Antigrav has one button, but the craft is never simply falling. Gravity, the walls, the slope of the walls, the attraction field and the weight you are carrying all push on it at once. This chapter explains each force with the numbers behind it, so you can predict where the craft will go instead of reacting to where it went.
Gravity and the tap
Gravity always pulls the craft toward either the floor or the ceiling. A tap (click, touch or Space) does two things in the same instant: it reverses the direction of gravity and it cancels your current vertical speed. The second part matters more than it sounds. Whatever speed you had built up toward a wall is wiped, and you start accelerating the other way from rest.
The invert fires the moment the button goes down. There is no delay while the game decides whether you meant a tap or a hold, so timing a flip is exact.
Because every tap resets your vertical speed to zero, two quick taps in a row leave you pointing the same way as before but with no vertical speed at all. Rapid tapping is a way to slow your drift and hang near one height for a moment, without spending any of the field's reserve.
The walls push back
Hitting the floor or the ceiling is not a crash. On contact, gravity flips automatically, your vertical speed is cancelled, and the wall throws you away from it: at the instant of impact the push is 2.15 times normal gravity, fading back to normal over about a third of a second. The result is that the craft crosses the corridor in arcs rather than sliding along a surface. You cannot rest on a wall; the wall always sends you back.
Bounce charge
The strength of that push depends on your bounce charge, drawn as an arc around the craft. It is bright crimson while you have a good amount and turns grey when it runs low.
- Each wall hit spends 22% of the charge.
- The charge refills at 55% per second, but only while you are in the air, touching neither wall.
- A completely drained bounce still has 30% of its full strength, so it never stops working entirely.
The break-even rhythm is about one wall hit every 0.4 seconds. Bounce faster than that and each launch gets weaker; fly a calmer line and the charge holds. The Aphelion craft refills the charge 70% faster.
Slopes turn impacts into speed
The corridor is never flat, and the angle of the wall where you land decides what the bounce does to your forward speed.
- A wall that falls away from you (a floor sloping down ahead, or a ceiling sloping up ahead) is a glancing hit. Part of your impact speed is converted into forward speed.
- A wall that rises into you (a floor climbing ahead, or a ceiling dropping ahead) is a head-on hit. It costs forward speed, but the push off the wall lasts longer, so you get height back instead.
The amount scales with both the steepness of the slope and how fast you were moving vertically when you hit. A long fall onto a steep downslope pays the most. The bonus is capped at +300 speed and the penalty at -170, and either one drains away by itself over the next second or so. On top of that, each level adds 300 speed from start to finish on its own, so earned speed rides on a rising baseline.
The bounce also dents the wall and sends a ripple along it. That ripple is visual only; the wall you collide with is always the real one.
The slingshot
A bounce that converts a lot of impact into forward speed, while your bounce charge is above half, is a slingshot. It is the highest-scoring move in the game:
- It adds one to your combo, just like a red coin.
- It scores 40 points times your chain length (counting up to six) times your combo multiplier.
- Consecutive slingshots build a chain: the callout reads SLINGSHOT x2, x3 and so on, with banners at three and five.
- Any wall hit that is not a slingshot resets the chain to zero.
Since a slingshot needs more than half your charge, chaining them means spending time in the air between hits. Slamming wall to wall drains the charge below half and the chain dies.
The attraction field
Keep the button held for more than 0.14 seconds and, on top of the flip you already got, the attraction field switches on. While it runs:
- Your vertical speed is damped hard every frame. You do not stop, but you fall far more slowly, which reads as hovering against gravity.
- Red coins within a large radius around you (215 units, the circle drawn on screen) are pulled toward you. The field never moves hazards.
The field runs on its own reserve. A full reserve lasts about 2.4 seconds of continuous holding. It refills whenever you are not holding, and refills up to twice as fast when you are carrying mass. Once it is empty it will not switch on again until it has recovered a little, so an empty field behaves like a short cooldown. There is no meter for it on screen, so count it in your head: one long hold, then let go. The Perigee craft drains the reserve 30% more slowly.
Remember that a hold always begins with a flip. If you want to hover in place, press when gravity is pointing the wrong way, so the flip that comes with the press points it the right way.
Mass and how the light bends
Every red coin adds one eighth to your mass, and mass makes you heavier. Effective gravity is multiplied by 1 plus 0.55 times your mass:
| Red coins held | Mass | Gravity | What you see |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 | 1.00x | Normal |
| 3 | 0.375 | 1.21x | LENSING: light starts falling in toward the craft |
| 5 (all of them on Easy) | 0.625 | 1.34x | Stronger lensing |
| 6 (Hard only) | 0.75 | 1.41x | SINGULARITY: the second, heavier tier |
| 8 (Hard only) | 1.00 | 1.55x | The event horizon opens and mass resets to zero |
The colour of the whole scene also shifts from indigo toward violet as mass rises, so you can read your weight from the world without looking at the counter. Heavier means faster falls, harder bounces off the far wall, and less time to correct a bad line. The upside is that the field reserve refills faster. What happens at full mass is covered in Red coins, the horizon and the star.
Null gravity inside the anchor pocket
Each campaign level has one anchor pocket. Inside it gravity is zero: the craft keeps whatever vertical speed it entered with and flies in a straight line. A tap still cancels your vertical speed, so inside the pocket a tap means fly level. Gravity returns the moment you leave, which is why the angle you enter at is the angle you exit at.
Why the late levels feel so fast
At low speed you can see a hazard and still cross the whole corridor before it arrives. Above roughly 750 speed that stops being true; you can only shift part of the corridor's height between seeing a hazard and reaching it. On Easy, level 1 crosses that line partway through, and level 9 and every level from 11 onward start above it. The game sizes its crushers, pillars and wall hazards against what is physically reachable at the current speed, so nothing is undodgeable, but the late campaign asks you to be moving toward the right side before the hazard is even on screen. That is why reading the hazard wall and the flip blocks ahead of time (see Techniques) matters more than reflexes.