Prog Check

A wasp queen, a comb arena, and a rota of telegraphed mechanics that gets denser every phase until one of them lands on you. If you have ever spent a Tuesday night learning a fight one wipe at a time, you already know how to play this.

How it goes#

• Move with `W` `A` `S` `D` or the arrow keys. That is the only control. On a phone, hold anywhere on the arena and drag.
• Red means get out. Blue means get in. Every mechanic is one or the other and the fight never mixes them up. Learn that and you can survive the opener without being told anything else.
• Two things are usually up at once, from the first bar. The opener casts in pairs on purpose — a fight that shows you one telegraph at a time is teaching a habit you have to unlearn in phase two. The casts are long enough to read and the answers are simple ones; what gets harder is how close together they land.
• When two are up they are numbered, on the floor and on the cast bars. `1` resolves first. They are not always in the order they went out — a wedge takes its time and a pod lands early — so the numbers are worth reading rather than guessing.
• Nothing goes out that you could not have survived. Before the queen commits to anything she walks the whole rota through and checks there is still somewhere to stand at every resolve, and that you could get there at less than full speed from where you actually are. Combinations with no answer are thrown away and re-rolled. Being caught is always something you can point at.
• Standing in melee range scores three times as fast. The dotted inner ring is melee; the outer one is half credit; past that you are barely scoring at all. Running to the far wall is always safe and always wrong, which is the argument the whole cabinet is built around.
• Two clean in the same beat pays half again. Survive one within about three quarters of a second of the last and the payout goes up 50% — the pairs are the hardest thing the fight asks and the only reason the busy phases are worth reaching rather than merely surviving.
• The chain is the multiplier. Every mechanic you survive without taking a hit adds one, and it steps the multiplier up every five, to five times. Eat anything and it goes back to one.
• There is no healing. Nothing gives health back — not a regen, not a pick-up, not a phase change. A hit costs twenty-two out of a hundred, so the bar is a running tally of every mistake in the run and four or five of them is the whole fight.
• Pods take the arena away. A pod lands where you are standing and nothing happens — then it burns for the next six seconds. Where you drop it decides how much floor the next four mechanics have to share, and the queen will not cast anything into it, so a badly placed one narrows the fight for you.
• Knockbacks can throw you off the comb. Being over the edge when one resolves is the most expensive mistake in the game — position for it before the cast finishes rather than after.
• Sweeps keep hurting after they go off. The beam turns for about a second and a half, so it is the one mechanic you move with rather than away from.
• No difficulty to pick. Every run starts at the same opener and the phases keep coming, so the fight walks up to your level and then keeps walking.
• Sound is on. `M` or the speaker in the status bar turns it off, and the cabinet remembers. Casts click when they go out, so a mechanic behind you is still audible.

The phases#

Roughly every twenty-seven seconds the queen learns something new, the casts get shorter, and the gaps between them get shorter faster.

| Phase | Called | What arrives |

| --- | --- | --- |

| 1 | Opener | Puddles, cleaves, towers and pods — in pairs, on three-second casts |

| 2 | Fissures | Lines, stacks, and a comb that splits leaving one wedge standing |

| 3 | Leashes | Donuts, and a tether that makes melee range the dangerous place |

| 4 | The Hunt | A puddle that follows you, the edge crumbling, and cascades |

| 5 | Gales | Knockbacks and the rotating sweep, three and four at a time |

| 6+ | Enrage | Everything, faster, until it stops being possible |

Posting a run#

Sign in with Discord and the run posts itself when you go down; play as a guest and it is kept as a personal best on this device instead. The board keeps each player's best run and shows the phase they got to. The arcade page has the longer version of how that works, and the other cabinets.