Steeplejack
A ladder of chimneys and spires, climbed at night by lantern light. A machine can prove a level beatable with frame-perfect play, which proves nothing about you, so these towers carry a harder certificate: a surveyor climbs each one the way a person does, rung to rung with its feet planted between moves, and then the tremor test shakes its line, sliding every jump press, release, and mid-air steer by whole frames, hundreds of times per rest. A tower only ships if no input needs better than the plaque's timing window and the shaken line still summits almost every time. Falls cost time, never progress, and the honest clock never stops: your whole climb is a code any browser can re-simulate and verify.
TypeScript · human-certified towers · verifiable run codes
every tower ships with a proof a human can climb it · your run is a replayable code
How to play
- arrows or wasd move, space jumps; on a phone the bottom corners steer and the right side jumps
- hold toward a wall to slide, jump off it to kick away: flues are climbed on wall kicks
- checkpoint lamps on the balconies hold your progress: a fall costs the climb back to the lamp, never the tower
- the amber ghost is the surveyor's certified line: race it
- r restarts the climb, esc returns to the title
- the daily climb is the same tower for everyone; your result and your run code are shareable
Changelog
- 2026-07-20·The playtest verdict was fair: too easy, too samey. So the towers went back to school with Celeste, Mario, and Super Meat Boy. Checkpoint lamps now glow on rest balconies every couple of sections, Celeste style: a fall costs the climb back to the lamp, never the tower, and the honest clock keeps running either way. Eight new section shapes break the ladder rhythm: mid-lane weaves, staircase runs, forked routes, long galleries you sprint across, wall-hugging spires, pendulum swings, and stacked planks you hop up through. And the curve follows Mario's four-step rule: each mechanic is introduced somewhere it cannot easily kill you (a lone shard beside a wide rung, a chimney with a safety plank halfway up the kicks) before the towers start combining them in earnest. Every tower re-certified from scratch under the new physics.
- 2026-07-20·The scaffolding comes down: six towers, each shipped with a corridor certificate, and the taller ones still in the mine, joining the ladder as they pass. Behind them, three instruments. The surveyor climbs rung to rung like a person, resting between moves. The rigger slackens its lines: stutter inputs pruned, every jump held past its apex, every boundary centered in its feasible window. And the tremor test shakes the result, hundreds of seeded replays per rest with every airborne input slid by up to two frames at once; the plaque on each tower reports the tightest window and the worst summit rate it measured. First certificates: every input tolerates at least a 33 millisecond window. Plus ghosts of the certified line and your best climb, a daily tower, and run codes that replay your whole ascent, falls included.