Blackout Bricks

Bounce the ball off your paddle to smash every brick on the wall, but the screen is black. Each brick hit, enemy shot and kill flashes a brief glimpse of where things are, so you play by memory and reflex. Clear the wall to advance; the levels never stop escalating.

• Clear all bricks to finish a level and rebuild a tougher wall.
• You have three balls, lose one each time the ball slips past your paddle.
• Your platform has its own health bar; alien fire chips it down, though it slowly self-repairs.
• It's over if you run out of balls or your platform is destroyed.

• Desktop: move the paddle with the mouse or the left/right arrow keys; click or press Space to launch the ball; Space also pauses, and Esc releases the mouse.
• Phone & tablet: fully touch-enabled, drag to slide the paddle and tap to launch the ball.

• Listen and watch the flashes, the audio pings and momentary light tell you where the ball and enemies sit.
• Keep the ball moving through fresh bricks; each impact buys you another snapshot of the board.
• The ball destroys any alien it touches, so aim a rebound upward to thin out the gunners.
• Let your platform recover between volleys instead of taking constant fire, its slow regen only helps if you dodge.

Breakout played in the dark. Paddle, ball and bricks are all present; the light is not.

Each impact lights the room for a heartbeat, so the layout is revealed in flashes at exactly the moments you are busiest.

That converts a reflex game into a memory one. The ball's position is inferable between flashes if you have been paying attention to its speed and angle, which makes the game about maintaining a mental model rather than tracking a sprite.

Blackout Bricks is an original free browser game that fuses the classic paddle brick-breaker with echolocation and a top-down siege. It's built in-house, plays in any modern browser, and needs no download.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.