Substrate Entity

About

Substrate is an arcade game about reading ahead. You are a charge running down an etched plate, one row every beat, and you cannot stop. The trace splits every beat. Some of the branches it offers are dead — they run a little way and then simply end — and the only way to tell is to read further down the plate than the branch is long. Press the left or right side of the glass to pick your side. That is the whole control. THE DESCENT Seven strata, 118 to 172 beats a minute. The plate is etched a fixed distance ahead of you and no further; deeper down it is etched less far, the dead ends run longer, and the tempo climbs. The color change is the tempo change — when the stratum turns, everything gets faster at once. CHARGE Every row costs you charge. The bright pads put it back, and a run of them builds your multiplier. The branch that keeps you alive and the branch that keeps you fed are usually not the same branch, and that is where the game actually is. AN ENDING The descent finishes. Twelve hundred rows, seven strata, and a plate that closes — about eight and a half minutes of clean running. Close it once and the plate that never closes opens up. RECORDS Your best, how deep you have ever been, and a mark for every stratum you have left behind. Portrait, one thumb, and short runs. Sound, haptics and motion can each be turned off. It runs entirely on your phone. No account, no server, no analytics — the app has no network code in it at all. Privacy Policy: https://dro1d.org/substrate.html#privacy Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/