Garden Siege

Overview

Garden Siege drops you into the bottom five rows of a moonlit mushroom field while a segmented horned crawler winds down from the top edge. The crawler marches sideways until it strikes a mushroom or the field boundary, then drops a row and reverses — so the whole field is effectively a timer, and every mushroom it eats through brings it closer to you. Your bolts do three different jobs: they destroy crawler segments, they chip mushrooms down through four damage states, and they swat the pests that complicate the field. Hitting the crawler's head pays 100 points; body segments pay 25 but split the chain, so one long crawler becomes two shorter ones with independent heads. A flea falls whenever the field gets thin, planting new mushrooms in its wake, and a spider bounces through your movement rows hunting you directly. Clear every segment of a wave to score a bonus and face a faster, longer crawler. Survive all six waves and the garden is saved; four lives stand between you and the overrun.

How to Play

Press Start Game, then move with the arrow keys — you are confined to the bottom five rows, which is both your safety and your prison. Space fires a bolt straight up, with a short cooldown and at most two bolts in flight. On touch devices, hold the direction pad to move and tap SPRAY to fire; tapping the field itself also nudges the sprayer toward the tap and shoots. P pauses, R restarts. The wave ends only when every segment of every chain is destroyed — splitting a crawler never reduces the total work, it just changes where the heads are. Watch the segment counter in the HUD; when it approaches zero, reposition before the last kill so the next wave's head does not spawn above you.

Tips & Strategy

Resist the urge to saw the crawler in half early: every split creates a second head that descends independently, and two heads at different heights are far harder to track than one. Instead, trail the chain and peel segments from the tail — tail kills pay the same split-free points and never create new heads. Mushroom management is the real strategy layer. A clear column under the crawler means it descends a row almost every pass, so shoot out mushrooms directly above your position only when you need an escape lane, and leave dense clusters intact as natural speed bumps near the top. When the flea dives, lead it slightly — it falls fast and pays 200 points, but more importantly every mushroom it plants is a row of future deflection you did not ask for. The spider is worth hunting when it crosses low, because the score bonus scales with distance, but never chase it into a corner while a head is entering your rows. Finally, spend your respawn shield deliberately: after a death the crawler is pushed out of your rows, which is the best moment to carve firing lanes for the endgame.

What Makes It Distinct

Most fixed-field shooters treat the terrain as static decoration. In Garden Siege the mushroom field is a shared resource that everyone rewrites: your shots erode it, the crawler's turns depend on it, and the flea rebuilds it. The result is a shooter where map editing and target priority are the same decision, which keeps six short waves tense instead of repetitive.