The computer is crashing. You are the Watchdog: a tiny dog made of glowing vector lines, the last process still running. Corrupted data pours in as hordes of ASCII glyphs. You bark on your own. All you do is move, choose, and decide what you can live without.

Bark, fetch, howl, sniff and tail-whip, or let the machine fight for you: a Blue Screen that freezes a crowd and deletes it, Select + Del, a bouncing screensaver logo (hit a corner!) and a Recycle Bin that swallows the horde. Every weapon has five levels and an evolution.

Every level-up is a deal: power in exchange for a slice of the machine. The HUD, the radar, colour, sound, the lights, the display itself. Red glyphs explode; with COLOR gone they look just like the blue ones. In the dark, all you see is their eyes. The stronger you get, the less you can see.

Restore deals, patch nodes on the radar, and the crash bonus: when the machine blue-screens, drop debug balls through a pachinko board for a purge, a patch, a bomb or a level-up. Then bark the screen apart.

Swarms that fly across the screen, worms, symbol creatures that split apart, giant processes, phantoms only the radar can see, and walls of blocks that close in around you.

Every five minutes, KERNEL PANIC. It never ends. It only gets harder, until you halt. How long can you last?

• WASD / arrows / left stick: move. You attack on your own.
• Level-up: click a card, 1-3, or arrows + Enter. R rerolls once.
• Crash bonus: A / D to aim, Space to drop.
• Esc: pause and settings (volume, screen shake, CRT intensity, flash reduction).

Made by Alex. Sound effects: Retro Arsenal by Archanor VFX. Fonts: JetBrains Mono, Silkscreen (OFL).