About

Belay is a game about the cost of holding on. This page says what it is about. The game itself never does.

The rule

On the rope, rock cannot kill you. Off it, any touch ends the run.And you cannot descend while holding on.

That is the whole design. The rope is genuinely protective — while you hold it, the cave cannot hurt you — and it is precisely what stops you getting anywhere. Every metre is bought with unprotected time you chose to spend. Grab to survive, let go to move.

Why that shape

People do this. The thing that makes a fear bearable in the moment, checking once more or staying in or holding on, is usually the same thing that keeps it exactly where it is. You never find out what would have happened without it.

And not only fear. The safe job. The conversation not had. The message left in drafts. Everything that protects you costs you movement, and the arithmetic is genuinely difficult, because holding on is not stupidity. It works.

Belay is that arrangement with gravity attached. Nothing in the game says so. There is no narrator, no lesson and no screen explaining what the rope means; you either notice or you play a falling game, and both are fine. What the game does instead is show you: the world narrows while you hold on, and opens again over a descent you spend off the rope.

What it is not

Belay is a game, not a treatment, and it is never offered as one. It makes no claim to be good for anyone and nothing here is advice. The resemblance above is why the design is interesting. It is not evidence that the design does anything, and working on a real fear is done with people who are trained for it.

The percentage the game reports is a fact about a descent. It is not a measurement of you, and it is never turned into a type, a grade, or a comparison with anybody's temperament.

The bottom

It is at 100,000 metres and it is not meant to be reached. There is no ending to unlock and no completion to chase, so whatever the game is worth has to be in the falling rather than the arriving. When you die it tells you how deep you got and how much of it you spent holding on, and then it says nothing else.

What it will never do

• Explain its own metaphor inside the game.
• Use streaks, daily rewards, notifications, or anything else designed to make leaving feel like losing.
• Show an advertisement, or sell anything.
• Decide a death for you. Every one is a thing you did.

Contact

Bugs, ideas, or anything about your data: hello@playbelay.com.

To delete a score you posted, Your data does it directly, without waiting for a reply.