Play Stormsight • Free

A flash is two or three strokes a split second apart, followed by a fading afterglow, and the raiders are only visible while the light lasts. Between flashes you aim from memory. The landmarks on the field stay faintly visible in the dark, so you can remember a raider as "just left of the dead tree" or "by the second puddle".

You can also listen. A walker's footsteps get louder as it approaches, and a drone's hum grows as it closes in. Both are heard from the side they are on, so with headphones you can tell roughly where a raider is even in the dark.

Every shot travels out across the field, and the game works out where it lands from the moment you fire. The longer it is in the air, the more the wind pushes it sideways: a 6 m/s wind moves a shot about one and a half metres at 400 m but well under half a metre at 200 m. The wind gusts, so the push changes from moment to moment.

Faster rounds spend less time in the air, so they drift less and need less lead on a moving raider. That is what the Gale and Stormcrow rifles, and the Barrel upgrade, are for.

The Moorland is open moor with peat bogs, dead trees and a broken fence line, under steady rain. The Harbour is tidal mud with mooring posts, wrecked boats and a lighthouse out at sea, with spray on a strong crosswind. The Quarry has stepped rock terraces and old cranes, and the flashes come less often. On the Salt Flats the dry lightning comes often, but haze swallows the far field and the raiders show as dark shapes on the white ground. The Frozen Pass has snow, pines and sleet, with short flashes and the fastest raiders.

The first nights are gentle: a few slow walkers, a light wind and lightning that comes often and lingers, so you can learn the game. After that the raiders grow to fifteen walkers, drones join them from the fifth night, armoured walkers that take two hits join from the sixth and make up almost half the walkers by the end, everything moves faster, and the wind gets stronger through each set of nights. From the eleventh night, the first in the Quarry, you also get a fixed number of rounds for the night: a little over two for each hit needed at first, falling to about one and a half on the last nights, so every shot has to count.

The armoury is a proving range on the cliff top. The rifle lies on sandbags, and through its scope you see a steel test plate cut in a walker's shape, 400 m out in a steady test wind. The rifle keeps firing at the plate's core, and the group of holes shows how far that rifle drifts and how widely it spreads. Fit an upgrade and the plate is cleared, so the new group shows what the part changed.

There are five rifles. The Drizzle is free and honest but slow. The Squall has a quick bolt and a big magazine, but its light rounds drift more. The Gale fires a fast round that cuts through the wind. The Thunderhead has a powerful scope and is very steady, but slow to reload. The Stormcrow is the best on the cliff. Each rifle takes four upgrades of three levels: Night Glass keeps the raiders visible longer in the scope after a flash, Barrel speeds up the round, Bolt shortens the time between shots and Magazine adds a round per level.

Every target is a machine: big walking robots with a glowing core, some of them in steel plating, and quadcopter drones, both large enough to pick out clearly in a flash even at the far edge of the field. A hit knocks them apart in sparks and scrap, and a wreck smoulders for a few seconds so you can see that you got it. There are no people and no blood in the game.

The nights you have held, your best score on each, your coins, the rifles you own and their upgrades, the rifle in your hands and your sound setting are saved on Unihfy Games in this browser.