A FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER. IN POWERSHELL.

Your shell.
Their problem.

Someone gave PowerShell a gun.
Now there are ten floors to clear, a printer to fight, and absolutely no good reason this should work.

Download free ↓

WINDOWS · POWERSHELL 7.2+ · OPEN SOURCE

>_ Start-Polf3D.ps1― □ ×

Actual POLF 3D gameplay: the Pipeline Cannon faces a guard and The Printer boss

ACTUAL GAMEPLAY. ACTUAL POWERSHELL.100% UNREASONABLE

YES,
POWERSHELL.

BUILT DIFFERENT. SCRIPTED LITERALLY.Scroll to investigate ↓

NO GAME ENGINE.NO ASSET FILES.NO BUSINESS BEING THIS FUN.>_

01 / THE BEAUTIFULLY BAD IDEA

IT STARTED WITH
“BUT COULD YOU?”

A textured, ray-casting shooter with secret walls, boss fights, and a real in-game console. Almost all of it is plain PowerShell. Somehow, the answer was yes.

10+1

Campaign floors + a secret one

Players. Co-op or deathmatch.

Pre-made game asset files

Two co-op teammates run ahead through a corridor, each in the colour of their slot

BRING FRIENDS. ESCALATE PRIVILEGES.

Clock in. Fight your way out.

From Shellstein Dungeon to Ring 0. Ten floors of patrols, traps, secrets, and deeply unhelpful office equipment.

Make it a team incident.

Bring up to three friends over the network. Clear the campaign together, or settle things in deathmatch.

Tomorrow, another dungeon.

A daily generated dungeon with verifiable runs. Or step into the arena and see how many waves you survive.

02 / THE BUILDING

TEN FLOORS.
ONE LIFT. NO HELPDESK.

Every floor has its own walls, its own music and its own way of making your day worse. Find the keys, find the lift, and read the report it hands you on the way up.

The hub hall on floor 1 with patrols and banners — **FLOOR 01 / SHELLSTEIN DUNGEON**The hub hall. Patrols, banners, and the >_ coat of arms.

Mutants between the pillars of the catacombs — **FLOOR 03 / THE CATACOMBS**Mutants between the pillars. They never shout an alarm.

An elite patrol in the ring corridor of Lab Zero — **FLOOR 04 / LAB ZERO**An elite patrol in the ring corridor.

The great hall of the citadel — **FLOOR 05 / THE CITADEL**The great hall, and everyone in it.

A cold aisle of the data centre — **FLOOR 06 / THE DATA CENTRE**Cold aisles. A sniper at the far end of every one.

The dark core of Ring 0 with a blue glow — **FLOOR 10 / RING 0**Dark, and something in there is glowing blue.

Gold and silver keys
Wall levers
Secret push-walls
Cracked walls
Windows to shoot through
Spikes and crushers
Teleporter pads
Dark rooms and a flashlight
Lockdowns
Power failures
Patch Tuesday
A hidden lift switch

03 / COMMON PARAMETERS. UNCOMMON VIOLENCE.

YOUR COMMAND LINE.
NOW WITH CONSEQUENCES.

These aren't cheat codes. They're your abilities.
Spend privilege. Bend the rules.

[ Z ] · 25 PRIVILEGE

See the future. Then ruin their plans.

Freeze time for four seconds. Ghosts reveal the next two seconds of enemy movement. The red ones are about to fire. Plan accordingly.

A real forecast: the game simulates ahead, then restores the world.

The WhatIf ability reveals ghost predictions of enemy movement — IN-GAME CAPTURE / -WHATIF

Yes, the console is real.

Pipelines, a $PROFILE, background jobs. All inside the game's sandbox.

See it below ↓

04 / POWERSHELL IS NOT JUST THE LANGUAGE. IT IS THE THEME.

PRESS TAB.
GET A PROMPT.

The world stops and you get a PowerShell prompt. A real one: pipelines, Where-Object, Sort-Object, script blocks, tab completion. The game's cmdlets cost privilege when they do something.

The in-game PowerShell console with a pipeline that lists the nearest enemies

# who is coming, nearest first?
Get-Enemy | Sort-Object Distance | Select-Object -First 4

# freeze everyone who is shooting at you
Get-Enemy | Where-Object State -eq 'attacking' | Suspend-Enemy

# who needs keys
Get-Door | Where-Object Lock -ne '-' | Open-Door

# the sentry gun changes sides
Get-Enemy -Kind turret | Set-Turret -Owner Me

Terminals with files.

Log on at a terminal and read what happened at Shellstein, floor by floor: tickets nobody could close, a duty roster, the minutes of the board. Some of them give codes away.

Background jobs.

Start-Job sends out a drone that flies through the ventilation and brings back ammunition, first aid and keys. Receive-Job drops the load at your feet.

A $PROFILE and hotkeys.

Write a function, save it to your profile, and put it on a key with Set-Hotkey. It runs in the middle of a fight without opening the console.

