Wick

The storm has taken the stairs out of the lighthouse. The sea is coming up the shaft. The keeper is hurt at the bottom and there is a ship on the rocks with nobody left to light the lamp for her.

You are Wick, the lighthouse cat, and you can do the one thing the keeper cannot: kick off a wall.

One button

That is the whole game. One control, and it does two things.

• Tap to kick off the wall you are clinging to. Wick arcs up and across the shaft and catches the far wall.
• Hold to dig the claws in. You stop sliding for about a second, then the grip gives; it comes back while you are not using it.

Everything else is timing. Rusted spikes, sparking wire, plaster that gives way under a landing and a chain that throws you across the shaft are all on the walls, and the window slits have no wall to catch at all, so when you kick decides where you land. Get knocked off and you lose height, not the round. Only the water ends it.

The lamp room is 120 metres up. The sea rises the whole time, and at 80 metres it stops being patient. A round runs about a minute and a half, and one press starts the next.

Controls

	Kick and grip	Pause	Menus
Keyboard and mouse	Space, W, Up, or the left mouse button	Escape or P	W/S or the arrows, Enter, Escape
Touch	tap or hold anywhere on the shaft, or the Kick button	the pause pip	tap a row
Controller	A (Cross), or the right trigger	Start	D-pad or left stick, A, B

The whole game plays from any one of the three, menus included, and the layout follows the shape of your screen. It is built tall, for a phone held upright, and it holds up on a monitor.

What to look for

• The tower is a real place from the inside: granite courses, the sheared stubs of the iron spiral stair, brackets, chains, weed and barnacle down at the waterline, and window slits with the storm going past outside.
• The keeper talks to you the whole way up, from the foot of the shaft.
• The height meter down the left edge is also the sea. Watch the gap close.
• The brass lamp room at the top, when you finally get there, and what the beam finds out on the water.

Good cat.