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Overview

CUBEHEAD is a top-down, twin-input wave-survival shooter. You control a single operator — CUBEHEAD — fighting fixed waves of infected inside a walled arena. Survive a wave and the Armory opens so you can spend cash. Clear an area's waves and a boss appears. The loop is simple; the mastery is in kiting (leading the horde in circles), positioning, and spending your cash in the right order.

Controls

CUBEHEAD supports mouse aim (default) and 8-direction keyboard aim — switch any time with V. Every key below is rebindable from Settings → Controls.

Touch controls (mobile & tablet)

On a touchscreen the game shows twin virtual sticks: the left stick moves and the right stick aims and fires. On-screen buttons handle dash, weapon previous/next and pause.

Movement

Base move speed is the baseline 1.0× multiplier; the Move Speed upgrade raises it +5% per level (up to 4 levels). Walls and obstacles are solid — you slide along them rather than passing through, and so do the enemies (except during the anti-stall "enrage" state, where stragglers path around walls faster but never phase through them).

Dash & I-Frames

The dash is your panic button and your skill-expression move. Tap Shift or Space to burst in your movement direction (or your aim direction if you're standing still).

Because the 0.26s of invulnerability ("i-frames") slightly outlasts the dash itself, a well-timed dash lets you pass through a wall of bodies or a boss projectile unharmed. There's a short 0.28-second minimum gap between dashes, but the real limiter is your stamina bar — you can chain 2–3 dashes before it runs dry.

Stamina

Dashing and meleeing draw from one shared stamina bar (max 100). You cannot infinitely dash or spam-punch. The bar refills at about 32/second, so a single dash (28) is back almost immediately, but back-to-back actions will tap you out and the bar tells you why your dash didn't fire.

The Stamina upgrade boosts regen +18% and raises the max by 8 per level — a favourite for dash-heavy, melee-leaning runs.

Shooting & Combat

Each weapon has its own damage, fire rate, projectile speed, spread and special behaviour — see the full Weapons database. Several systems apply across all of them:

• Critical hits. Some weapons (Fists, Sidearm, Ricochet Carbine) have a crit chance that multiplies a shot's damage (e.g. the Carbine crits ~14% for ×2.0).
• Damage falloff. The Sidearm loses damage with distance (full up close, down to 40% far away) — it's a close-range stepping-stone gun.
• Spread & bloom. Shotgun fires a 10-pellet cone; the Uzi's accuracy "blooms" wider the longer you hold the trigger.
• Pierce, bounce & explosions. The Railgun and Pulse pierce enemies, the Carbine ricochets off walls, and the Rocket/Barrel/Mine deal area damage — which can also hurt you.
• Knockback & stun. Fists, Shotgun and Mines shove and briefly stun, buying breathing room.

Melee (Fists)

You always carry Fists in slot 1 — they never run out and are your out-of-ammo fallback. A punch is a short forward arc that deals light damage, a small knockback, and a brief stun ("thunk, stagger"), with alternating left/right fists. Each swing costs 20 stamina, so you can't machine-gun punches. Wave 1 of the Campaign is intentionally fists-only — it's your warm-up before the Armory opens.

Combo & Score

Kills within 2.6 seconds of each other build a combo multiplier (up to 99×). Let the timer lapse and the combo resets. Your score for a kill scales with that multiplier — and bosses are worth a 5× bonus on top. Milestone combos at 5, 10, 25 and 50 play a rising audio sting.

Pickups & Drops

Dead enemies drop loot you must physically run over to collect. The Cash Magnet upgrade widens the vacuum radius that sucks pickups toward you.

Cash also comes in a wave-clear bonus that grows with difficulty, so your income keeps pace with the rising cost of better guns. A hordier wave doesn't pay more per kill — income is kept difficulty-neutral by design.

The Arena Edge

Arenas are walled, but you can slip past the lit play space at the very edge. Don't. Leaving the arena flags you out-of-bounds, gives a short grace warning (~1.2s), then drains your health at a ramping rate (roughly 14 up to 60 HP/second) that ignores armor — so camping the void is never a strategy. Get back inside.

Game Modes

Settings

• Controls — fully rebind every key; reset to defaults any time.
• Graphics — Low / Medium / High. Lower settings drop glow, shadows, blood stains, gibs and particles so a weaker device keeps its frame rate. Gameplay is identical across all three — it's purely cosmetic.
• Crosshair — Plus, Dot, Circle, or Hybrid.
• Audio — master mute; all sound is synthesized in-engine.

Alpha vs Beta

This wiki documents the public Alpha build. Alpha deliberately keeps several systems hidden as "coming soon" while the public release gathers gameplay data:

• Shop, Customize, Account & gems — present in the codebase but switched off in Alpha. Gems (the green meta-currency), cosmetics and local accounts are Beta-only testing features.
• Leaderboard — marked Coming Soon in both builds.
• Dev tools — the difficulty-tuning screen and cheats are dev-only and not in the public Alpha.

What you get in Alpha is the complete combat game: the full Campaign, Endless, every weapon, enemy, boss and upgrade documented here — pure gunplay, no meta-progression gates.