First Light: Crowfeet

A three-minute climb, in the last hour before dawn.

You are the Old Crow. The crow's-feet around your eyes are pale with age and your wings will not carry you any more. The murder roosts at the top of this sea cliff and it leaves at first light. Hunger gnaws. So you do the one thing left to you: you climb, on foot, your crowfeet gripping shelf after shelf, eating what glows on the ledges, to be on the roost when the light comes.

Twenty-eight ledges. Sixty metres of basalt over the sea. One night, and it is nearly over.

Two clocks, running against each other

Hunger falls the whole time. Every hop takes a bite of it; hanging from a lip burns it faster. Below the red line you can sidle but you cannot hop. At zero you go down.

First light rises the whole time. When the mark on the bar is reached the murder stirs, and when the bar fills they are gone without you.

Eat to hold the first one back. Climb to beat the second.

How to climb

Sidle along the shelf you are standing on. Hop up, or up and across, to the next one. Come up short and your feet catch the lip — you hang there, and you either hop again to haul yourself over or press down and let go. That catch is the move the whole cliff is built around; some gaps have no other answer.

Peck what glows: cyan glow-grubs, bone-white limpets, and the yellow crowfoot blossoms that open as the light comes, which are worth the most.

Some shelves crumble a beat after you land on them. Below everything is the sea.

Controls

Every action answers to a keyboard, a controller and a touchscreen, and every menu can be driven by all three.

Action	Keyboard	Controller	Touch
Sidle	A D / ← →	left stick	on-screen stick
Hop, and pull up from a lip	Space	A	Hop
Let go of a lip	S / ↓	stick down	stick down
Peck	E	X	Peck
Pause	Esc	Start	Pause
Move the selection	↑ ↓ / hover	stick or d-pad	tap the row
Choose	Enter / click	A	tap the row
Back	Backspace	B	the Back row

Four ways a night ends

First light — you are on the roost when it breaks, and this time the flock takes you with it. The sea — a shelf did not hold, or a hop did not reach. Hunger — nothing left in you, halfway up. Full day — the light finished breaking and the roost is bare.

Each of them ends on a card with the night's figures, and one row that says the cliff is still there.

Worth seeing

The sky walks from deep indigo through violet to amber over the round, and the cliff, the sea and the crow's own feathers walk with it — the shelf you are standing on is a different colour at 40 metres than it was at 4. The Old Crow narrates its own climb, aloud, in short dry lines. And the last thirty seconds, if you get there, are worth the two and a half minutes underneath them.