Averno

A free 3D shooter that you play in your browser. Fly a mining ship in any direction through the tunnels of a dead colony, destroy its three reactors, and escape before each one blows.

Play Averno

Free
Nothing to install
Three levels
Keyboard, gamepad or touch

Forty days of silence

Averno stopped answering forty days ago. Its mining robots turned on the crew, and the reactors that power the colony still run.

You fly a small mining ship down through the colony. Find the access keys, rescue the survivors you can, and destroy each reactor. Then race the countdown back to the exit.

The game HUD during an escape: a self-destruct countdown of 49 seconds, a survivor rescued and a robot close ahead — When a reactor goes, the exit opens and the countdown starts.

Six degrees of freedom

There is no up. Fly, strafe, slide and roll through tunnels in any direction.

Three levels

Access keys, locked doors, survivors to rescue and a timed escape after each reactor.

Made from code

Procedural textures, baked light, synthesized sound and robots built in Blender.

Plays anywhere

Keyboard and mouse, a gamepad, or touch controls on a phone.

Three levels down

Level 1 · Upper works
The Intake
Rock shafts and ore halls lit by sodium lamps. Learn to fly, find the blue access key, then destroy the first reactor and climb out through the gallery.
Level 2 · Ore processing
The Refinery
The refinery still runs, and its acid tanks light the dark green. Find a blue key in the settling pool and a gold key in the pump station to reach the core.
Level 3 · The magma halls
The Crucible
At the bottom of the mine, the miners hit magma. The Overseer AI took the core for itself and shields the last reactor. Destroy it, then make the long climb out.

Controls

Six degrees of freedom takes a few minutes to learn. Turn with the mouse, then use roll and slide to dodge. In the game settings, you can change the look speed and turn on auto-level.

Thrust and strafeWASD

Pitch and turnMouse

RollQE

Slide up / downSpaceC

Fire primaryLeft click

Fire missileRight click

AfterburnerShift

Primary weapon123

Missile type45

Drop a flareF

HeadlightH

MapM

How it’s made

Averno runs on WebGL 2 with Three.js, and the menus and HUD are React. Each level is a set of connected cube segments, like the mines in the six-degrees-of-freedom shooters of the 1990s.

When a level loads, a web worker bakes the light into every vertex: direct light with shadows, one bounce and ambient occlusion. It also bakes light probes, so robots and pickups match the room around them.

A build script makes every texture from noise. A Python script builds the robots in Blender and exports them as glTF. The sound effects are synthesized in code, and the music plays live through the Web Audio API.

Three.js
React
WebGL 2
three-mesh-bvh
postprocessing
Web Audio
Blender and Python
Cloudflare

The same view of The Crucible as a wireframe — The Overseer above the last reactor. Drag to see the geometry.

The Crucible as you see it in the game — The Overseer above the last reactor. Drag to see the geometry.

Nothing to install

Averno opens in your browser on a computer or a phone. Your progress saves on your device.