Coming soon

About This Game

Five hundred dollars, a rented room, and a pull-tab hall down the block.

Break Even is a top-down pixel game about cheap gambling, built the way games were built in the 90s: flat colors, chunky sprites, rain that never stops, and nothing standing between you and the machines. If you grew up on games like that, this one was made for you. Every sprite is drawn in code and every sound is synthesized while you play.

The heart of it is the tab. Buy a sheet at the LUCKY STUB, hold one up, and peel the windows open one at a time — the slow crackling tear, the beat between one line and the next, the reveal. It is quiet, tactile, and strangely calming. Five pull-tab games, five slot machines down at MOONBEAM SLOTS, a bar pour that bends the odds for a while, a pawn counter, a title-loan window. One rainy block, and more ways to spend a night on it than the night is worth.

And the calendar keeps moving. Rent is $650 on the first. Utilities on the fifteenth. Groceries every five days. The bills do not pause when the machines go cold, and they do not pause when the balance hits zero — they arrive on schedule whether you have the money or not, and what you do about that is the actual game. Sleeping is the only thing that moves the day forward. Everything else just moves the money.

There is more than one way for a run to end. Which one you get depends on what you were still willing to do near the bottom.

WHAT THIS IS, PLAINLY

• Simulated gambling, and an adult subject. Nothing here is a real wager, nothing you win is real money, and nothing pays out.

• No in-app purchases of any kind — no currency packs, no loot boxes, nothing to buy.

• No advertisements.

• No account or sign-in of our own, no leaderboards, and no analytics of ours. Your save lives on your computer, and in your Steam Cloud if you have Steam Cloud turned on.

• The game makes no network requests of its own; your cloud save and your achievements travel through Steam.

• The game bundles no image or audio assets of its own — the art and the sound are generated by the game itself.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

Break Even was built with an AI coding assistant working under the developer's direction and review. That includes the game's code and, with it, the pixel maps its sprites are drawn from, its synthesized sound, its dialogue and ending text, the scripts that draw the store images, and drafts of this store page. The game ships no image or audio files of its own — every picture is drawn and every sound synthesized by its own code while you play — and the one bundled file is an open-licence pixel font. No AI runs during play, and the game contacts no AI service.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Simulated gambling throughout — pull tabs and slot machines, played with fictional money that never pays out. Alcohol is served at a bar and is part of how the game plays. Adult themes of debt, pawning, a title loan and financial desperation.