GLOOPY
Controls
These are the bindings in the build you actually play, read straight out of it. Several actions have more than one key so your hand can sit wherever it likes.
| Action | Keys | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Run | AD or ←→ | Applies force, not position. Releasing does not stop you — the mesh keeps its momentum and hands it back to you a moment later. |
| Jump | Space↑WZ | Hold for height. The body squashes to load the jump and the depth of that squash is the height you get. Tapping gives you a hop. |
| Firm up | Shift or KL | Tenses the whole mesh: springs stiffen, shape memory rises, bounce drops. Your brake, your landing gear, and the only precision you own. |
| Pause | Esc | Freezes the simulation and opens the pause overlay — resume, restart, or disconnect. |
| Restart stage | R | Reloads the current stage from its start. Coins and time reset; lives carry. |
| Mute | M | Toggles all audio. The preference is remembered between sessions. |
| Start / confirm | Space | From the title screen, starts the run. In the shop, confirms a purchase. |
| Debug panel | ` | Opens the physics sandbox: material presets, live sliders, mass points, springs and colliders. Left in on purpose. |
Desktop only, for now. The current build has no touch handlers — the simulation only listens for keys. Rather than ship a virtual stick that does not connect to anything, the game shows a notice on phones and tablets. Touch input is queued behind the vertical slice.
The physics
Gloopy is not a sprite with a wobble filter on it. He is a mass-spring mesh — a few dozen points held together by springs, with interior pressure keeping him inflated and a shape-memory force slowly arguing him back toward blob. Everything below falls out of that.
You apply force to a body, not a position to a sprite. When you release the run key the force stops but the mass does not, and a soft mesh sheds momentum badly — some of it goes into travel and some of it goes into the body still sloshing in the old direction. Expect to arrive late and long. The fix is never to press harder; it is to stop pressing sooner than feels right.
Compression is not decoration, it is stored energy. Holding jump squashes the mesh against the ground and the depth of that squash sets your height. The same thing runs in reverse on landing: a hard fall compresses you, and the rebound out of it is real upward velocity you did not ask for. Good players stop fighting the rebound and start planning the next jump around it.
Every surface has a bounce coefficient and yours changes with your state. Loose and relaxed, you keep most of the energy and carry on down the level in a series of decaying hops. Firmed up, the surface takes it and you stop. Chaining bounces is the fastest way through Mossgut Valley and the fastest way off the side of Sunbleach Ridge, which is the joke.
Hold Shift and the springs stiffen, the shape memory climbs, and the damping rises. You become, briefly, something close to a normal platformer character — slower, duller, and much more likely to land where you looked. It costs you nothing but style, and on ash and glass it is the difference between a stage clear and a respawn.
Stick a tentacle to a branch, a rope, a fence or a passing goat; swing on the momentum you already have; release at the top of the arc. It is the one genuinely precise tool in the kit, and it works by borrowing the world's stability rather than pretending to have your own. Designed and specified — not yet in the playable build.
The mesh conserves interior volume, so squeezing through a gap narrower than you are is not a special move — it is arithmetic. Push into the gap, the body redistributes, and you come out the far side longer than you went in. The only thing that stops you is firming up at the wrong moment.
Zone by zone
| Region | Primary hazard | How to take it |
|---|---|---|
| Mossgut Valley | Nothing holds. Moss over stone cushions every landing and betrays every push-off. | Stay loose. The valley is the one place where bouncing is faster than walking, so chain the hops and let the moss take the impacts. |
| Sunbleach Ridge | Invisible thermals. Columns of rising air you cannot see and cannot plan around. | Firm up before you cross open rock. A tense mesh has less surface for the air to grab and drops through a column instead of riding it. |
| The Fizzing Marsh | Delayed buoyancy. Every step releases bubbles, and the lift arrives a beat after you have moved on. | Keep moving and never commit to a platform you are still standing on. The Marsh punishes hesitation specifically. |
| Cinderpeak | Ash that gives way, heat updraughts, and slag heaps that slide under load. | Short hops, firmed landings. Long jumps here get caught by a heat column and put you somewhere with no floor. |
| Glass Hollow | Reflections. Four openings where there is one, a wall where there is a drop. | Trust the fungus, not the walls. Anything glowing is real; anything reflecting the glow may not be. |
| The Undercrust | Clay walls that shift when touched, because they were built to. | Touch deliberately. The walls are a mechanism, not a hazard — the hazard is discovering that by accident at speed. |
Bestiary
None of these are enemies in the usual sense. They have routines, and you are an interruption to them. Counterplay is almost always positional.
