Cyber-Clones: Panic Logic is a free online multiplayer game that runs entirely in your browser — no download, no install, no account. Up to eight human players share an arena with a crowd of up to fifty identical AI clones. You look exactly like the crowd. They move at exactly your speed. Your job is to rob the place blind without anyone working out which of the walking silhouettes is a person.
It is a game about being watched. Every genuinely useful thing you can do — sprinting for a gem, standing still at a terminal, buying an upgrade at a shop — is also the thing that tells the other humans exactly where you are. The tension is not in reflexes; it is in deciding how much you are willing to be seen doing.
AT A GLANCE
- Players: 1–8 humans per room, plus up to 7 AI rivals and up to 50 crowd bots.
- Round length: 2 to 6 minutes. Four minutes is standard.
- Modes: Stealth (the main event) and Deathmatch.
- Price: free. No ads, no purchases, no account.
- Platform: any modern desktop browser. Keyboard required.
- Interface language: English by default, with Spanish selectable in the settings panel.
The core loop
In Stealth mode, the arena is scattered with two kinds of loot, and they do completely different jobs.
Gems are your score — but only once they are banked
Private gems spawn across the map for each player. Picking one up does nothing for you yet: you are carrying it, and if you die you drop everything you have not banked. To convert gems into points you must walk to an UPLINK terminal and stand inside its ring for about five seconds while the upload bar fills. Leave the ring and the progress decays.
This is the whole game in one mechanic. Standing motionless in a bright ring for five seconds is the single most conspicuous thing a human can do in a room full of aimlessly wandering bots. Everyone knows it. Everyone has to do it anyway. Once a gem is banked it is yours permanently — death never takes banked gems away, which is what makes the greedy second trip so tempting.
MB are your budget, and they never score
Data packets scattered around the map give MB, the game's currency. MB are worth exactly zero points. You spend them at the $ shop terminals on ability charges, permanent upgrades, or an instant cooldown reset. Killing a rival human also pays MB.
Shopping, like banking, is public: everyone can see who is standing at the shop. A player who is well equipped is a player who was visibly buying things a minute ago.
Hiding in plain sight
Humans and bots are rendered from the same pool of eight cosmetic chassis, assigned at random to everybody, and they move at identical base speed. There is no outline, no name tag, no marker. The only thing that gives a human away is behaviour.
That is why the bots have personalities. Eight of them can populate the crowd — the Worker, the Glitch, the Rusher, the Social, the Paranoid, the Looter, the Bodyguard and the Mimic — and every one of their routines is reproducible by a human with the movement keys and the emote button. The Social bots stop and chat in small groups; you can join a group and stand there emoting, and you are functionally invisible. The Rusher moves faster than everyone; sprint in the open and you might pass for one. The whole roster is a menu of alibis.
The host chooses which personalities are in play, so the crowd's behaviour — and therefore the set of disguises available — changes from lobby to lobby.
Everything kills instantly
There is no health bar in Cyber-Clones, on purpose: nothing does partial damage. Every lethal thing in the game is lethal on contact. Get hit and you are gone, you drop your unbanked gems, and you rebuild after a three-second respawn.
That includes the floor. Spikes erupt from the tiles throughout the round — always with a one-second warning animation, and never within two tiles of a character, so no death is unfair — and they accumulate. A four-minute round ends in a map with far less safe ground than it started with, which slowly squeezes everyone toward each other.
Kits and abilities
Every player starts a round by picking one of three kits. Each grants two signature abilities; everything else is bought with MB during the round.
| Kit | Abilities | Plays like |
|---|---|---|
| Distraction | Active Decoy, Clone Hack | Recommended for new players. Drop two decoy clones that flee in fake panic while you turn invisible and walk away, or instantly swap places with the nearest bot in your line of sight. |
| Stealth | Optic Invisibility, Shadow Dash | For the patient. Four seconds of invisibility that survives you shooting, at the cost of speed; plus a short forward teleport that leaves a decoy clone standing where you were. |
| Destruction | Gravity Grenade, EMP Cannon | For the aggressive. A grenade that drags players in and kills at the core, and a piercing electric beam that kills everything in a straight line. |
Two abilities are always available to everyone. Wind Push is a frontal cone that shoves people around and cannot kill — it exists to knock a rival off a terminal, into spikes, or simply into looking ridiculous. Bounce Shot is a wall-ricocheting projectile that kills outright, limited to two rounds in the chamber that recharge slowly, so missing twice really hurts. There is also a Clone Whistle in the shop that makes nearby bots run in your direction of travel, manufacturing a crowd to disappear into.
