Thaw puts you on a rig slung across the mouth of a frozen shaft, looking straight down the well while slabs of ice grind their way up toward you. One finger works a heat lance, and the twist is that the lance is a budget rather than a trigger. Every slab carries a stamped seam count, one to three, and the heat it takes to break apart rises with that number while the lance refills at a steady trickle. So the question each slab asks is not simply when to tap. It is whether this particular slab is worth the heat at all, when a far thicker one is already visible two places behind it in the climb.
Tap anywhere to fire. A slab turns amber as it nears the strike zone and flares white through it, and only a shot landed inside that white band shatters the ice cleanly and raises your multiplier. Fire too early and the ice blows apart into shards that wedge against the walls, and enough wedged shards jam the shaft and end the run. Fire with an empty lance and nothing happens but a vented puff of heat and a broken combo. Let a slab climb all the way to the rig and it takes out one of your three props. The gauge on the right shows your heat with a tick marking exactly what the next slab will cost, so when the bar sits under the tick the correct move is to hold your fire and let the trickle refill — coasting is a real play here, not a failure to act.
At twenty-five points the shaft starts delivering brittle slabs, marked in violet with an exclamation instead of a seam count. These are the act-two reversal: lancing one does not clear it, it detonates into two shards at once and breaks the chain, while simply letting it slide past the rig pays points and keeps your combo alive. The skill stops being pure timing and becomes reading, and hoarding heat turns from caution into correct play because the slab you are saving for might be the one you must ignore. Chill, Normal and Hard stretch or squeeze the climb and the width of the white band, but the opening stretch stays survivable in every mode so you learn the lance before it starts charging you for mistakes.