Kith, Like Us
A downloadable game for Windows
Lead your people: claws, chitin, and many eyes. Swarm the maze in this reverse tower defense game.
Reclaim your alien planet by breaking the Grid's automated defenses. You are the Kith, creatures that learn to live together, humans and beasts, held together by the tendrils.
Kith, Like Us is a reverse tower defense game. You lead the Kith through an intricate maze: pick your hero, your beasts, and push through corridors full of automated turrets and droids. Reach the hub for a final boss fight.
Every level is a puzzle with more than one answer. The turrets own the sight lines, so you learn what to take out first: the gun, or the relay that powers it. Storm the front and trade lives for tempo, or take the quiet road: walls can be leapt, and the alarm beams sweep on a rhythm you can wait out, or trip on purpose with your cheapest beast while the rest of the team slips through.
Action-packed real-time strategy, with you in it. The camera follows your hero and your team, and the fight is wherever you are standing. No base to build, no build order to memorize, no second screen to manage.
Status: early development. This is the companion build for the encounter editor. Design a maze in your browser, then load it here and play it. The editor is live: design your own. Join the Discord to share what you build. New devlogs every two weeks.
What's in this build
- Three campaign maps, the opening run of the story
- Load any maze you design in the editor, from the main menu
- Keyboard and mouse. Controls and rules are with the download, below
- Windows 64-bit download
This is an early companion build, not a polished one. It exists so the maps you design are playable today. If something breaks or plays wrong, say so on the Discord: that is what this build is for.
The planet was supposed to be ready for them. Instead, the colonists survived by adapting to the local fauna, generation by generation, until there was no line left between the two. They are one people now, the Kith: humans and beasts, sheltered by the tendrils, plant roots that reach all of this world.
Then the terraforming fleet arrived, centuries late, set to prepare the planet for colonization. Its machines ran their protocol without hesitation: clear hostile wildlife, prepare for human habitation. The fleet no longer recognizes you. The Kith fight to survive.
How it plays
The gauntlet is the level, and you are the wave.
- No base to build. Capture the maze instead. Need more Kith? Take a sector. Plant your gateway on its energy source and it pays you the resources that field your army and knits up whatever stands beside it, for as long as you hold it. Leave one neutral and the Grid takes it back.
- Several teams, one budget. Every beast costs resources to field: one for a swarmer, two for a bomb-lobber, three for a shield that walks in front, four for a sapper that shuts a turret down. Each team does something the others cannot, and each costs what it is worth.
- Adapt to every turret cluster. Switch teams as the cluster demands. Nothing comes back on its own: a beast that falls stays down until you pay to call its team again, so every loss is a choice about what to bring next. Some clusters are worth a direct attack. Others are better walked around.
- Explore. Not every wall is an obstacle. Some can be leapt, some breached, some simply open, and some are blast doors waiting for the keycard you have not found yet.
- The final boss waits in the center. Do not be fooled by the Grid's patience. Trip an alarm and it calls in reinforcements. Advance too fast and its droids come for you from behind, from corridors you thought cleared.
🛠️ The Workshop
Every encounter is a maze of turrets, walls and zones, and the tool the official maps are built with is free in your browser.
Draw the maze or auto-generate one. Place the turret line, the locked doors, the keycards, the caches. Then hit Simulate: a bot fights its way through your map and hands back a scrubbable replay, plus a diagnostic showing where the attack died and which entries it never touched.
Tune it, re-simulate, and when it's right, download the JSON and load it into the companion build to play it yourself.
Share it on the Discord. The most-loved community encounters will inspire official content at release.
Open the editor: kithlikeus.com/editor. Open-format JSON. No account required to design. Discord login to share.
Where to find us. Design a map in the browser · kithlikeus.com · Discord
"Log entry. Operating duration: centuries. Mission status: complete. Habitability confirmed. Transmission acknowledged. Unit status: still running. No applicable failure condition has been met. Disable confirmation: pending… pending… delayed. Fallback mode active: recording until report."
The Archive
UI icons by game-icons.net (CC BY 3.0).
