7Games

A climber is making his way up a terraced cliff stairway, and he never stops to think about the gaps. He jumps every one of them automatically, the moment his feet reach the edge. What you control is not when he jumps, but how he jumps — and you do it by changing the weight he carries. The stones in his pack decide everything. A light pack sends him high and far, arcing well over a wide break in the stairs. A heavy pack flattens the arc into something low and quick, which is exactly what you want when a stone arch hangs over the next landing. So the whole climb becomes a question of weight management, read one gap at a time. Tap on an open stretch of stair and the climber sets a stone down, lightening his load for the lift he needs ahead. Tap inside a cairn zone and he picks a stone up, trading height for a flatter, ducking jump. Both actions are a single touch, and both take effect on the very next gap, so you are always planning one jump ahead of where his feet are. That one-jump lookahead is where the game lives. A wide gap followed immediately by a low arch means you need to be light, then heavy, with almost no stair in between to make the change. Cairns are not always placed where it would be convenient, and neither are the open stretches you need in order to put a stone down. Sometimes the answer is to carry an extra stone far longer than feels comfortable, just so it is in the pack when the arch arrives. Fifteen levels carry the climb from the lower terraces to the shrine at the summit, and each one lays out its gaps, arches and cairns as a small puzzle of timing and weight. There is nothing to configure and nothing to learn beyond the single tap — the difficulty comes entirely from reading the stairway ahead and deciding, in the second you have, whether this climber should be heavier or lighter when he leaves the ground. Walk the terraces, mind the arches, and put the stones where the climb needs them.

Aventio Jump