Cellbound [IN DEV]

The first infusion starts.

Somewhere inside the body, in the dark,
something cold wakes up.

Cellbound is a pixel art platformer RPG about chemotherapy, seen from the inside. You are the medicine: Vin, a hooded figure of amber drug, sent into the lymph nodes to find a cancer that has learned to hide among the body's own guards.

The cancer has no army and no speech. It has one whisper, and the body believes it.

Rest. Nothing is wrong here.

The lymph node is a place to explore. Its caverns rise two and three screens high, with ledges, thin membranes you can drop through, a lift, and gaps you only cross with a sprint or a slow, buoyant float. Each zone has its own ground: wet membrane at the gate, valve leaflets in the vessels, a market of cobbled cells, a grove of fibrous branches and a sinus packed with crowding cells. Caches, lost lymphocytes and Echoes wait off the main path.

Touch a cell and the fight turns to turns. Every dose spins a roulette. Stop the needle in the green and the hit lands clean. Stop it in the red and the drug turns on the body instead. The red grows a little after every fight, the way side effects pile up over a cycle, and only the next infusion resets it.

You will want to hit everything. Don't. Most of a sick lymph node is the body's own immune cells, called in and then told to stand still. Scan the crowd, find the one that doesn't belong, and try not to hurt the rest. Every healthy cell you hit costs Spirit, and low Spirit makes the roulette harder.

Cancer cells move through Rest, Copy, Prepare and Divide. Some of Vin's drugs only bite at the right moment, so you learn to wait for it. Find a weak point in the green and Vin gets to act again. Each new enemy adds a page to the journal, with the real biology written under the drawing.

This build is the first area: a lymph node in the neck, from the first drip to the first boss, a cancer cell that hides in the crowd behind a mask.

Vin starts with Sever, made from vinblastine. The other three drugs of the ABVD regimen wake up in later cycles. The story outside the body is not in this demo yet. Here you only hear it as Echoes: voices from a hospital room, coming faintly through the walls of the body.

Playable in English and Bahasa Indonesia, on Story, Normal or Hard.

	Keyboard	Mouse	Controller
Move	A D or arrows		D-pad or left stick
Jump (hold to float)	Space, W or Up		A
Sprint	Shift		B or RT
Drop through a thin platform	S or Down + Jump		Down + A
Interact	E or Enter		X
Confirm, stop the needle	Space, E or Enter	Left click	A
Back	X or Backspace	Right click	B
Scan	Q		LB
Map / Items	M / I		Back / Y
Pause	P or Esc		Start

Playing fullscreen in the browser? Esc leaves fullscreen, so pause with P.

We are a small student team, and this is our test build. If you play it, we would love three more minutes of your time. We read every answer, and the most useful ones tell us where you got confused.

Tell us what you thought

Found a bug? Leave a comment below and say which browser or system you played on.

Cellbound is about cancer and its treatment. It shows illness, hospital days and side effects. We have tried to handle all of it with care, and the medicine is simplified for play. It is not medical advice.

If you are going through treatment yourself, or someone close to you is: we made this for you too.

The browser version needs a desktop browser (Chrome, Edge or Firefox) and loads about 31 MB the first time. The downloads are not signed yet. On Windows, if SmartScreen stops it, choose More info, then Run anyway. On macOS, right click the app and choose Open the first time. On Linux, run chmod +x Cellbound.x86_64 first.

Team Cellbound, for Venture Creation at BINUS University.
Rizky Mirzaviandy Priambodo, Andrew Wijaya, Sheehan Timotheus Alexander, Moammar Arvihan Khadafi and Nyoman Rajendra Gautama Ewari.
Made with Godot. Some sound effects are built from Kenney recordings (CC0). 

Bahasa Indonesia. Cellbound adalah game platformer RPG pixel art tentang kemoterapi, dilihat dari dalam tubuh. Kamu bermain sebagai Vin, obat kemo yang menjelajahi kelenjar getah bening untuk mencari sel kanker yang bersembunyi di antara sel imun. Lompat, melayang, dan berlari menembus gua sel yang tinggi, lalu hentikan jarum roulette di zona hijau saat bertarung. Ganti bahasa di menu Settings. Setelah main, isi form masukan kami, ya. Terima kasih sudah mencoba.