Play Cliffdrum • Free

How to Play

• Cliffdrum starts at base camp, at the foot of the cliff. Tap, click or press Space to start. A drum counts you in with four beats, and the word Ready, then 3, 2, 1 and Climb appear on the rock.
• A ring closes in on the spot where the next piton will go and lands on it exactly on the beat. Tap as it lands. The climber swings the hammer, the piton bites into the rock, and a hitch of one metre takes them up to the next spot. Four dots at the bottom of the screen show where you are in the bar, and the edges of the screen pulse on every beat, so you can play with the sound off.
• How close you tap decides what happens. Inside a tight window you get a Perfect, which scores a bonus. A little wider is Good. A little wider again is a Close call: you still climb, but the combo is cut in half. Further out than that is a slip, and well outside the beat is a fall.
• A slip slides you down half a metre, breaks your combo and leaves you shaky; three dots over the helmet show how many clean hits you still need. Three clean hits in a row steadies you again. A second slip while still shaky, or a tap nowhere near any beat, is a fall and ends the run. A beat that goes by with no tap at all counts as a slip, so keep tapping through a wobble.
• Every hit adds to your combo. At 8, 16, 30 and 50 in a row the multiplier steps up to x2, x3, x4 and x5, and the drum track builds up with it, adding a shaker, a plucked bass line, a clap and then bells. You score points for every metre of new height, times the multiplier, plus a bonus for each Perfect. Climbing back up after a slip earns nothing until you pass your highest point.
• The drum gets faster the higher you climb, from 84 beats a minute at the foot to a top speed of 132. The tempo only changes on the first beat of a bar, so it never lurches under your finger.
• Three kinds of obstacle turn up on the way, each announced by a sign on the rock and a banner at the top of the screen as you near it. Loose rock is a pale band of rubble: the timing windows shrink, close calls don't count, and a slip slides you a full metre. A gust is a band of wind streaks: the beat is pushed around, so the gaps between beats swing long and short, stall, drag or rush, and the ring turns blue to show it. Watch the ring, not the clock. A crack is a dark split in the rock where some beats are holds: press on the beat, keep holding while the sling fills, and let go on the next beat. Let go early and you slip.
• Obstacles start easy, short and far apart. They grow longer and closer together as you climb, they get harder up to around 250 metres, and higher up two kinds can share the same stretch of rock.
• When you fall, the route log drops in on a piton: your height, longest combo and score, the tempo you reached and what went wrong, and a little sketch of your climb up to a red X. New bests get a rubber stamp. Tap to climb again straight away, or go back to base camp, where your high mark is chalked on the rock.

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