JUMP ROPE

One button. Space, click, or tap. Press it and your character shoots their legs down to find the floor.

The number is the game. Every landing is measured against the exact instant your feet reach the ground, and shown to the thousandth of a second along the bar at the bottom. −0.008 means eight thousandths early; +0.012 means late. Hit 0.000 and it says so.

Jump height is a staircase, timing is not. A near-perfect landing adds a lot to your chain, a loose one adds a little. You climb a rung on the gauge at the top only when the chain crosses a whole number.

The lit part of the bar is the target, and it closes as you climb. Half the bar at the bottom of the gauge, a sixth of it at the top — the number beneath tells you how wide it is right now. Land outside it and you drop a whole level.

Press too early and your legs are in the rope's way. They hang out there for a quarter of a second. If the rope arrives while they are down it snaps in half and costs you a rope. If it does not, you simply lose the chain you had built.

The road forks upward. Between every two places the ground rises. Jump high enough and you land on top of it and carry on along the high road; if your jump does not reach, nothing stops you — you go straight on underneath and watch it go by. Nothing is ever refused and nothing ever waits: the step is simply under your feet when you come down, or it is not.

So it is worth going back down. Every shelf of every place holds its own crates and chevrons, and the game remembers which ones you have lifted. The road you walked at rung four still has things on it when you can clear rung eleven. ROUTES on the title screen is the map of what you have and have not emptied out.

Crates are opened in their own room. Grabbing one mid-run is a thing you did; opening it is a thing that happens to you. Chevrons raise your height ceiling for good. Loops give you a spare rope.