THE RIDEWalk into a piece whose cells are at your level and you climb onto it — one row for a flat piece, two for a piece that fills the band. From that moment your weight is on it: the load bar across the piece fills, and it crawls instead of driving. When the bar fills it gives way — it drops out of the lane, falls, and comes apart into the pile with you on top. You cannot get off once it is falling. Leaning (DOWN) does not hurry it: it brakes the piece, so the drop lands where you are standing instead of a couple of cells downstream. Every ride costs the same time either way. What braking costs is the queue — a stopped piece is a jam, and what is behind it closes on your back while you wait.
CRUSHEDA piece that reaches your cell shoves you one step ahead of it. That is survivable, and often useful — it is a free ride along the surface. It stops being survivable the moment there is nowhere to be shoved: a side wall, or a column of your own pile. The staircase you are building is also the thing you get crushed against, and the taller it gets the less road there is to be pushed along.
THE PILELocked wreckage. You walk on it, you climb steps of up to two rows, and you fall down anything deeper. Traffic is not stopped by it — the lanes run over the top of the pile, and no amount of building will ever shield you. What the pile does instead is take your room away: every column you add is one more thing a shove can pin you against, so the staircase gets more dangerous to stand on the taller it gets. The lanes the pile has grown past are dimmed in the rail, and that count is the clearest read on how the climb is going.
FULL ROWThe pile has no holes and no overhangs — rubble slumps — so the number of rows standing complete is simply the height of the shortest column, and every one of them clears at once. Everything above drops, you included. Tetris keeps a column open to score; here you keep one open to keep the floor you are standing on, and the marked column at the foot of the board is the one doing it. A clear pays back a short freeze of every lane and nothing else — no points. It is a setback, and the only reason it ever happens is that you built too evenly.
THE LANESSeven lanes, two rows each, alternating direction — so whichever lane you are standing in, the one above runs against it, and every step up reverses the traffic you are reading. Each lane has its own speed, fixed for the run and shown in the rail beside its direction and how choked it is. A slow lane is a long safe ride and a long time standing still; a fast one is over before the queue behind you builds. Learning which is which within the first minute is most of the game.
THE EXITThe green strip across the top two rows. Reach it and the run is over — which means the last piece you ride is one you board while standing fourteen rows up, in the busiest band on the board, with a pile underneath you made of everything that tried to stop you getting there.
KEYS← → or A D walk and climb, ↑ hops, ↓ or Space leans on the piece you are riding, braking it. P pauses, M mutes, R restarts.