Underpump

You carve tunnels through layers of soil while subterranean monsters hunt you through the passages. Your weapon is a pump: skewer a monster and pump it full of air until it swells and bursts. You can also dig beneath rocks to drop them on enemies for a chain crush. Clear every monster to descend to the next layer.

• Pump a cornered monster repeatedly to inflate and burst it.
• Undermine boulders so they fall onto monsters below for bonus multi-kills.
• Clear the level of monsters to dig deeper; get caught and you lose a life.

• Desktop: Arrow keys to dig and move, Space to pump. Keyboard recommended.
• Phone & tablet: keyboard play recommended for precise tunneling.

• Line up rocks early, a single well-placed drop can wipe a whole row of chasers.
• Don't over-tunnel; open passages let monsters flank you from multiple directions.
• Pump fast when surrounded, a half-inflated monster can still reach you.

Underpump revisits Dig Dug, released by Namco in 1982, in which you tunnel through earth pursued by creatures that can also move through it.

The pump is one of the stranger weapons in arcade history: you inflate an enemy in stages, and until the final stage it is merely swollen and still coming. Letting go lets it deflate and resume. The alternative is to undermine a rock and drop it, which is worth far more and kills several at once but permanently removes the rock. Digging shapes the board too, since every tunnel you cut is a route your pursuers can use.

Underpump is an original take on the dig-and-inflate maze arcade genre, free to play instantly in your browser.

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