Ninety seconds of the thing Limn takes off your desk.
Inbox Invaders is a small arcade game about a Tuesday. Twelve kinds of notification descend in four ranks — channel pings, group chats, calendar invites, @-mentions, repo events, CI failures, a review bot — and you clear what you can with one beam and five units of focus. It is unwinnable, on purpose. Keyboard only, no sign-up, about ninety seconds. Press Esc to come back.
Inbox Invaders. Press space, or click the field, to play.
Inbox Invaders
Ninety seconds of the thing
Limn takes off your desk
PRESS SPACE OR CLICK TO PLAY
Keyboard or mouse — Tab reaches the field too
← → move · space fire · F focus · esc exits
mouse steers · click fires
Arrow keys or A and D move. Space fires. Hold F to spend a focus segment and clear a column. P pauses. M toggles sound. Escape returns to the site. A mouse can play instead: click the field to start, move the pointer to steer the craft toward it, and click to fire. Everything is reachable from the keyboard alone.
One beam, three lives, no win state.
The physics are the 1978 original’s, faithfully: one alien is advanced per frame, so the rack accelerates as you thin it out; the march drops and reverses the moment it touches a wall; and the instant it reaches your row, it is over. What is new is what the sprites are.
- ← → or A / D move the craft. It is a caret, not a ship.
- Space fires — and there is only ever one shot of yours on screen. That single constraint is the whole game: every shot you take is a shot you are not taking somewhere else.
- Or play with the mouse. Click the field to start, and the craft steers toward wherever your pointer is — at its own speed, so it catches up rather than teleports. Click to fire. Touch the arrow keys and they take control straight back.
- Hold F for half a second to spend a focus segment and clear an entire column at once. Let go early and it costs you nothing.
- Focus refills from exactly one thing: clearing a review request. The work that matters is what buys you the ability to batch the rest.
- Four filters sit between you and the rack. They erode from alien fire, from your own fire, and from the rack descending through them.
- P pauses, M toggles sound. Sound is off until you ask for it, and the game pauses itself the moment the tab loses focus.
- Esc returns you to the site, at the scroll position you left.
Twelve kinds of interruption.
Every sprite is an original bitmap and every one behaves differently — the way the real thing does. Nothing here is a re-skin of a shared enemy; the group chat splits, the email takes two hits, the meeting freezes you, and the notebook simply refuses to leave.
- Rank 1 · Chatter · 10 pointsChannel pingSlack-classHarmless alone, arrives in fives.10 pts
- Group chatTeams-classSplits into two channel pings when cleared.10 pts
- Generic alertany appThe filler. Cheap points, infinite supply.10 pts
- Notebook scribbleanalogueDoes not descend. Sits at the edge of the field and never goes away.Cannot be cleared10 pts
- Rank 2 · Comms & calendar · 25 pointsEmailmail-classSlow, heavy, takes two hits. Stacks if ignored.25 pts
- Meeting inviteMeet / calendar-classFreezes the player craft for one beat when it lands.25 pts
- @-mentionany appHomes toward the player. The one you can't ignore.25 pts
- Thread replyany appSpawns behind a cleared sprite. The reply-all tax.25 pts
- Rank 3 · Engineering · 50 pointsRepo eventGitHub-classPush / branch. Fast, low value, constant.50 pts
- Review requestGitHub-classHigh value. Clearing it is what THREADS CLEARED counts, and the only thing that refills FOCUS.50 pts
- CI failurepipelineRe-spawns once unless the whole column is cleared.50 pts
- Boss · 250 points, three hitsReview botCodeRabbit-classFires forty comments; three are real. Shoot the three.250 pts
The game is the argument, played badly on purpose.
Every sprite is a real interruption: a channel ping, a group chat that becomes two group chats, a meeting that freezes you mid-thought, a review bot that files forty comments of which three are worth reading. You can clear a column at a time, but only by spending focus you earned doing the work that mattered — and the rack still lands.
Limn is the version where that does not happen. Same firehose, sorted before it reaches you: what is stalled, whose turn it is, and which of the bot’s comments a human still needs to read. The game ends in defeat because the point is that the firehose wins. The dashboard is the part where it does not.