HOW TO PLAY
Every rule in KEYSTORM
There is no aiming and no fire button. The words falling towards you are the controls. This page is the full reference: how targeting works, what every enemy does, how the score is calculated, and what changes between the four difficulties.
The core loop
Enemy ships descend from the top of the screen, each carrying a word. A dashed red line sits just above your own ship. If an enemy crosses that line you lose a life. Clear every enemy in a wave and the next begins, slightly faster and slightly busier than the last.
There are only two rules you need in order to start:
- Type a word's first letter to lock onto it. Your ship turns to face that target and stays locked until the word is finished or the lock is dropped.
- Every correct letter after that fires a shot. Finish the word and the ship is destroyed.
Your first run teaches this as you go. The ships fall slower, a hint under the nearest one shows which letter to type, and nothing that gets through costs you a life until you have shot down three ships. After that it is the normal game.
No two live enemies ever start with the same letter. The spawner holds a word back if its first letter is already on screen, so a key press can only ever mean one target.
Combos and the score multiplier
Your combo counts consecutive correct keystrokes, and it sets the multiplier every word's score is calculated with.
| Combo | Multiplier | A six-letter word is worth |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 9 | 1x | 60 points |
| 10 to 19 | 2x | 120 points |
| 20 to 29 | 3x | 180 points |
| 50 to 59 | 6x | 360 points |
| 70 and up | 8x (capped) | 480 points |
A word scores 10 x letters x multiplier, where the multiplier is
1 + floor(combo / 10) and stops climbing at 8x. A wrong key resets the
combo to zero. That does not cost you one keystroke, it costs you the multiplier you
spent the last thirty seconds building.
So accuracy is worth more than speed. Someone typing 50 words per minute cleanly out-scores someone typing 80 with a mistake every other word: the careful player spends most of the run at 6x or 8x, the fast one keeps falling back to 1x.
Seven enemies, plus power-ups
Seven of these are hostile. Recognising them on sight is most of the difference between reaching wave 10 and reaching wave 20.
| Type | What it does | How to handle it |
|---|---|---|
| Grunt | Falls at the wave's base speed. The standard target. | Type it. Take the lowest one first. |
| Sprinter | Carries a short word but falls noticeably faster. | Deal with it immediately. A short word is quick, so the interruption is cheap. |
| Splitter | Bursts into two smaller, faster fragments when destroyed. | Kill it high. Killing one near your line hands you two problems lower down. |
| Armoured | Carries a plate, so the word has to be typed twice. | Start early. Half-stripped armour is wasted effort if it breaches. |
| Diver | Accelerates while you are locked elsewhere, reaching 2.6x its base speed after about three seconds of being ignored. | The one enemy that punishes tunnel vision. Never leave one unattended. |
| Mini-boss | A tougher target, on the waves between full bosses. | Clear the field around it first, then commit. |
| Boss | Shielded, and releases a swarm of escorts before it can be touched at all. | Clear the swarm, then the hull. It cannot be rushed. |
| Power-up | Not hostile. Costs nothing if it reaches the bottom untyped. | Free if you have a spare moment, ignorable if you do not. |
The five power-ups
Power-ups drift down carrying a word of their own. Type the word to claim the effect. They can never hurt you, so the only cost is the seconds you spend typing one instead of a threat.
- NUKEClears the entire field at once. The panic button, so it is worth holding.
- FREEZEStops every descent for four seconds. Worth most when the board is crowded, wasted when it is calm.
- SLOWHalves falling speed for six seconds. Less dramatic than freeze, but lasts half again as long.
- SHIELDAbsorbs one breach. Stored until something gets through, so claiming it early is never wasted.
- DOUBLEDoubles your score for ten seconds. Best claimed while your combo is already high, not to start one.
Wave modifiers
From wave four onwards a whole wave can arrive under a modifier, announced before the wave begins. Most of them change how you read the board. SWARM and RUSH also make it faster.
| Modifier | Effect |
|---|---|
| FOG | Words stay unreadable until you lock them, so you commit on a first letter alone. |
| MIRROR | Every word arrives backwards. |
| SILENCE | No audio cues. If you have been relying on sound to confirm hits, you will find out here. |
| SWARM | More targets, arriving faster. |
| RUSH | Everything falls harder. |
| BRITTLE | One typo ends your combo and your lock together. |
Difficulty, modes and word lists
These change what a run is made of, so they have their own page. In short: four difficulties from five lives down to one, a daily challenge everyone plays identically, three-player co-op and versus, a drill built from your weak keys, and three word lists to choose between. All of it is set out here.
One rule changes how you type. On brutal a typo drops your target lock as well as your combo, so the half-finished word is released and has to be re-acquired from its first letter.
Controls
- Letter keys: everything. Lock on, fire, finish.
- Escape: pause, and go back one step on any menu.
- Enter: confirm the focused control.
- Arrow keys: move between options on menus.
On a phone or tablet the board switches to a portrait layout with an on-screen keyboard, so no physical keyboard is needed.