | Nearly twice the speed of a swarmling and completely immune to slow. | 1 flame | A long-reach tower over the straights, plus a second line further along. |
| Serpent Spawn | Sheds itself into two smaller swarmlings when it dies. | 2 flame | Splash damage and slows, so the shed halves die where they fall. |
| Sand Wraith | Solid for a few seconds, then a ghost that nothing can touch. | 1 flame | Volume of fire. It cannot hurt what is not looking at it. |
| Bound Priest | Heals every creature standing near it, forever. | 2 flame | Reach past the front rank and kill it first. |
| Herald of Apep | Three thousand hit points of armour that walks slowly and does not stop. | 6 flame | Everything, at once, for a long time. |
| Apep’s Coil | The serpent’s own body, at the end of the fourth act and every Eclipse Cycle. | 10 flame | The Obelisk of Ra and a bank full of everything else. |
Stars, and where the reference line comes from
The reference line on the HUD is not a designer’s guess. Before a bank ships, an offline reference architect plays it: it reads the same foundations, buys the same towers at the same prices under the same gold economy, and fights every wave out in the same deterministic 60 Hz simulation your browser runs. If it cannot hold the bank, the bank is thrown away and rebuilt. The flame it finished with is then baked into the chapter, which is why the brief can print a real number and why three stars means something.
| How you finish | What it means | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| Any flame left | The brood never put the solar disc out. The bank held, and the barque moves on an hour. | ★ |
| Eleven flame or more | Half the flame intact: at least one tower was doing three jobs. | ★★ |
| Seventeen flame or more | Nearly the whole flame. This is the line the architect bot plays to. | ★★ύ |
Four hours of night, thirty banks
| Act | Chapters | Where you are | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| I · The First Hour | 1–8 | The Bank of the Reed Fields | Swarmlings and the first walking ushabti. Two towers. Nothing is armoured enough to matter yet. |
| II · The Fourth Hour | 9–16 | The Sedge Marsh of Sokar | Winged bas over the water and bound priests in the reeds. The Obelisk of Ra and the North Wind are surveyed. |
| III · The Seventh Hour | 17–24 | The Coils of Apep | Sand wraiths that phase out, spawn that shed themselves, and the serpent’s own get. The Eye of Horus and the Altar of Isis open. |
| IV · The Twelfth Hour | 25–30 | The Mouth of the East | Everything at once, and then Apep himself walking up the channel in the last chapter. |
The longest bank in the saga is a thirty-four tile serpentine that doubles back on itself three times and gives a single well-placed tower four separate firing angles. The shortest is a sixteen tile L, where the brood arrives at the barque almost as soon as it leaves the gate and you will feel every point of lost reach. Every bank is hand-fitted to its chapter: the route length, the foundation pattern and the wave budget are all part of the same number, because in a tower defense a long road is worth more than any upgrade.
Eclipse Cycles, endless mode
Clear the thirty chapters and the Eclipse Cycles open. Each cycle is a bank the House of Life never surveyed, rebuilt from the cycle number, fourteen waves deep, with a serpent at the end and a little more hit points, a little more deben and a little less room for error at every depth. There is no reference line in a cycle. Your deepest run is kept on your own device and stays there.
Built with nothing but code
The whole game is one page. No engine, no framework, no sprite sheet, and no network request at all after the page loads. Every star, dune, hieroglyph, obelisk, sarcophagus, scarab and sand wraith is drawn at runtime on a canvas with path operations, and every sound — the sistrum chorus, the scarab burst, the sun-lance, the frost ring, the bell when a bank holds — is synthesised in the Web Audio API. The simulation runs on a fixed 60 Hz step with no calls to Math.random, so a wave behaves exactly the same in your browser as it does in the offline bot that proved the bank was holdable. The whole thing weighs less than a single screenshot of a modern commercial game, and it loads instantly on a phone.