Brotato

Brotato: One Potato, Six Guns, Twenty Waves

A spaceship from Potato World has crashed on a hostile alien planet, and exactly one passenger survived: a potato with enough arms to hold six weapons at the same time. That is the entire premise of Brotato, Blobfish’s top-down arena roguelite, and it is all the setup the game thinks you need before it starts throwing aliens at you.

Here is what makes it different from every other horde-survival game: you do not aim. Your weapons fire on their own, at whatever is closest, forever. The only thing under your direct control is where the potato stands. Everything else — damage, range, attack speed, survivability — is decided in the shop between waves. Brotato is a build game wearing a shooter’s clothes.

This is the All Pain No Gain version (1.1.15), the update that added Nightmare difficulty, the Wounded, and the Railgun on top of an already enormous roster.

The Loop That Eats Your Evening

A run is twenty waves long. Each wave lasts somewhere between 20 and 90 seconds — short at the start, longer as you go — and your only job is to still be alive when the timer hits zero. Aliens drop materials as they die, and materials are both your experience points and your currency, but only if you physically walk over them. That is the whole tension of the game: the safe corner of the arena is never where the loot is.

Survive the timer and the shop opens. Spend, level up, re-enter. The waves are short enough that a disastrous run costs you six minutes, which is exactly why "one more potato" turns into an hour.

Controls

• 🎮 WASD or Arrow keys — Move. This is genuinely the whole control scheme in the default mode.
• 🔫 Weapons fire automatically at the nearest valid target. You never press a fire button.
• 🎯 Manual aiming is optional. Switch it on in the settings if you would rather point your own guns — it rewards good positioning even more, but most players never turn it on.
• 🛒 Between waves the shop takes over with clicks: buy, reroll, lock, level up.

The Arsenal: Over Sixty Weapons, and Yes, Mostly Guns

The weapon list is genuinely huge, and it is split down the middle between things that shoot and things that swing.

Ranged — the guns

Projectile weapons hit one enemy each, but they fire fast, reach across the arena, and can pick up Bounce and Piercing to start hitting whole lines of aliens. The line-up runs from the humble to the ridiculous:

• 🔫 Basic firearms: Pistol, Revolver, SMG, Double Barrel Shotgun, Blunderbuss, Crossbow, Slingshot.
• ⚙️ Sustained fire: Minigun, Chain Gun, Shredder, Flamethrower — the weapons that turn Attack Speed into a wall of bullets.
• 🎯 Precision: Sniper Gun, Harpoon Gun, and the new Railgun, whose damage climbs the longer you go without being touched.
• 💥 Explosive: Rocket Launcher, Grenade Launcher, and the Nuclear Launcher for when subtlety has failed.
• 🔮 Energy and magic: Laser Gun, Gatling Laser, Particle Accelerator, Obliterator, Wand, Fireball, Icicle, Taser, Ghost Scepter.
• 🪃 Thrown and strange: Shuriken, Javelin, Potato Thrower, Medical Gun, and the Flute — because one of the weapon classes is Musical.

Melee — for when they get close anyway

Melee weapons swing in an arc and hit everything in their path, which makes them the answer to being swarmed rather than sniped. Sword, Spear, Scythe, Chainsaw, Circular Saw, Chopper, Hatchet, War Hammer, Mace, Anchor, Trident, Jousting Lance, Quarterstaff, Claw, Fist, Power Fist, Flaming Brass Knuckles, Thunder Sword, Lightning Shiv, Plasma Sledge, Vorpal Sword, Excalibur, Ghost Axe, Ghost Flint, Spiky Shield, Thief Dagger, Sickle, Pruner, Screwdriver, Wrench, Drill, Scissors, Spoon, Plank, Brick, Rock and a plain Stick all show up — and yes, the Stick is a real weapon that can carry a run.

Turrets — the third way to play

Turret, Incendiary Turret, Laser Turret and Explosive Turret do not move with you. You plant them, they scale off the Engineering stat instead of Melee or Ranged Damage, and an Engineering build plays like a completely different game: you are not the damage, you are the thing keeping the damage alive.

Tiers, Merging and Weapon Classes

Every weapon comes in four tiers — Common, Uncommon, Rare and Legendary — and here is the mechanic that quietly separates good runs from bad ones: two identical weapons of the same tier merge into one weapon of the next tier up. Buying a second copy of the pistol you already own is usually a stronger purchase than buying a shinier weapon you have never held.

On top of tiers, every weapon belongs to one or more classes — Gun, Blade, Blunt, Heavy, Precise, Elemental, Explosive, Medical, Medieval, Musical, Naval, Primitive, Support, Ethereal, Tool, Unarmed and Legendary — and stacking several weapons of the same class grants escalating set bonuses. Six random excellent weapons will lose to six mediocre weapons that all share a class. This single rule is the deepest thing in the game.

Sixty-Plus Characters, and Almost None of Them Play the Same

You pick a character before every run, and the choice is not a skin — it rewrites your stats, your starting weapon, sometimes the rules themselves. The roster is enormous, so it helps to think of it in groups.