The things that go wrong on purpose
Panic Mode
In the final stretch of a Stealth round — between thirty seconds and two minutes, host's choice — the arena turns on you. The AI rebels, and a scanner sweeps the map at intervals, flashing every human as a red silhouette for a fraction of a second. Your disguise stops working. Banking during the panic is faster than normal, which means the endgame is a scramble of people who all know exactly where each other are, sprinting for terminals through a floor full of spikes.
The Golden Gem
Roughly every seventy-five seconds a single public Golden Gem appears, worth far more than a normal one. Picking it up marks you for an instant. It is a deliberate trap: take it and you have announced yourself, ignore it and you have handed somebody else a lead.
Secret contracts
Each player privately receives a side mission with a gem reward — bank eight gems, kill a human rival, use five abilities, and so on. Nobody knows anybody else's, so unexplained behaviour is never quite proof of anything.
Supply drops and mutators
Crates land during the round carrying single-use overpowered abilities: a supercharged Mega Grenade, or a Ghost Cloak granting five seconds of invisibility at full speed. They are public and visible, so a crate is a conflict zone with a countdown on it.
On top of that, each round can roll a random mutator that rewrites one rule for everybody: double MB from packets, a spike field that grows far faster, everyone twenty percent quicker, fifty percent more loot on the map, or half-price shops.
Deathmatch
If you would rather skip the theatre, Deathmatch strips the game to its skeleton: no crowd, no gems, no hiding. Score is kills, cooldowns are loose, and the round ends when someone hits the frag limit (one to twenty, twelve by default) or the clock runs out. It is the same instakill physics with all the social pretence removed — and it is a good way to learn what the abilities actually do before you need them under pressure.
Controls
- WASD or the arrow keys to move.
- Hold an ability trigger to aim, release to fire. A live guide shows the shot; it turns red if the ability is not ready.
- Keys 1–6 select ability slots; the mouse wheel or the cycle key rotates through them, and holding Shift opens a radial picker.
- Walk into a $ shop to open the upgrade terminal.
- An emote key pops a speech bubble — the single most important social tool in the game, because it is what the Social bots do all day.
- Every binding is remappable from the settings panel.
Playing with friends
One player creates a room and gets a five-character code. Public rooms also appear in the browser's room list for anyone to join; private rooms need the code. Everyone picks a kit in the lobby while the host tunes the round — mode, round length, bot count, which bot personalities appear, spike rate, panic duration and intensity, supply drop frequency, global speed, loot density, mutators, contracts and the Golden Gem — and then starts it.
Short of humans? The host can add up to seven AI rivals, which join the room as players with kits of their own rather than as crowd filler, so a lobby of two friends still has a real field to hide from.
The server is authoritative and simulates at thirty ticks per second, so what you see is what everybody sees.
Free, and quietly measured
Cyber-Clones is free, has no ads and no purchases, and needs no account — you type an agent nickname and play. That nickname is the only thing about you that leaves your browser: it appears on the global ranking alongside your banked gems. Beyond that we keep only anonymous counts of whether the game is being played, with no nickname, no account and no IP address attached, and a one-click opt-out in the main menu. The privacy policy explains every field of it, written from the source code.
Also by Spireborn
Cyber-Clones is made by the solo developer behind Elderspire, a free browser auto-battler roguelike and eldritch creature collector of cosmic horror — a slower, single-player game about recruiting monsters and climbing a tower, and about as far from a four-minute panic as you can get. Both run in the browser, both are free, and neither wants an account from you.