4pooled — in development

REFRACTED

Hold the ground. Outlast the swarm.

A wave-survival shooter where hundreds of enemies close at once and the only thing standing between them and the Heart is what you built this run — relics, walls, tamed beasts, and whatever you are still holding.

See the game Steam page — soon
A masked gunslinger in a long coat, brass-fitted respirator and wide hat.

The game

Every run is an arithmetic problem

The swarm arrives in waves and does not negotiate. You pick a hero, you pick up what the run offers, and you find out whether it adds up before the count does.

Status
In development
Platform
PC
Players
1 — co-op in progress
Engine
Unity 6
Episodes
Three, in design
Studio
4pooled
01

Relics compound

Run modifiers stack, and we let them talk to each other. Combinations that look absurd on paper mostly stay in — the interesting builds live out at the edges, and sanding those off would cost more than it saves.

02

Tame what you kill

Clear a camp and the monster is banked rather than spent. A war horn puts it back on the field on your side — the thing that was eating you an hour ago now walks in front of you.

03

Hold the choke

Walls drop into fixed slots and genuinely block the path, not slow it. The swarm reroutes, piles against the seam, or comes through it. Where you spend a wall decides the shape of the next ten minutes.

Three gunslinger silhouettes under bands of refracted light.

Cool leads. Violet trails. Nothing here is resolved yet.

Episodes

Three grounds, none of them yours

Each episode is a place the swarm already owns. All three are in design — the art below shows the shape of a place without showing the place.

A wide red-rock desert canyon under a hot yellow sky.
EPISODE I

Desert

Open ground, long sightlines, nowhere to put your back.

In design
A dead forest of bare trunks in cold grey light.
EPISODE II

Dead Forest

Broken sightlines. You hear the wave before you see it.

In design
A black basalt plain split by rivers of lava under a red sky.
EPISODE III

Volcano

The ground is hostile too. Fewer safe places to stand.

In design
Character select portrait of the masked gunslinger.
Character select

Heroes

Built around the weapon, not the stat line

Each hero is a different answer to the same problem. The kit, the weapon and the way the class moves are designed together — a hero is not a stat spread bolted onto a shared body, and swapping one changes how a wave reads.

More of the roster is still behind the curtain. The ones that are finished are finished; the rest are not going to be rushed out to pad a number.

The studio

4pooled

A small independent studio. Refracted is what we are building.

4-pool — the earliest all-in opening in StarCraft. Spawning Pool at four drones, lings on the way before the other player has a wall up. No economy, no second plan, everything at once. It seemed like the right name for a studio whose first game is about being on the receiving end of exactly that.

Contact

Get in touch

Press, partnerships, or anything about the game — this reaches us directly.

clay@4pooled.gg