Dead Mile is out. You can download it right now, for free, on the App Store and Google Play. A week ago it didn't exist. Typing that sentence feels a little unreal.
If you haven't seen it yet, here's the short version. The dead walk one road. You hold the other end. You choose six fighters, spend Courage to send them out, and try to keep your house standing until the last wave breaks. Everything you need to start is on the Dead Mile page.
What is Dead Mile, exactly?
Dead Mile is a zombie lane defence game where you control the timing, not the fighters. You never drag a unit around or tap to aim. Your only decision is who goes out and when. That sounds small. It isn't.
Courage builds up as the wave plays out, and every fighter costs some of it. So every few seconds you're asking the same question. Do you send a cheap Scrapper now to slow the first zombie down? Or do you hold your nerve, let them get a little closer, and save up for someone who can actually hold the line?
Both answers are right sometimes. Working out which one, in the moment, is the whole game.
Then there's the house. Damage carries between waves, and there's no fresh start until the run is over. A messy wave three is still hurting you on wave eleven. We love that. It turns every run into a small story you remember afterwards: the wave where Anvil held on with a sliver of health, or the one where you panicked and spent everything too early.
Meet the squad
You'll meet a few survivors early on. Your final six are up to you.
- Scrapper. Fast, cheap and fearless. The first one out the door.
- Anvil. Slow and armoured. He's there to take the hits so everyone behind him can work.
- Breacher. A shotgun for when the road gets crowded.
- Longshot. A rifle that stays back and picks things off from a distance.
- Corpsman. A healer who turns a front line that survives into one that lasts.
- Tinder. Fire. Pair it with a sturdy front line and the road ahead becomes a very bad place to be dead.
The dead aren't all the same either. The Bulwark soaks up punishment and keeps walking. The Popper is dangerous up close, and killing it is only half the problem. The Seeder poisons the ground behind it, so the threat stays after it's gone. Learn what's coming and bring an answer.
Why did we fall for this idea?
Because it's the kind of game we open "for one more run" and then look up twenty minutes later. The idea is simple enough to explain in a sentence. The decisions are fast enough to make in a second. And they're interesting enough to keep thinking about on the walk home.
Most of our week goes into VR training, 3D web experiences and interactive installations for clients. We love that work. But Dead Mile is different, because it's ours. Nobody wrote us a brief. Nobody set a deadline except us. We built it because we wanted a game like this on our phones and couldn't find one that felt quite right.
The one-road idea stuck early. On a phone, one lane means you can read the whole fight at a glance and play with one thumb. The depth moves out of your fingers and into your choices. That's the game we wanted: easy to pick up on a bus, hard to put down once you're chasing a better run.
And the pixel art? We just love it. There's something about a squad of tiny survivors walking into a horde that no other style gets quite right.
What went into making it?
Seven days. Dead Mile went from idea to store build in one week.
We built it in Unity, but we barely touched the editor by hand. We drove it from the command line, with Claude Code working alongside us: writing and wiring up systems, running builds, and fixing what broke. That took most of the busywork off our hands, so the team's time went into the decisions only people can make. Is this fighter fun? Does this wave feel fair? Is the road readable at a glance?
A short schedule didn't mean a low bar. When you build something for yourselves, the bar is whatever you decide it is, and this team kept raising it. We played it constantly and argued about it. Plenty of ideas that were fine, but not great, didn't make it. We kept going until the game on our phones looked like the one we had in our heads.
Some of the decisions you'll only notice if they were missing. The campaign plays offline, because a game you open on the train should work on the train. The PvP arena was built so two players can meet on the same road, each defending their own house. The leaderboard on our site pulls the live standings, so you can see who's leading the line without opening the game.
To everyone on the team who put themselves into this: thank you. It shows in every wave.
What can you do once you've beaten the campaign?
Take your six online. In PvP, two squads share one road with a house at each end. Break theirs before they break yours. It's the same Courage-and-timing game, except now the other side is thinking too.
The global ladder ranks players by Stripes. Our Dead Mile page shows the current top of the table and refreshes every minute. The next rival you meet there might end up being the person you ask for squad advice.
That's what the Dead Mile Discord is for. Share your squads, complain about the Seeder (everyone does), and tell us what you want next. We're reading all of it.
Choose your six. Hold the road.
Dead Mile is free on iOS and Android right now. Download it, pick your squad, and see how far down the road you get. Then come and tell us about it.
We're so proud of what this team made. We hope you have as much fun playing it as we had building it.