How to play

You are Kiki, a chubby white cat with a plasma emitter strapped to one paw. You fell through a hole in time. Nothing that follows is your fault.

The short version

Get to the right. Shoot what is in the way. When a stage ends there is a boss, and when the boss ends you take its weapon and it becomes a key to something you walked past three stages ago.

Controls

The game reads keyboard, gamepad and touch at the same time. Pick up a controller mid-game and it just works; no menu, no setting.

Keyboard

Controller

Xbox 360, Xbox One and Xbox Series pads work on Linux, Windows and macOS. The game finds them on its own, and says so with a small notice when one connects or disconnects. The keyboard keeps working the whole time.

Pushing the stick lightly walks; pushing it all the way runs.

Any of it can be changed in Settings > Controls > Controller. You rebind by pressing the button you mean rather than picking it from a list, and you can give one action two buttons instead of replacing the first. The same screen has the deadzone slider and a live stick test, which is the quickest way to tell whether a pad is drifting or you are.

Touch

An on-screen stick on the left and four buttons on the right, all multitouch, so walking while jumping while shooting is one gesture and not a compromise. The stick floats: it recentres wherever your thumb lands rather than making you find a fixed circle.

Everything about the overlay is adjustable in Settings: size, opacity, which side the stick is on, and vibration. You can also force it on or off regardless of what the device reports.

Moving well

The movement is the game, so it is worth knowing what it forgives:

• Coyote time. You can still jump for a moment after walking off a ledge.
• Jump buffering. Pressing jump slightly before you land still jumps.
• Variable height. Releasing the button early cuts the rise. Tap for a hop, hold for the full arc.
• A wall jump refreshes your air jump and your dash. That is what makes a chimney climbable and a mistake recoverable.
• The dash has invulnerable frames and suppresses gravity, and it keeps part of its speed on the way out, so it chains into a jump instead of stopping you.

A full jump clears about three and a half tiles. A running jump crosses about five tiles of gap. With the air jump you have roughly six tiles of height.

Health and energy

The green bar is health, the blue one is energy. Energy refills on its own and pays for special abilities. Health does not: it comes back from pickups and from checkpoints.

Checkpoints heal you. How much depends on difficulty, and they are placed so that dying never costs you more than a couple of minutes. Every stage has one immediately before its boss.

Prompts and settings

The first stage names each button once, where the room has just made that move necessary: move, jump, shoot, charge, double jump, wall slide, wall jump, dash, checkpoint. The prompt never stops the game and goes away when you do the thing. Each one is shown once per save.

If you do not want them, Settings > Gameplay has NORMAL, MINIMAL and OFF, plus a button that forgets everything you have already been shown.

Settings > Video has the render resolution, from 384x216 up to 1920x1080. It changes how many pixels the picture is made of and nothing else: the camera shows exactly the same amount of the level at every setting, so a small window is never a disadvantage. AUTO picks the largest whole multiple your display can hold.

Difficulty

Three settings, changeable at any time from Settings, mid-campaign included.

None of them change how Kiki moves. Acceleration, jump arc, dash and wall jump are identical on every setting. Changing difficulty never means relearning the game, which is why you can change it whenever you like.

Saving

The game saves by itself, to the browser or app it is running in. There is one save slot. It survives updates: the format is versioned and old saves are migrated rather than discarded.

Starting a new game asks first, because it overwrites that slot.

Next

• Controls and abilities in detail
• What to collect
• How the stages unlock
• Beating the bosses