Purple, armoured, and locked to a heading it chose some time ago. It is not aiming at you. The corridor you are standing in simply happens to be its corridor, and it has no reverse gear.
Counterplay. Never contest the line — leave it. Get to any surface off the floor and it passes underneath. Firming up and bracing does not work; the shell wins that exchange every time.
Threat · high
Small, furious, and germinating out of spite. One is a nuisance. The lower valley holds several hundred and they reinforce hourly, which is why nothing else nests there.
Counterplay. Bounce off them. A stomp resolves one permanently and the rebound carries you to the next, so a clump of Seedlings is really a staircase that resents you.
Threat · moderate
A standing route above Mossgut Valley, flown to the minute and unchanged in every year of observation. They are not guarding anything and they are not looking for you.
Counterplay. Cross under, never through. If you do trip the route, drop altitude immediately — they escalate on deviations and lose interest the moment you stop being one.
Threat · moderate
Glass Hollow's landlord. Gave up on eyes entirely and navigates by sound, in caves that distort sound, which it has simply learned to read anyway.
Counterplay. Move in bursts, then stop dead. They track continuous motion and lose you in the gaps. Firming up also helps — a tense mesh is quieter against the glass.
Threat · high
Swells when you get close, then shoves everything nearby away with more force than its size suggests.
Counterplay. Use it. A Puffball is free distance in whichever direction you approach from, and on the Ridge it is often the only way across. Approach deliberately and let it fire.
Threat · low
Grabs at a tentacle and holds on for noticeably longer than is polite. It does no damage. It costs you the thing you actually need, which is momentum.
Counterplay. Go loose, not firm. A relaxed mesh slips the grip; a tense one gives the vine something solid to hold. Counterintuitive, and it catches everybody once.
Threat · moderate
Live wire coiled in the grass, usually where the grass is tallest. There is no clever way through it and there never has been.
Counterplay. Route around, or go over with height to spare. This is the one creature in the Wilds with no interaction beyond avoidance, and pretending otherwise costs a life.
Threat · high
A beat-up little windstorm that quietly rewrites your movement mid-jump, usually after you have committed.
Counterplay. Jump shorter than the gap looks. Gustbugs almost always add distance rather than remove it, so aim to land short and let the bug close the difference.
Threat · moderate
Rolls across the level at speed the moment it is disturbed. It is not chasing you. It is leaving, and you are in the way of leaving.
Counterplay. Disturb it on purpose, from above and behind. A Roller in motion is a moving platform with predictable velocity, and riding one is the fastest route through the Undercrust.
Threat · moderate
Does nothing. Watches. Continues watching. Present on ridgelines in every region, including two it has no plausible way of reaching.
Counterplay. None required. It has never interacted with anything. Gloopy nonetheless refuses to pass one at close range and the Surveyors have stopped trying to make it.
Threat · none
Tips
The instinct is to make lots of small corrections, and every correction adds another oscillation to a body that is already oscillating. Pick a direction, hold it, release early, and let the mesh settle. Players who fight the wobble are slower than players who plan around it.
Roughly half a body-length early is the right amount in Mossgut Valley and closer to a full length on ash. You are not stopping the character, you are stopping the force and waiting for friction to do the rest.
Firming mid-jump kills the arc you already paid for. Firming just before impact converts a bounce into a landing. Same key, opposite outcomes, and the timing is the whole skill.
The rebound out of a deep impact is real upward velocity. If there is a ledge above you, do not absorb the landing — stay loose and let the mesh throw you at it. This is the intended route through most of Cinderpeak.
The coin lines are placed along the intended path. If you are collecting them comfortably you are on the designed route; if they are just out of reach, you are on a faster one that the level was not expecting.
Backtick opens the physics sandbox that shipped with the build — material presets, live sliders, mass points, springs and colliders. Watching the spring mesh react while you run is the quickest way to understand why he does what he does. It was left in deliberately.