Best played with sound on. Your progress is saved in this browser.
You control a single cell adrift in a hostile field. Enemies fill the screen with projectiles, and your only job is to survive. Weave through the gaps, collect the drops they leave behind, and push deeper wave after wave until a boss blocks the way.
The core skill in any bullet-hell game is reading patterns, not reacting to individual shots. Projectiles arrive in shapes — spreads, rings, aimed streams — and each shape leaves a safe gap somewhere. Your job is to spot that gap early and already be moving toward it. Panicked, large movements are what get you hit; players who survive longest are the ones making small, continuous adjustments.
Between stages you can strengthen your cell with upgrades. Runs are scored, and your best result is saved locally in your browser, so you always have a number to beat.
· Desktop: move with W A S D or the arrow keys.
· Touch screen: drag anywhere on the play area to steer your cell; it follows your finger continuously.
Your cell moves at a constant speed — there is no dash or brake. Everything comes down to where you point it and how early you commit.
· Stay near the middle. Hugging an edge halves the directions you can escape in. The centre gives you the most room to react.
· Move small. Micro-adjustments thread gaps that big sweeps cannot. Save large movements for repositioning between waves.
· Watch the gaps, not the bullets. Look at the empty space you are heading into rather than the projectiles you are avoiding.
· Greed kills. A pickup drifting into a dense stream is not worth the run. Survival first, collection second.
· Learn the boss. Boss attacks repeat. The first attempt is for reading the pattern; the second is for beating it.
· Watch your own hitbox. The white dot at your centre is the only part of you that can be hit — not the whole cell. Gaps that look impossible usually are not.
A run is built out of waves. Each wave sends a set of enemies with their own firing patterns, and clearing it moves you deeper — with more on screen, denser fire and less forgiving spacing each time.
At intervals a boss blocks the way. Bosses do not simply shoot more; they fight in phases, switching attack pattern as they take damage. A pattern you have learned to stand still through will stop working halfway into the fight, and the phase change is where most attempts end.
The practical consequence is that bosses reward patience over aggression. There is no timer pushing you to finish quickly, so the correct play on a first encounter is to survive and watch — learn where each phase leaves its gap — and only then start pressing.
What you collect during a run is not lost when you die. Between attempts you spend it on upgrades that carry into the next run, so a failed attempt still moves you forward.
This changes how you should treat a bad start. In a pure arcade game a doomed run is wasted time; here it still buys progress, which means it is usually better to push into a wave you are likely to lose than to restart hunting for a cleaner opening.
Upgrades are stored in your browser, on your device — there is no account and nothing is uploaded.
Alongside the normal endless mode there is a daily challenge: a run generated from the current date, so everyone who plays on a given day faces the same sequence rather than a random one.
It is the fairest way to measure yourself, because luck is removed from the comparison — a good daily score is a good score, not a lucky seed. It also makes the game worth returning to once a day even when you are not chasing an endless-mode record.
· Your score grows the longer you survive and the deeper you push, so surviving is scoring — there is no safe way to farm points while standing still.
· Your best result is saved locally in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, and there is no login. Switching browser or device starts you fresh, and clearing site data for rickbing.com erases your progress and upgrades.
A screen full of projectiles aimed at one small cell is a surprisingly honest picture of what cells actually deal with.
· Cells really are under constant bombardment. Ordinary metabolism produces reactive oxygen species — unstable molecules that collide with DNA and damage it. Every cell in your body absorbs a very large number of these hits daily and spends real energy repairing them. Survival is not a passive state; it is continuous active repair.
· The immune system genuinely fires projectiles. Killer immune cells destroy their targets by releasing perforin, a protein that punches pores directly through the target's membrane, then pushing enzymes through the holes. The complement system does something similar, assembling a ring-shaped complex that drills through a membrane and lets the cell's contents leak out.
· Viruses attack by volume. An infected cell can release enormous numbers of new virus particles, which then saturate the surrounding area looking for the next cell to enter — a strategy much closer to a bullet-hell screen than to a duel.
The liberty the game takes is agency. A real cell cannot see an incoming attack and slip sideways; it survives through membrane chemistry, repair enzymes and sheer numbers rather than reflexes. Dodging is the game's way of turning a statistical process into something you can actually play.
More on the science behind these games in the articles section. If you are curious how this game got into a browser tab at all, the devlog Shipping a Godot Game to the Web covers what broke along the way.
Cell Dodge is a bullet-hell (danmaku) action game and the first title in the Cell Games collection. Like the rest of the site it is a hand-written single HTML file — plain JavaScript and canvas, no engine, no framework, no build step. It opens in well under a second, works offline once loaded, and stores scores and upgrades locally on your own device.
It was not always this way. The original version was a Godot build compiled to WebAssembly, which meant downloading roughly forty megabytes of game engine before anything appeared on screen. It ran well once it started, but on a phone the wait was longer than most people are willing to give a browser game, so it was rewritten from scratch to match the other titles here. The full story is in the devlog: Shipping a Godot Game to the Web.
Part of a shared cell universe alongside Cell Culture and Cell Mimic — the cell you steer here is the same species that later escapes the petri dish in Cell Culture.