• 🥔 Start here: Well Rounded, Generalist, Brawler, Ranger and Mage — clean, readable characters that teach you melee, ranged and elemental scaling respectively.
• 🎲 Stat gamblers: Crazy, Chunky, Old, Lucky, Mutant, Speedy, Sick, Glutton and Loud. Each one shoves a stat to an extreme and dares you to build around the hole it leaves.
• 💰 Economy and engines: Saver, Entrepreneur, Arms Dealer, Farmer, Streamer, Explorer, Curious and Jack — characters whose real weapon is the shop.
• 🔧 Engineering specialists: Engineer, Artificer, Builder and Technomage, all built around turrets, structures and Engineering scaling.
• ⚔️ Fighters and hunters: Gladiator, Knight, Soldier, Hunter, Renegade, Wildling, Gangster, Vagabond and Cyborg.
• 🧟 Monsters and the occult: Lich, Demon, Vampire, Ghost, Golem, Cryptid, Creature, Ogre, Druid and Apprentice — lifesteal, curses, elemental damage and worse.
• ⚓ Sea legs: Sailor, Captain, Diver, Buccaneer and Fisherman, plus Hiker, Chef, Dwarf, Doctor, King and Romantic rounding out the oddities.

And Then the Ones That Break the Game Outright

• 🤚 One Armed: Exactly one weapon slot, with the numbers cranked to compensate. Every shop decision suddenly matters ten times more.
• 🐙 Multitasker: Twelve weapon slots. Twice the arsenal, half the room for items.
• 👶 Baby: Up to twenty-four weapons, one gained per level. Screen-filling, frame-dropping absurdity.
• 🐂 Bull: Cannot use weapons at all. You survive on stats and whatever your items decide to do for you.
• 🕊️ Pacifist: Rewards you for not killing things, in a game entirely about killing things.
• 🩹 Masochist: Turns taking damage into a resource. Comes with the Spiky Shield, which hurts things that hurt you.

Each character also carries its own difficulty ladder — Danger levels that unlock as you win, layering nastier enemy mixes onto a run you already thought you had solved.

New in All Pain No Gain (v1.1.15)

The update this build is running adds the hardest content in the game so far:

• 🌑 Nightmare difficulty: A tier above everything that came before. Enemies get flat damage and speed buffs, exclusive Nightmare-only enemies appear, fog blacks out parts of the arena so you cannot see what is coming, and environmental projectiles fly across the map — which tips whole waves into something close to a bullet hell.
• 🩹 The Wounded: A new character who dies in a single hit. The compensation is almost insulting — about 5% more Speed and 8% more Harvesting — but you start with a Tardigrade, which absorbs one instance of damage. That item is your entire life bar.
• 🌠 Railgun: A new ranged weapon whose damage climbs every five seconds you go without being hit, resetting at the start of each wave. It is a perfect-play weapon, and you unlock it by completing a run with the Wounded on any difficulty.
• ⚰️ Death recap: The game now tells you exactly what killed you, so you can plan the revenge properly instead of guessing.
• 🗺️ Random starting map for players with the Abyssal Terrors content, plus a round of balance passes across the roster.

The Shop Is Where Runs Are Won

Between waves you get four random offers. They are not truly random: the pool is weighted by your character, by your Luck stat, and — for weapons — by what you are already carrying, so a committed build feeds itself better offers over time.

You can reroll for materials, and you can lock anything you cannot afford yet. Locked items survive rerolls and survive the next wave, so a Legendary you are 40 materials short of is not gone — it is waiting. New players reroll away things they should have locked, and that single habit is worth several waves of progress.

How to Actually Reach Wave 20

• Commit to one weapon class early. By wave 5 you should know whether this is a Gun run or an Elemental run. Six weapons from six classes is the most common way to die at wave 14.
• Buy the duplicate. A second copy of a weapon you own merges upward. Two Tier-1s becoming a Tier-2 beats two unrelated Tier-1s almost every time.
• Stop buying weapons around the halfway mark. Late waves are survived with Armor, Dodge, HP Regen and Lifesteal. Damage kills the wave; defence lets you collect the materials afterwards.
• Never stop moving, and move in circles. Kite the horde around the arena in a wide loop so your auto-fire is always chewing the front of the pack while you sweep up the drops behind it.
• Pick up everything before the timer ends. Materials left on the floor are gone. Judge the last five seconds by what you can safely hoover, not by what you can kill.
• Match your stats to your weapons. Gun builds want Range and Attack Speed, melee builds want the HP to justify standing in the swarm, and turret builds want Engineering and nothing else. Buying Ranged Damage for a sword build is the classic beginner tax.
• On Nightmare, treat the fog as an enemy. Do not kite into darkness you cannot read, and keep your loop in the lit half of the arena even if that means giving up materials.

Clear wave 20 and the rescue ship arrives — or you ignore it and push into endless, where the aliens keep scaling and your build finally gets to find out where its ceiling is.