An eight-brawler, last-one-standing arena fought under a setting sun. Pick a shotgunner, sharpshooter, bomb-thrower or heavyweight, hide in the tall grass, smash boxes for power cubes and outlast seven bots while the poison gas closes in.
Sundown Showdown is a top-down 3D brawler in the last-one-standing style: eight fighters drop into a small desert arena of crates, walls, tall grass and lamp posts, and the only way to win is to be the final one alive. You are one of the eight and the other seven are bots. The game's own tagline sums up the pressure — "the sun sets as the gas closes in" — and it is literal: the in-game clock on the top bar runs from mid-afternoon into evening while the light turns from bright gold to purple dusk to lamp-lit night, and a ring of poison gas shrinks the playable space until there is nowhere left to hide.
Before each match you pick one of four brawlers with clearly different jobs. Dusty is a shotgunner with a wide five-pellet cone that is deadly up close. Ace is a sharpshooter who fires a long-range six-shot burst. Fuse lobs bombs that land and detonate after a short fuse. Titan is the heavyweight — the most health by a wide margin, close-range punches and a leap for his super. Each card on the title screen shows health, range and damage bars so you can compare them at a glance.
It is a single page that runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, no server and no matchmaking; the seven opponents are computer-controlled, so a match is available the instant the page finishes loading.
How to play Sundown Showdown
- Choose a brawler on the title screen and press PLAY. A three-second countdown runs before the match starts, and the Easy / Normal / Hard bot setting lives under the gear (⚙) button if you want to change how hard the bots hit you.
- On desktop, move with WASD or the arrow keys and aim with the mouse. Hold the left mouse button to fire — you have three ammo pips, shown under your name, and each one refills by itself after a moment, so short bursts beat holding the trigger down.
- Landing hits charges your super (the ring in the lower-right corner). When it is full, hold Space, E or the right mouse button to show the aim guide and release to fire it. Each brawler's super is a bigger version of what they already do: Dusty's nine-pellet shotgun blast that can break walls, Ace's piercing twelve-shot burst, Fuse's large bomb and Titan's landing leap. Titan also charges his super by taking damage.
- Smash the crates and boxes for power cubes; downed brawlers drop them too. In our test each cube added 400 to your maximum health and made your attacks about 10% stronger, so early cubes snowball. Standing in the tall grass hides you, and your health recovers by itself once you have been out of combat for a few seconds.
- Watch the top bar: "Brawlers left" counts down, and a "Poison gas is closing in!" banner appears roughly twenty seconds into the match. The gas starts hurting a few seconds later and the safe area keeps shrinking, so do not camp the edges.
- On a phone or tablet the touch controls appear on their own: a stick on the left to move, a stick on the right to aim and fire, and a SUPER button. A plain tap auto-aims and fires. Keyboard shortcuts P (pause), T (cycle time of day) and M (mute) exist as extras; on touch, use the gear menu for sound and lighting.
Controls: Desktop: WASD or the arrow keys to move, mouse to aim, hold left click to fire. Hold Space, E or the right mouse button to aim your super, release to fire it. P pauses, T cycles the time of day, M mutes. On a phone: left stick moves, right stick aims and fires, tap SUPER for the special.
Click Fullscreen above the game for the largest play area. If the game does not load, use Open in new tab to play it directly from our copy.
Why it's worth your time
The time-of-day lighting is the game's signature. The gear menu has a "Follow the match" option that ties the sun to the match clock, or a 0–24 slider to freeze it wherever you like — we checked noon (bright and flat), 18:30 (purple and dusky) and 22:00 (night, with the lamp posts lit). The same menu has Low, Medium, High and Ultra quality plus ambient-occlusion and bloom switches, and the game benchmarks your GPU on first load and picks a quality level for you (and drops a level if it later falls below about 24 frames a second). Choosing a level yourself turns the automatic switching off. In our test on a desktop GPU, Low ran at about 60 fps and Ultra at roughly 27 with the settings panel open, so on a modest laptop Low or Medium is the smooth choice.
Everything is in one HTML file of about 740 KB with the 3D engine bundled inside, and once the page and its font are loaded it makes no network requests at all — we blocked everything except our own server while playing and nothing tried to leave. The only thing it saves is a small settings record in your browser's local storage (quality, effects, sound, time of day and bot difficulty). Nothing about your matches is stored.
A match is short. The in-game sun sets over roughly three and a half minutes, and in our test matches a player who fights well can be crowned inside about a minute of match time, because the bots also eliminate each other. When it ends a results screen shows VICTORY!, DEFEATED or SO CLOSE! (for a top-three finish), your rank out of eight, your takedowns and the cubes you collected, with PLAY AGAIN (same brawler) and CHANGE BRAWLER buttons.
Where it comes from: the original is a Claude artifact, a page someone built in a Claude conversation and published by link on claude.ai — that is the address linked as the original on this page. The artifact page labels itself "user-generated and unverified", names no author, and does not say which Claude model produced it, so we do not claim one. What you play here is our own copy of the game with a single change: we removed the wrapper script that claude.ai injects around every artifact, which the game does not need. The game's own code is untouched.
The format — eight fighters, poison gas, power cubes from boxes, a charged super, tall-grass hiding — closely follows the familiar showdown mode of mobile brawler games. The brawlers, art and code here are the game's own and none of the characters are borrowed; we mention the resemblance only so nobody is surprised by how familiar it feels. Two things we could not confirm: multi-touch on a real phone (we tested with an emulated touch screen and sent one touch at a time), and Fuse's bombs flying over walls in live play (the game's code says they do, but we did not stage it).
How it was made and where it lives
Shared as a Claude artifact on claude.ai — a single self-contained page that someone built in a Claude conversation and published by link. Original: https://claude.ai/artifact/EAV3z8SCR8mwxPzUytxaoQ. The Play button above runs our own unmodified copy, so the game keeps working here if that page goes down — which on free hosting usually has nothing to do with the author. Nothing about the game itself is changed, and the original stays linked from every page.
If you like Sundown Showdown, try these
For another brawl with a shrinking arena, try Blobfighter, a soft-body fighter where you charge punches and throw furniture — it also has bot practice matches that need no network. If you like your 3D short and low-poly, SUNBREAK is a low-poly downhill racer. And Sublevel Studio is another single-file 3D page from the site's made-with-Claude shelf.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I play it with other people online?
- No. The seven opponents are computer-controlled bots and the game has no server or multiplayer mode. Everything runs in your own browser.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Yes. Touch controls — a move stick, an aim stick and a SUPER button — appear automatically, and the game suggests holding the phone sideways for a wider view. On an older phone, pick Low quality from the gear menu.
- Who made it, and which AI model was used?
- The original is a Claude artifact published on claude.ai. It does not credit an author and does not state which Claude model was used, so this page does not name either.
- How do I use my super?
- Deal damage until the ring in the lower-right corner is full, then hold Space, E or the right mouse button to aim it and release to fire. On touch, tap SUPER.
- Is my progress saved?
- There is no progression. Only your settings (quality, effects, sound, time of day, bot difficulty) are saved, in your browser's local storage.
- Why does the lighting change during a match?
- That is part of the game: the sun sets as the match runs. In the gear menu you can turn off "Follow the match" and set the time of day yourself, or press T to cycle it.
- Is it an official version of a well-known brawler game?
- No. It is an independent page with its own characters and art that borrows the general showdown format.
- Is Sundown Showdown free to play?
- Yes. Everything on Floating Arcade is free, with no account, ads or downloads.
- Can I embed this game on my own website?
- Yes — copy the snippet below. The embedded player links back here, which is how we ask to be credited.
Embed Sundown Showdown on your site
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