About This Game

Photosensitivity warning. BreakFree has bright, fast-moving fireballs that can fill much of the screen, and some flickering wall animations. A small number of people may have seizures when exposed to flashing lights or patterns. If you or anyone in your family has epilepsy, consult a doctor before playing. Controls ▸ Accessibility ▸ Fireballs: Calm keeps fireballs small, and Animation: Still stops the wall and sprite flicker.

Break the walls. Break out.

BreakFree puts you inside the playing field. The walls are all around you in first person, and the only way out is to destroy every wall that can be broken.

You do it with fireballs. Launch one and it stays in play, ricocheting off the walls and off you. Miss it and you lose it. Keep several alive at once and the level comes apart fast. Find a gun and you can take shots directly, but ammunition runs out, and every second left on the clock when the last wall falls is worth points.

Seventy-two levels, named for the elements

You start in Hydrogen and finish in Hafnium. The levels get denser and meaner as the atomic number climbs, with new wall types, hazards and layouts that stop forgiving a missed ball.

• Fireballs that stay live. Every ball in play is one you have to keep alive. Run out and the game is over.

• Hazards worth learning. Poison balls, bomb balls and wrecking balls each change how a level has to be played.

• A gun, when you can get one. Direct fire for the walls a ball cannot reach, limited by the ammunition you collect.

• Five difficulty settings, from Relaxed up to Impossible.

• 100 achievements, from clearing Hydrogen to clearing all 72 levels on Impossible, with every level earning its own.

Race yourself, your friends and the world

• Medals. Bronze for clearing a level, silver and gold for clearing it inside a target time.

• Pace race. During a level the game tells you how many blocks you are ahead of or behind the level's top run, or your own best.

• Daily Challenge. The same level for every player each day, with fireballs that never run out. The fastest clear wins.

• Steam Leaderboards. Friends and world times for each level.

Build your own

A finished level editor, with the keyboard or a controller. Lay walls and objects, set the name, time and colours, and save up to twenty levels of your own. Publish them to Steam Workshop, and browse other players' levels from Custom Levels.

The 1995 game, running properly

The levels, the artwork and the sound effects are the 1995 Software Storm originals. What changed is everything around them:

• Runs natively on modern Windows. No emulator needed for the main game.

• Controller support in play, in the menus and in the level editor, alongside mouse and keyboard. Buttons can be remapped, and rumble can be set or turned off.

• Full screen or windowed, with the original 4:3 shape and sharp scaling, and your settings remembered.

• Save anywhere, with a tutorial to get you started and built-in help pages.

• An original soundtrack. The 1995 release had sound effects and no music. This one has music written in the two-operator FM style of an AdLib card, and you can turn it off. The music was composed with AI assistance.

Play it your way

Controls ▸ Accessibility has Large Text, Colorblind filters, a High Contrast radar, Game Speed down to 70%, Sound Captions, arrows for fireballs out of view, and a choice of showing or hiding the six levels built from invisible walls. Effects and music have separate volume controls.

The 1995 original is included

Choose "Play the 1995 original (DOS)" when you press Play. It is the retail DOS build with all 72 levels, running in DOSBox, and it needs a keyboard.

About the original

BreakFree was released in 1995 by Software Storm as shareware, recommended for a 20 MHz 386 or faster. It is a first-person action game of demolition and escape, and there was not much else quite like it.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

The music in this release was composed with AI assistance (Anthropic's Claude). It is written as note data and played by the game's own synthesizer; no AI-generated audio files are used, and no AI runs while you play. The code of this modern port was also largely written with AI assistance. The original 1995 game - its artwork, levels and sound effects - is unchanged, human-made work by Software Storm.