How to play
On the rope, rock cannot kill you. Off it, any touch ends the run.You cannot descend while holding on, so every metre you gain is a metre you spent unprotected. That is the entire game.
Controls
| Keyboard | Touch | What it does |
|---|---|---|
Hold Space or Enter | Touch and hold anywhere | Grab the nearest anchor. Release to let go. |
← → or A D | Slide that finger sideways | Aim the grab, steer in free fall, pump the swing. |
↑ or W | Slide up | Aim upward. While attached, climb the rope. |
↓ or S | Slide down | Aim downward. Pay the rope out. |
One finger does everything on a phone. On-screen buttons would cover the thing you are trying to look at.
Everything else is one key:P or Esc pause ·N mute ·M minimap ·R restart ·H leave the game. While paused, ← → set the volume.
The six anchors
Shape tells you what a thing is. Colour tells you whether it will hurt you — only the two red ones can.
Solid — a plain dot
Ordinary. Swing on it, let go, carry on.
Rest — a dot inside a square
Let go while moving slowly and you stay hanging. Use it to stop, look at what is below, and choose. One sits just above every split.
Pitch — a dot inside a wide ring
Its rope is 1,150px instead of 470, so you can ride it a long way down while still protected. Worth steering toward — spot them early.
Brittle — a hollow red ring
It breaks about 0.7 seconds after you take it. Hollow because it will not hold. Fine as a stepping stone, fatal as a plan.
Boost — a dot with chevrons
A speed bonus when you let go. Swing to build speed first — it multiplies what you earned. You leave fast and unprotected.
Boom — a solid red star
It erupts the moment you touch it and you never get a hold. Every anchor within 430px is knocked out for about three seconds. It does not push you: you keep the momentum you had and fall on into an area that has just gone dark.
Getting back up
Hold ↑ to aim — the highlighted anchor becomes one aboveyou. Grab it, keep holding ↑, and you climb the rope. At the top it takes the next anchor above without letting go, so climbing is one continuous protected action. It is slow on purpose: about 190 px per second against 780 falling.
The nine kinds of cave
Placed by a seeded grammar, so the cave is identical for every player and unpredictable the first time you fall it. Never the same piece twice in a row, and never three easy ones together.
| Drift | Wide and gently curving. Recovery. |
|---|---|
| Sweep | One hard arc that throws you sideways. |
| Chimney | Narrow but straight. Fast. |
| Pinch | Closes hard, opens straight back. Always short. |
| Funnel | Wide, then a throat somewhere you are not, then wide again. |
| Stagger | A short weave of alternating shelves. |
| Split — merge | Two channels around a rock spine. Both rejoin; one is faster. |
| Split — dead | Two channels. One ends in solid rock. Read it, or climb back. |
| Cavern | A big room with islands in it. Cross it. |
The ten bands
The descent is ten stretches of 10,000 m. The one you are in is named in the top right, and its name flashes as you cross into the next.
01 Midnight02 Tide03 Fern04 Moth05 Orchid06 Rust07 Ember08 Lichen09 Slate10 Dawn
They are colours, not difficulty. Nothing about the cave, the anchors or the physics changes with the band — every hazard is in the game from the first metre. The names exist so a depth has a face.
Scoring
Depth is measured from where the run began, and your score is thedeepest point you reached — not where you died. Climbing back up to take another route never costs you.
Runs shallower than 50 m are not offered to the board, so the panel asking for a name does not appear after them. That is the only thing depth decides other than the ordering.
The share of the run you spent on the rope
When a run ends it reports how much of it you were attachedfor, counted over the same frames your score is — up to your deepest metre and no further. It counts time on the rope, not time on the button: a rest anchor keeps you hanging after you let go, and a button held with nothing in reach holds nothing. It is a fact about that descent. It is not scored, it is not ranked, and there is no number to aim at.
Beside it is the longest single stretch you stayed on the rope. The share on its own cannot tell one descent from another: half a run held in one long stop and half of it held in twenty catches come to the same number and are nothing alike. Also not scored, and also nothing to aim at.
Three things worth knowing
- The dotted arc is always on. It shows where free flight would take you, and turns red at the exact point you would hit rock. Nothing is hidden from you.
- There is always a rest anchor above a split. You can stop, look at both channels, and choose. The map is built so that you can.
- The swing is where speed comes from — and it is also the only time you are not getting deeper. Both are true at once. Deciding between them, over and over, is the whole game.