What is FIFTH SKY — Thirty rooftop levels, four stones, one flying taxi
FIFTH SKY is a side-scrolling platformer built around four locks that repeat and combine for thirty levels. Red buttons open golden gates, but only while all of them are held down at once. Keys sit behind jumps and have to be carried to golden locks. Memory pads flash a sequence of lights and play a note with each one, and you have to step on them again in the same order. Levers summon lifts. From level twelve the generator starts putting two of those rooms in the same level, and from twenty-one, three.
Between the locks is a genuinely demanding platformer. Both heroes double-jump, both punch through cracked walls, and you can swap between them at any time. Vrax, armed bandits and drones patrol the rooftops of Velopolis, the skyway, the Aurelia cruise liner and the old temple. There are two guns to find — the Blaster and the Scatter gun — and both run on ammunition you will be short of. Elemental stones wait on levels seven, fourteen, twenty-one and twenty-eight; Director Voskar waits on thirty.
How to play
- Move with the arrows or WASD, jump with W or the up arrow, and press jump again in mid-air for the double jump. Hearts are your health and checkpoints are automatic in the second half of each level.
- Press F to attack. With ammunition it fires the gun you are carrying; without it, you punch, and only the punch breaks cracked walls, so keep at least one heroic fist free.
- Red buttons must all be pressed at once, and the counter on screen tells you how many are left. Keys are carried, not collected, so plan a route that ends at the golden lock, not one that ends where the key was.
- On memory pads, watch the lights and listen to the notes, then step onto each pad in the same order. The sequence is three pads long at level four and grows to six by the end.
Strategies that work
- The double jump is what the whole game is balanced around, and most players waste it. Jump, wait until you start falling, and only then press jump again: the second jump is measured from where you are, so a late second jump clears gaps that an immediate one never will.
- Swap heroes to dodge. Swapping is instant and puts a fresh body in the same place, which means it is also a free way to break out of a bad landing. It costs nothing and there is no cooldown, so use it as a panic button.
- Bandits shoot, Vrax charge and drones hover. The drones sit about three tiles above the ground, which means they are the only enemies you cannot reach with a punch from a standing start — either shoot them or jump into them from a platform above.
- Ammunition is scarce and the Scatter gun burns it fastest. Save the gun for the armed bandits, who take three hits, and punch the Vrax, who take two. A level cleared with ammunition left is a level where the next boss does not go badly.
- The score is coins plus kills plus stones plus whatever is left of a six-thousand-point time bonus, minus nothing for dying. Falls cost you time, not points, so on a run for the leaderboard it is almost always better to take the risky shortcut than to grind out a safe route.
A little history
FIFTH SKY sits in the odd space between a platformer and a puzzle game, and it gets there by making the lock the level rather than an object inside it. A button room is not a room with a button in it: the room exists so that reaching three buttons within one another's reach is hard. That idea is old — it goes back to the arcade era, when a level had to be a single readable problem because there was no room in memory for anything else — but it survives because it scales. The generator here builds thirty levels from a seed, adding rooms and shortening the distance between hazards, so difficulty comes from combination rather than from bigger numbers. The story on top, a taxi driver and a girl who fell out of the sky chasing four elemental stones, is there to give the four locks four colours and a reason to care which one you are standing in front of.
Frequently asked questions
Can I skip to a later level?
Yes. Every level you clear unlocks the next one in the Level Select screen, and you can start a run from any unlocked level. The score is calculated from what you collect during that run, so starting at level twenty means a lower total than starting at one.
Is there a game over?
No. Running out of hearts sends you back to the last checkpoint and adds one to your Falls counter. The run only ends when you beat level thirty, which is also the only moment a score is sent to the leaderboard.
Does it work on a phone?
Not well. FIFTH SKY needs the keyboard for movement, jump, attack and hero swap, and there are no on-screen controls. Play it on a computer.
