Your Whole Keyboard Controls One Sad Spider In Spidren

Spidren is the spindly, web-spinning Train Jam spawn of Octodad programmer Devon Scott-Tunkin, and that kinda makes perfect sense when you think about it. It's about an oft-misunderstood owner of too many legs and one lonely heart just trying to scrape by as its brood of children wreak havoc on its life. Difference is, while Octodad plucked out a gentle, family-friendly melody on heartstrings, Spidren does anything but. If you fail to protect your multi-segmented legs by flailing about using almost your entire keyboard, your bizarrely adorable younglings will STAB YOU TO DEATH WITH YOUR OWN FEET. Let this serve as a lesson, folks: it's not easy being a spider, and it's even harder when you're a single spider mother whose children are unrepentant murderers.

The controls are simple. Haha just kidding they will be your nemesis. Your increasingly disheartened spidermom (watch that pooooor face) has eight legs, each with three individual segments. As a result, you must keep your swarm of skittering hatchlings at bay with 24 different keys, and a single press doesn't even necessarily result in an action that'll accomplish that.

The key (huh/ugh) is combining presses on various segments that result in the care and feeding stabbing and eating of your awful spiderkids. Holding femur and tibia segments of one leg and then tapping the same leg's metatarsus portion (ex: hold W + A, then tap Z) will result in a stabbing motion, while holding tibia and metatarsus causes you to devour an impaled ne'er-do-well. If you were ever grounded or spanked for being naughty, just remember: it could've been much, much worse.

Early waves are manageable enough, but eventually your sea of offspring becomes too much, and they start tying up your oh-so-brittle appendages like Hoth snowspeeders bringing down an AT-AT. Spidren is a jam game, so there's not much more to it than that, but it's certainly, um... different while it lasts. Play it for free here.

Thanks, Indie Games.