Keeping Up

Work, daily life, health, relationships, and your dreams are all falling apart at once. You cannot pause life—you can only try to keep up.

Keeping Up is a multi-window time-management roguelite set on a chaotic retro computer desktop. Every part of your life appears as a program window with a constantly draining progress bar. Watch the entire desktop, switch rapidly between competing demands, and prevent everything from crashing.

Each window requires a different kind of attention. Click repeatedly to catch up with work, wait for daily-life tasks to finish cooling down, hold a button to maintain your health, respond to messages at the right moment, and complete special interactions involving calculations, timing, and scratch-off panels.

As each run progresses, more windows appear and the pace becomes increasingly demanding.

Build Your Maintenance System

Complete stages and choose from a random selection of rewards. Increase your clicking range, improve recovery, slow down endangered windows, or make your clicks launch pulses across the desktop.

You can also collect and deploy unusual components:

• Use auto-clickers to maintain important positions

• Attach directional arrows to windows and turn them into pulse emitters

• Redirect pulses by placing reflection windows

• Use pause, close, and fast-forward components in critical situations

Window placement, component layout, and pulse direction all become part of your build. Gradually transform a chaotic desktop into an interconnected system capable of keeping itself running.

Recover Data From Every Failure

Every run leaves behind Data Fragments. Enter a BIOS-inspired disk utility to repair upgrade files and gain permanent improvements. Expand your clicking range, increase recovery power, gain additional lives, and unlock new components and pulse effects.

Even when you fail to keep up, the data you recover will help you go further next time.

Features

• Manage multiple program windows with independently draining progress

• Master varied interactions involving clicking, holding, cooldowns, timing, and quick decisions

• Choose randomized roguelite rewards and components during each run

• Build clicking pulses that can travel, change direction, and reflect across the desktop

• Spend Data Fragments on permanent progression between runs

• Complete a tightly paced Standard Mode

• Unlock an increasingly demanding Endless Mode

• Experience a retro visual style inspired by Windows 3.1, 95, XP, 7, 10, and classic BIOS interfaces

• Enjoy CRT effects, system sounds, and dramatic window-crash animations

You cannot take care of everything forever.

But perhaps you can keep going a little longer.