First Light: Lavic Odyssey

The caldera is filling. You are a pilgrim in a great helm, and the only way out is up — one hundred and twenty metres of basalt ledges, glass stairs and crumbling crust, with a tide of lava climbing behind you the whole way.

The helm is the whole game. Worn, it keeps the embers and the heat off you, and it leaves you looking at the world through a slit: you cannot read which crust plates will hold. Taken off, you see everything — the glowing cracks in the bad stone, the dawn on the horizon, the lost knights standing fused into the rock — and the heat starts filling a bar that kills you when it tops out. You get about seven seconds of sight at a time. Spend them well.

How to play

Climb. Reach the rim at 120 m before the lava does. Along the way, six lost knights stand where they gave up, still helmed. Hold Free beside one while your own head is bare and the helm lifts off it; the knight goes up as a column of light and your count ticks over. Nobody has to be freed. Everybody is worth freeing.

	Keyboard & mouse	Controller	Touch
Move	WASD	left stick	left virtual stick
Look	mouse	right stick	drag the right side
Jump	Space	south button	Jump
Helm on / off	Q or Shift	west button	Helm
Free a knight (hold)	E	north button	Free
Pause	Escape	Start	Pause
Restart	R	north button	Again on the end card

Menus take a click, a tap, or the d-pad and the confirm button — whichever you have in your hands.

What to look for

• The tide. The lava is not scenery. It rises from below the floor at a steady rate for the whole round and it is faster than you are comfortable with.
• Four cantos. The Caldera, The Black Stair, The Glass Field, The Rim. Each opens with a line from the narrator and each looks different — the sky runs from indigo at the floor through rose to gold at the top, so you can read your own altitude off the horizon.
• Bare-headed at height. The best view in the game costs you heat. Take the helm off at 100 m with the sun on the horizon and look at what the mountain has been hiding.
• The lost. Six of them, one in the first canto, two in each of the middle two, one near the rim. They are hard to reach on purpose.

Ends two ways: you stand on the rim as the sun comes up, or the tide takes you. The card tells you how far you got, how many you freed, and how long it took. Then you climb again.