Ironspine
README.md
IRONSPINE
Climb the dead machine before the storm closes.
A colossus died in this water a long time ago. Most of it is under the sea. What is left above the surface is its spine — a hundred and ninety metres of ribbed iron vertebrae going up into the cloud deck — and at the top of it, dark for forty-one years, the Crown Beacon.
You are a salvager in a heavy exosuit. You are going up there to light it.
The one thing to understand
You do not press a direction and watch a climb animation. You have a body with mass, hanging in a physics simulation, and you have two hands. Everything else is consequence.
Each hand that closes becomes a real constraint anchored to a real hold, and your whole weight hangs from it. The HUD shows the load that grip is carrying in newtons — that is the actual reaction the simulation is solving, not a gauge. Your grip burns down in proportion to that number.
So the climb is a conversation with the load. Hang one-handed with your mass swung out under a hold and the number is high and the meter falls fast. Get a boot onto a rib and stand into it and the number drops and the meter slows. Reach too far, catch too hard, and the clamp is torn off before you have a say in it.
Controls
| Mouse | Aim. Whatever hold sits under the aim and inside your reach is what a hand will take. |
| Left mouse | Close the left hand. Hold it closed. Let go and it opens. |
| Right mouse | Close the right hand. |
| W / S | Winch in and pay out along the arm you are hanging from. W is how you gain height. |
| A / D | Lean — shift your weight between the two hands. |
| Space | A committed lunge. Both hands open and you go where you are looking. Nothing catches you but you. |
| Shift | Brace. Cheaper to hold on, but you cannot reach as far. |
| Esc | Pause. |
A gamepad and a touch overlay are both bound to the same six controls.
How to actually get up it
- Take a hold with one hand and hold W. The backpack winch hauls you along that arm. You will rise, and higher holds will come into reach.
- Before you let go, get close. A hand that opens while your weight is swinging out is a hand that has to catch you again on the way down. Winch in first, then move.
- Alternate. An open hand recovers fast — about four seconds from empty. A closed one under full load has about twenty-five. Give each hand a rest by putting the other one on.
- Use your feet. They solve to whatever is actually there. A boot on iron takes real weight off your arms, and you will see the newtons fall when it finds something.
- Clip the pitons. There is one roughly every twenty-six metres, marked by a sodium lamp. Clipping one makes it your checkpoint: a fall costs you the pitch instead of the run.
The route is authored, and it tells you where it goes. A salvage crew bolted a brass twin rail up the column decades ago and it follows the good line exactly. Bright brass is a sound hold. Red, jagged and flaking means the hold is crumbling and will shear off under sustained load. A sodium lamp is a piton. Cold blue at the top is the beacon.
Where the rail stops, the crew stopped too. That pitch is called the blank.
Win and lose
Win: get both clamps onto the Crown Beacon's ignition ring at 190 m and hold for three seconds.
Lose: fall past your last piton into the sea.
There is no health bar and there is not going to be one. The only failure is the simulation deciding you are not holding on any more.
What to expect on the way up
The air changes with height, and it is worth stopping to look. At the base it is spray, sodium haze off the salvage deck, and the storm sea breaking against the colossus. Around a hundred metres you go into the cloud deck and lose the world entirely. Above it there is thin, clear, cold air, a sea of cloud to the horizon, and the crown standing out of it.
The wind rises with altitude and comes in gusts that will torque you off the surface. The top of the tower is harder than the bottom for physical reasons, not because a number went up.
One climber. One ascent. No rope.