DNA

You wake up as a very small animal. Twenty-six health, a two-damage bite, three empty slots where your DNA should be. Everything out there is bigger than you.

Everything you become, you take off something you killed.

There are no character classes and no skill tree. Kill something and it may drop a sample of what it was. Take it and your body changes — not a stat on a sheet, your actual body. Armour grows overlapping chitin plates across your back. Speed stretches you thin and lengthens your legs. Wings unfold and beat faster when you run. Heat cracks your shell open and embers come off you.

You only ever get three. Taking a fourth means destroying one you already have, forever.

TWENTY PLACES, ONE ROAD

The road runs west to east through twenty zones, and each one is trying to kill you in its own way — heat, cold, toxin, pressure, radiation, the void. You cannot walk into the Burning Wastes without the Heat gene, and the only place Heat exists is inside something living one zone back.

So progress is never a level. It's a build. Find the animal that carries what the next door demands, and take it off them.

The way forward is gated. The way back is always open.

EVERYTHING IS GENERATED

Not one image or sound file ships with this game.

• Every creature is drawn from its genome by the same code that draws you. An Emberling glows orange because it carries Heat — and that glow is how you know killing it is how you get Heat. Reading the wildlife is a mechanic, not decoration.

• Every zone is laid out procedurally and dressed in a palette derived from its biome, so no two of the twenty look alike.

• Every note is synthesised at startup from square, triangle and noise. Each zone has its own theme, and the rhythm comes from the place you are standing in — the Greenlands wander with no drums at all, the volcanic zones hammer a kick on every beat, the abyss pulses once a bar. A fight plays that zone's music faster and meaner rather than a generic battle theme.

NOT EVERYTHING WANTS TO EAT YOU

Some creatures run. Some ignore you until you draw blood. Some hunt you on sight. And some help — there are little ones that feed you, ones that heal you while you stand near them, and ones that will fight beside you if you leave them alive.