Deep Breach

What is Deep Breach?

Deep Breach is a brick breaker set inside a computer system. Bounce the ball off your paddle, smash every brick on the screen, and each layer you clear drops you deeper: the code rain changes colour, the bricks get tougher, unbreakable firewalls and explosive logic bombs appear, and every seventh layer a guardian program waits to stop you. Break through all 21 layers to reach the core, then keep falling into the endless void below.

It plays with a mouse, a finger or the keyboard, runs full screen on phones, and saves your run at the start of every layer so you can quit and pick it up later. Every sound is synthesized live in your browser, and there is nothing to install.

How to play Deep Breach

1. Press Jack in on the title screen. Move the paddle with the mouse, by dragging anywhere on the screen, or with the arrow keys (A and D work too).
2. Click, tap or press Space to launch. Where the ball lands on the paddle sets its angle: the centre sends it nearly straight up, the edges send it out wide.
3. Break every brick to clear the layer. Numbered bricks take that many hits, grey firewalls never break and don't need to, and red logic bombs blow up the bricks around them.
4. Catch falling capsules with the paddle to collect power-ups: SPLIT, WIDE, LASER, SLOW, PIERCE, CATCH and the rare extra life. Avoid grey SHRINK.
5. If every ball falls past the paddle you lose a life and any active power-ups. You start with three lives; when the last one goes, the run is over.
6. On boss layers, hit the guardian until its health bar empties and dodge its shots: a hit glitches your paddle smaller for a few seconds. Destroying it collapses its shield and clears the layer.
7. Press P or the Pause button to pause, and M to mute. Save & quit from the pause menu keeps your run for later.

Deep Breach tips and strategy

• Aim with the paddle's edges to reach bricks tucked behind firewalls. The further from the centre the ball lands, the sharper the angle, up to 62 degrees.
• Breaking bricks without the ball touching the paddle builds a combo: every five breaks adds one to the multiplier, up to eight times the points. Lasers and bombs keep the combo going.
• Get the ball above the bricks and let it bounce around up there: it clears a layer fast and builds a big combo.
• Glowing power caches (the bricks marked ?) always drop a power-up and never drop SHRINK, so hit them early.
• Save logic bombs for when they're surrounded by tough bricks. A blast knocks every nearby brick down to its last hit point and then breaks it.
• Clear layers quickly. The ball speeds up a little every ten seconds, and the clear bonus shrinks the longer you take.
• Catch extra lives when you see them: you can hold up to five, and every life you still have adds 250 points to each layer's clear bonus.
• Every seventh layer is a checkpoint. Once you reach layer 8, 15, 22 and so on, you can start new runs from there.

Three zones and three guardians

Layers 1 to 7 are the Surface Grid, in green, guarded by the Warden. Layers 8 to 14 are the Deep Net, in violet, where the Sentinel moves and fires faster. Layers 15 to 21 are the Kernel, in red, home of the Core, which fires three shots at once and teleports across the field every few seconds. The guardians get tougher in turn: the Warden takes 22 hits, the Sentinel 34 and the Core 48.

Each designed layer has its own name and layout, from Boot Sector and Packet Storm to Chain Reaction, The Vault, Labyrinth and The Gate. Some are open fields of easy bricks, others are fortresses walled with firewalls where you have to find the one gap and bank the ball through it.

Power-ups

SPLIT turns every ball in play into three, up to nine balls at once. WIDE stretches the paddle by half for 14 seconds. LASER fires twin beams from the paddle for 10 seconds. SLOW drops the ball to bullet time for 9 seconds. PIERCE lets the ball tear straight through bricks for 7 seconds and doubles its damage to guardians. CATCH holds the ball on the paddle for 14 seconds so you can line up each shot; a caught ball relaunches on its own after three seconds.

A rare white capsule gives an extra life. Grey SHRINK, which only starts appearing from layer 5, makes the paddle smaller for 10 seconds. WIDE and SHRINK cancel each other out. Ordinary bricks drop a capsule now and then; power caches always do.

How scoring works

A hit that damages a brick without breaking it scores 5 points. Breaking a brick scores 10 points for each hit it could take, times your combo multiplier, so a 4-hit brick broken during an 8x combo is worth 320. Each hit on a guardian scores 25, and destroying one is worth 2,000 for the Warden, 4,000 for the Sentinel and 6,000 for the Core.

Clearing a layer adds a bonus of 500 points, plus 250 for every life you have left, plus a speed bonus that starts at 1,500 and falls by 10 for every second you spent on the layer. Firewalls score nothing, so there is no point aiming for them. Your best score and the deepest layer you have reached are shown on the title screen.

The endless void

Beat the Core on layer 21 and you can choose Go deeper. From layer 22 onward, every layer is generated: symmetrical brick patterns with more firewalls and tougher bricks the deeper you go, and a guardian waiting on every seventh layer with more health each time. Generated layers are seeded by their number, so layer 30 is always the same layer, which makes it fair to compare runs with friends.

Long stalls are handled for you. If ten seconds pass without anything breaking, a TRACE effect gently curves rising balls toward a brick they can reach, so you are never stuck chasing the last brick for minutes.

From Breakout to Deep Breach

Bat-and-ball brick breaking began with Atari's Breakout in 1976 and was reinvented by Taito's Arkanoid in 1986, which added power-up capsules, tougher bricks and boss fights. Deep Breach follows that tradition with its own twist: a descent through a computer system, with logic bombs, firewalls, combos and an endless mode instead of a fixed final screen.

Playing on phones, controls and accessibility

On a phone, drag anywhere on the game to move the paddle; it follows your finger's movement, so your thumb never covers the ball. A quick tap launches. Tap Full screen for the biggest view: the field is tall, so it is largest with the phone upright, and turning it sideways moves the score, lives and power-ups out beside the field. On a computer, the mouse moves the paddle directly, or use the arrow keys or A and D, with Space or the up arrow to launch.

The game pauses itself when you switch tabs or windows or scroll it out of view, and Escape closes the pause menu. Layer names, power-ups, lost lives and bonuses are announced to screen readers, and the sound can be muted with M or the Sound button; the setting is remembered.

Deep Breach FAQ