SpaceDrifting

You get a left thruster and a right thruster. That is the whole control scheme. There is no accelerator, because the engine never switches off. There is no fire button, because any thruster fires. Hold both and you brake, but only down to half speed and no further, so stopping is not something this game lets you do. Aiming is turning, which means you cannot line up a shot without also going somewhere. Two hits end a run. There is no lives counter: after the first hit the ship starts losing pieces of its own outline, and that is the only warning you get. TWO THUMBS, NOTHING ELSE The left half of the screen, the right half, or both at once. The menus use the same two inputs: one side moves the selection, both together choose. There is no third button anywhere in the game. A SCREEN THAT IS 192 BY 108 DOTS The look is not a filter laid over ordinary drawing. Nothing is drawn with the canvas stroke functions at all, because antialiasing puts half-tones on every edge and this screen has exactly four tones. Every line is rasterized by hand into an intensity buffer 192 by 108 dots, the same grid on an iPhone, on an iPad and in any window, then quantized to four values, and a shader adds the dot grid and the tint of the glass. The frame rate is pinned to 59.7275 Hz, the rate of the monochrome handhelds it is built to imitate. Whatever the screen has left over stays black on purpose: the glass never reached the edge of the case. The sound is synthesized as it plays. Square waves only, no recorded files at all, nothing below 380 Hz, and the explosions are fast tone jumps down a pentatonic scale, because a piezo buzzer has no noise channel to use. EVERY RUN STARTS BEFORE THE RUN The ship is born still, off screen, against a random edge and pointing anywhere, and it flies itself to the centre. It is not a cutscene: it is the ship under the same physics you are about to use, brought in by an autopilot that has nothing but your two thrusters. It arrives in grey, with a bracket closing on the middle, and when it blinks the controls are yours. FIVE THINGS TO PICK UP, AND SOME OF THEM LIE Broken rocks drop shield, repair, spread, pierce and anchor. None of them hand you a bigger number; they change how you fly. The anchor takes the drift out of the ship, which in a game called SpaceDrifting is the largest change to the flying there is. One in six arrives infected: it does the opposite of what it promises and lasts less. You can tell before you touch it, because an infected pickup is cracked and, above all, completely still, and a clean one is never still. A DEMO THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF DEMO on the menu is for watching. The machine plays a real round and the game explains itself while it flies: the control strip lights up with the thruster being pressed, and a card tells you one rule at a time, in the order you need them to understand what you are looking at. It is how you hand the game to someone without narrating it. TOP TEN, ON THIS DEVICE Three letters, ten rows, kept on your device and nowhere else. There is no server, no account, no global board and nothing to sign up for. Your own row pulses, which is the only thing that tells you which one is yours. THE FOLDED SHEET FROM THE BOX GUIDE is the paper that used to come inside the box. Eleven pages, read standing still, in the order you need them: what you touch, how the ship flies, what the rocks do, and every pick up drawn with the very same shapes the game uses, clean next to infected. The game never explains itself while you play, on purpose. This is where it explains itself. No ads. No in-app purchases. No accounts. No tracking. Nothing about you leaves the device. There is an easter egg on the menu.