Bryan Chen
Notebook

NotebookEntry 07

Neural Overclock

Dodge spikes as an electrode in the brain. Slow time when you need to, but every second of it grows scar tissue that shrinks your maximum charge for good.

  • Browser game
  • Keyboard, mouse or touch
  • Sound
  • Made with Claude
  • 26 September 2026
Neural Overclock mid-run: a glowing diamond probe weaves between red spikes on a dark field, with the score, a signal trace and a charge bar around the edges.
Fig. 1A run in progress, mid overclock. The glial load at the bottom left is the scar grown so far.
Play Neural Overclock

Keyboard, mouse or touch. It has sound: press M to mute, P to pause.

How to play

  • Move with the mouse, WASD or the arrow keys. On a phone, drag anywhere.
  • Overclock by holding Space, the right mouse button or the OC button. Time slows down.
  • Graze past spikes for points, three times as many while overclocked.

The idea

The foreign-body response as a game mechanic. Overclocking is how you survive, and every second of it grows glial scar that permanently shrinks your maximum charge, the way a real scar slowly costs an electrode its signal. The longer you last, the more joins in: fan bursts, homing orbs, then a sweeping laser.

Claude wrote the whole game as one HTML file: no engine and no image files, with the sound synthesized in the browser.