Bearzerk!

One see-through gummy bear against a whole candy planet. Your weapons fire on their own, so you move, jump and pick upgrades while the swarm grows from a few bugs at dawn to more than 15,000 candy enemies by nightfall.

A run lasts 20 minutes. A boss crashes in every five minutes, and the final one rises at nightfall. It's free in your desktop browser, with nothing to install.

How to play

• Keep moving and let your weapons do the shooting.
• Level up and pick one of three upgrades, or four when you're lucky.
• Jump to clear shockwave rings. With the Licorice Whip, a jump cracks it all the way around you.
• Max a weapon while you hold its matching passive, open a Candy Box, and it evolves.
• Stand in a Candy Altar's circle for a few seconds to claim its boon.
• Survive four bosses, the last one at nightfall.

Controls

• Move with WASD or the arrow keys, or hold the left mouse button to walk toward the cursor. On a gamepad, use the left stick.
• Jump with Space or a right-click, or A on a gamepad.
• Pause with Esc or P, or Start on a gamepad.

What's inside

• 22 weapons, each with its own evolution, plus two unions that fuse a pair of maxed weapons
• 22 passives to build around
• 8 bosses, four in each run, from the Sour Wyrm and the Cotton Titan to the Bonbon Queen
• 4 candy biomes with rivers of syrup, caramel or soda (Floss Highlands, Jelly Marsh, Licorice Badlands and Sour Crystal Wastes)
• 6 bear flavors, each with its own starting weapon (Strawberry, Orange, Lemon, Lime, Pineapple and Blue Raspberry)
• Golden Gumdrops to chase down and a herd of Mallow Bison that tramples the swarm
• A Candy Shop for upgrades between runs, a Codex, achievements and a Daily World

Desktop only, for now

Bearzerk! draws its swarm on the GPU with WebGPU and falls back to WebGL2 where WebGPU isn't available. It isn't built for phones yet, so play it on a desktop or laptop. The first load brings in a lot of candy, so give it a minute.

How it was made

Made with Claude Opus 5.5 in the Claude app. Codex on GPT-6 Astra did code review, bug testing, image generation and early model work.

Special thanks

To buak, whose Swarmfall heavily inspired Bearzerk!'s balance, weapons and passives.

Also on GamesByAI

Bearzerk! is listed on GamesByAI, where players rate games made with AI. The game's Play counter adds up the presses from both places.

Credits

The music and sounds are CC0 packs from OpenGameArt by Kenney, Aureolus_Omicron, CleytonKauffman, Komiku, artisticdude, JaggedStone and rubberduck. The fonts are Fredoka and Nunito (SIL Open Font License), and the game is built on three.js.