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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

You move at a steady base pace; the Move Speed upgrade nudges it up with each level. 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 invulnerability window ("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 minimum gap between dashes, but the real limiter is your stamina bar — you can chain only a couple of dashes before it runs dry.

Stamina

Dashing and meleeing draw from one shared stamina bar. You cannot infinitely dash or spam-punch. The bar refills steadily on its own, so a single dash 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 both your regen and your maximum stamina — 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) can land critical hits that multiply a shot's damage.
• Damage falloff. The Sidearm loses damage with distance — full up close, weaker far away — making it a close-range stepping-stone gun.
• Spread & bloom. The Shotgun fires a cone of pellets; 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 draws on your stamina, so you can't machine-gun punches. The first wave of the Campaign is intentionally fists-only — it's your warm-up before the Armory opens.

Combo & Score

Kills landed in quick succession build a combo multiplier. Let the timer lapse and the combo resets. Your score for a kill scales with that multiplier — and bosses are worth a hefty bonus on top. Hitting milestone combos plays 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. What you'll find on the ground:

• Gold nuggets — run cash for the Armory. Every kill scatters cash as collectible nuggets.
• Health packs — restore a chunk of your health; they drop occasionally from regular kills.
• Ammo crates — top up an owned gun's magazine; they also drop occasionally from regular kills.
• Boss refresh — a guaranteed burst of health and ammo pickups when a boss dies, a big intentional resupply.

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, then drains your health at a ramping rate 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.