05 / STEALTH

THE BUILDING HAS AN
EXECUTION POLICY.

Anyone who has not noticed you takes double damage. Sneak, use the knife, stay out of sight. Every shot you fire and every camera that sees you makes the whole floor more nervous.

A guard takes aim, seen through a door frame; the execution policy is shown in the top left corner

Restricted

The house suspects nothing. Nobody watches the logs, so your privilege comes back 30 % faster.

AllSigned

It has been told to look twice. Enemies react quicker and gunfire carries further.

RemoteSigned

It is on edge. Quicker still, and a shot is heard most of the way down the floor.

Unrestricted

It sounds the alarm. Everybody who can reach you comes running.

Set-ExecutionPolicy Restricted calms the house down again, for a price. Setting it to Unrestricted is free. You will pay for it in other ways.

06 / THE STAFF AND THE ARSENAL

SEVENTEEN KINDS OF COLLEAGUE.
TEN WAYS TO DISAGREE.

Guards, dogs, snipers and shield bearers.
And then the office equipment.

The cast of POLF 3D: guards, officers, elites, mutants, machines and bosses

BOSS / LEGACY.BAT

“Runs as SYSTEM. Nobody dares to touch it.”

Twin machine guns, three rounds per salvo, then a pause. That pause is your moment.

SUPER BOSS / THE PRINTER

“PC LOAD LETTER.”

Gun bursts and salvos of rockets. After every second salvo it has a paper jam: four seconds of helpless blinking and triple damage.

ALSO ON THE PAYROLL

Auditors, engineers and bugs.

The auditor runs for a terminal to report you. The engineer repairs what you broke. Blow up a bug and two smaller ones crawl out: fix one, get two.

The ten weapons as the player holds them: knife, pistol, machine gun, chain gun, Pipeline Cannon, Force Blaster, rocket launcher, flamethrower, throwing knives and taser

[ 5 ] PIPELINE CANNON

“`|` passes everything along.”

The beam goes through every enemy in the line of fire.

[ 6 ] FORCE BLASTER

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force.

For your whole field of view. Fed by rare Force charges.

[ 0 ] TASER

Stop-Process.

Silent. Stuns people for five seconds and switches cameras, sentry guns and kamikaze bots off for good.

07 / MORE WAYS TO PLAY

THE CAMPAIGN IS
ONLY THE DAY JOB.

New here? Start with the onboarding. Done with the campaign? There is a fresh dungeon every day, an arena that never ends, and a version that runs in your terminal.

The onboarding floor with a hint at the top of the view — **THE ONBOARDING / [ N ]**Ten rooms, one mechanism each. The floor explains itself.

The plan of a generated dungeon — **THE DAILY DUNGEON / [ G ]**Built from today's date, so everybody gets the same one. One life. Every run can be verified.

The arena: a wave of enemies comes through the gates — **THE ARENA / [ H ]**One hall, four gates, wave after wave. Every fifth wave brings a boss.

The player list of a network game, an admin panel on the host — **CO-OP AND DEATHMATCH**Up to four over the network. The host is the admin: kick, ban, forgive.

The game rendered as half-block characters in a terminal — **TERMINAL MODE / -Terminal**The same game as coloured characters. Yes, it works over SSH.

The report at the end of a floor, in the style of a Pester test run — **EVERY FLOOR IS A TEST SUITE**Ten tests per floor, reported Pester style. A hundred to pass in all.

Saved games and autosave
Speedrun clock
Demos that can be verified
Demos exported as GIFs
Modules to install in the lift
Mods in ten lines of data
A point-and-click level editor
Game pad support
Updates itself

08 / NO ASSET FILES

EVERYTHING YOU SEE AND HEAR
IS MADE WHEN IT STARTS.

The download is 350 KB.
The rest is arithmetic.

480

Sprite images, painted by code

Sound effects, synthesised

Tracks, composed by a chiptune composer

The face in the status bar in all its states

How far can PowerShell go?

Ray casting, AI, music, a network protocol, a GIF encoder. C# only where PowerShell cannot keep up.

Read how it was built ↗

09 / EXECUTION POLICY: HAVE FUN

YOUR NEXT BAD IDEA
IS ONE ZIP AWAY.

Free to play. Open source. Unreasonably committed to the bit.

Download POLF 3D ↓

WINDOWS · POWERSHELL 7.2+ · MIT LICENSE

Three steps. Zero dignity lost.

01
Get PowerShell 7.2 or newer ↗
02
Download and unpack polf3d.zip.
03
Run Play.cmd. Press N for the tutorial.

Prefer to clone it?

git clone https://github.com/oNdsen/polf3d.git
cd polf3d
./Start-Polf3D.ps1

First launch compiles four small C# helpers and caches generated audio. No extra modules needed. After that the game updates itself from the title screen. Full setup notes ↗

Your shell.Their problem.

IT STARTED WITH“BUT COULD YOU?”