Hold to fire the thruster, release to drop. Your pod sweeps side to side on its own, so climbing is all about arriving at each platform when its gap passes under you — and the scrapline never stops rising.
👆 Hold anywhere to thrust ← All gamesAscend drops you into a vertical shaft with a single button and a pod that will not hold still. Your thruster only pushes upward, and your horizontal position is not yours to choose — the pod sweeps left and right across the shaft on a fixed rhythm whether you like it or not. Every platform stacked above you has exactly one opening, and clearing it means being at that height at the precise moment your sweep carries you across the gap. That is the whole game: you do not steer toward the opening, you wait for the opening to come to you and decide when to spend altitude getting there. Hovering costs you, because a molten scrapline is climbing the shaft below and it never gets tired.
Press and hold anywhere on the canvas to fire the thruster; let go and gravity takes over. The space bar works the same on desktop. Two cyan markers show the edges of each opening, so you can read the gap from several decks away and plan the climb rather than react to it. Clipping a slab is survivable — the pod is knocked back underneath it and your combo resets — but every bounce is altitude you have to win back while the scrapline keeps coming. The bar in the top-left is your breathing room: green means you are well clear, red means the heat is about to reach you. Falling into it ends the run.
At twenty-four points the shaft changes character: the openings stop sitting still. Each slab's gap slides along its platform on its own slow cycle, so the two rhythms you are tracking — your sweep and the gap's drift — go in and out of alignment. Sometimes they move together and the deck is trivially easy; sometimes they oppose and the window is a fraction of a second wide, and the right play is to hover a beat and let the cycle come back around. Three clean decks in a row start the multiplier, which climbs to three times, so a patient run that never clips a slab scores far more than a frantic one that clears the same altitude.