Download
Install instructions
- Download the zip and unpack it anywhere. Keep the folder together: the exe needs the files next to it.
- Run Kith.exe.
- Windows may warn you about an unrecognized publisher. This build is not signed yet. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
- It opens borderless at your desktop resolution. Change that under Visuals in the main menu.
Windows 64-bit, keyboard and mouse. No installer, no account, no launcher, and nothing else to install.
Controls, rules, and how to play a maze you designed yourself are below. More at kithlikeus.com.
Controls
Your hero.
- WASD to move. The camera keeps the center of the maze toward the top of the screen and your movement follows the camera, so up is always inward.
- Left Shift to run, F to dash.
- Left mouse casts whatever you have equipped.
- Space to interact: raise a gateway on a vent, pull a lever, open a door you hold the keycard for.
- Escape pauses, and also puts your weapon back in hand.
- R restarts a map once it has ended.
Your kit. Keys 4 and 5 equip, they do not fire. Press the key, then click.
- 4 equips your bolt: free, unlimited, and what you hold by default.
- 5 equips the barricade. Click to raise a ridge of earth that blocks turret fire, for 10 tickets. It blocks your own team's shots too, and your bolt is holstered while it is equipped, so press 4 to take it back.
- 6 releases the scouts and fires the moment you press it. Widens what you can see for a few seconds, for 5 tickets.
- 7 drinks a health potion, 8 a ticket potion. Both go off on the keypress.
Your teams.
- 1 and 2 choose which team your orders go to. Choosing is free.
- Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 call that team in, or refill the gaps in one already out there. This is the only thing that spends tickets by itself, it needs a gateway standing, and that team then waits 30 seconds before you can call it again.
- Right click a turret, a relay, a hub or a wall and the chosen team commits to it, however far away it is.
- Right click open ground and the chosen team goes there.
- Q yanks everyone back to you and drops what they were doing, orders included. They stay slow to re-engage for about five seconds.
- Given no orders, a team follows you. An order whose target sits off screen for four seconds is cancelled and that team comes home, so keep what you ordered in frame.
Rules and numbers
The map ends when the hub in the middle falls.
Gateways. Stand on a neutral vent and press Space to raise one, free. A standing gateway pays you twelve tickets a minute, is where a team arrives when you call it, and heals you and your beasts next to it. That is the whole economy, so take vents early and hold them.
Tickets. The pool holds a hundred. Calling a team costs what its missing bodies cost, and it is the only thing that spends on its own. You lose the map when you have no tickets, nothing alive, and nothing left to earn from: no gateway, no vent you could still take, no cache on the ground and no potion on your belt. Any one of those keeps you in it.
Turrets. Peashooters shoot over walls. Flamethrowers saturate a short cone, so stay out of the front of one. Tesla coils chain through walls and stun. Repulsors knock your team back and stagger them. Mine layers keep the corridors beside them seeded. Trip an alarm and the Grid sends droids.
Caches. Walk your hero over one and it goes on your belt as a potion on key 7 or 8. A drink that would be wasted is refused and the potion kept, so you cannot lose one by pressing the key too early.
Your own mazes
The mazes you build in the editor play here. Download the JSON from the editor, then on the main menu press LOAD MAZE. That page lists every maze you have added, each under its own title and description, and launches the one you pick.
To add one, press OPEN FOLDER on that same page. The game creates the folder if it is missing and opens it for you, so there is no path to type. Drop the .json in, switch back to the game, and it is in the list: the page rereads the folder every time the window comes back into focus.
If you would rather go there yourself, the folder is C:\Users\you\AppData\LocalLow\Tendrils Foundry\Kith - like us\CustomLevels.
A maze this build cannot play is still listed, marked UNLOADABLE, with the reason where its description would be, so a file that is too new or malformed tells you what is wrong instead of quietly missing. Your own mazes are tracked separately from the campaign, so one named after a chapter can never mark that chapter finished.
This build is early and it is being worked on. If something breaks or plays wrong, tell us on the Discord.
