Ninety-Nine: A Life Upward

You begin on the floor, unable to walk. Heaven is at the top. Everything in between is furniture. This is a game about the one thing nobody lets you rehearse. You climb, and climbing makes you older, and the body you climb with keeps changing underneath you. At seven you run on instinct. At twenty-six you are at your absolute peak and nobody tells you. At fifty-six your hand starts to shake on the aim. At seventy-six you weigh almost nothing and the air holds you up. You will not notice the exact moment you peaked. Nobody does. There is no death here and no failure screen. When you fall you get younger and climb it again — and that turns out to be a harder thing to sit with than losing. Nine people are standing on the way up. The one who put you here. The one who let you fall. The one who stayed. Reach them and they say one thing to you, once. Fall below them and they thin into a shape you can no longer speak to, and you go on climbing past what used to be them. A girl starts following you around thirty-five, copying the way you jump. She keeps up for eighteen years. Then she does not. Somewhere near the top the light stops being a destination and turns out to have been in the room the whole time. — — — Nine ages, each with its own body and its own physics. A tower generated from scratch every single life. Two traits out of eight, dealt to you at birth. Nine small objects that were never really yours, hidden somewhere new each time. Ledges that are slippery, ledges that crumble, ledges that drift, ledges that sink under you. Weather that pushes every jump you make. A day and a night that turn while you climb, with fireflies that follow your path. At the gate you can turn round and climb the same life all the way back down. No ads. No energy. No daily rewards. No account. Nothing is collected about you. The game never goes online. Headphones recommended. It is quieter than it looks.