- Pace94 · frantic
- The waves of wisps never stop: one every two or three seconds, souls that streak off and are lost in a second if you hesitate, a drum climbing from 150 to 174 beats per minute.
- Difficulty69 · rather merciless
- Each stage asks for twenty-eight to thirty-six souls saved; lose sixteen to twenty and it starts over, a good minute lost. After each failure the gate widens a little and a few more lost souls are forgiven, without saying so.
- Tone95 · unsettling
- It's Halloween night: souls that scream when a pumpkin swallows them, black holes that grin, a theremin singing off-key, and an ending where you find out what you were.
- Story18 · silent
- One line per stage to name the gesture, and not one more; the story is in the souls passing through and in the last image.
- Scale87.8 · cosmic
- You play among the stars: the light of the whole sky bends around what you are, black holes drink the dust, and the souls cross space from one edge of the screen to the other.
- Form75.5 · rather strange
- You steer nothing you can see: an invisible gravity known only by its effects (stars lensed, dust, sound), with rules that change every stage, colours, gravity you flip, and orbiting gates.
- Look91.5 · lush
- A full sky: hundreds of stars twisting into arcs around the mass, swirling dust, wisps with trails, pumpkin black holes with discs of fire, gates of green runes. Toned down on old phones.
The theme
On Halloween night, souls cross the cosmos as will-o'-the-wisps on their way to the gate of All Saints, and pumpkin-shaped black holes swallow them as they pass. You are nothing anyone can see: a gravity, an invisible mass whose place you can only guess from the stars bending around it, the dust it swirls and the song of a theremin. When the last soul has gone through the gate, the stars finally draw what you were.
The mechanics
Move your gravity with finger or mouse (or the arrow keys) without ever seeing it: it follows with a lag, and you only know where it is from the light it bends. The wisps come in waves and fly straight; bend their path into the gate. Each stage changes the rule: two colours and two gates, then a pumpkin that sucks everything in and that you get around by flipping your gravity with a tap (Space), then gates that orbit. Lose too many souls and the stage starts over.
Palette
A violet-black void #0a0612 and a plum nebula, bone dust #e8e0d0, wisps of ember #ff9a3a and spectral violet #b98cff, will-o'-the-wisp green gates #7dffb2, pumpkin black holes with orange mouths #ff6a00 ringed by a disc of fire, and the lens: stars stretched into arcs around nothing. Creepster for the title, Grenze for the rest. Halloween at the edge of a black hole.
