Tap a side to set your ski edge — lateral speed keeps building until you switch. Pass every flag on the side its arrow points, and don't ski off the course.
👆 Tap the left or right half ← All gamesCarve is a downhill slalom where the tap does not move you — it sets an edge. Press the left half and your skis bite left, and they keep biting, so your sideways speed grows for as long as you leave that edge loaded. Press the other half and the skis scrub, dump most of that speed and start building it the other way. Nothing here snaps to a lane and nothing here is a nudge; a run is a rhythm of committing to an edge and then deciding when to let it go. The other half of the idea is that the flags are targets rather than obstacles. Each one carries an arrow: a pink flag pointing left must be passed on its left, a blue one pointing right on its right. You are steering toward the poles, threading past them on a named side, and the sides mostly alternate — which is exactly what makes it swing like a real slalom course instead of a dodging game.
Tap the left or right half of the screen to load that edge; arrow keys work the same on desktop, and the marker near the top corner shows which edge is currently loaded. Every gate you take on the correct side pays out and lifts the combo multiplier that scales your whole scoring rate; a wrong side, or skiing past the boundary netting, burns one of the six bars in the top-left and wipes the combo. Six burnt bars and you are disqualified. From 26 points the piste stops being groomed: pale ice patches spread across the snow, and while you are sliding over one your edge barely grips at all, so a flag that was routine now has to be set up two gates in advance.
Switch edges early and often — a single long hold is how you end up in the netting with no time to scrub. Because changing edge kills most of your lateral speed, the cheapest way to hold a line near the middle of the piste is to alternate in quick taps. Watch the ice a long way up the hill and change your edge before you reach it, never on it. When the arrows point the same way twice in a row, you need far less swing than the alternating rhythm has trained into you, so ease off rather than committing hard.