CoreWard

Descend. Survive. Restore. The drill only goes one way: down. Everything else is a decision. CoreWard is a vertical-descent arcade puzzler about reading a shaft before you cut into it. Every block you remove takes support away from the blocks above it. The rock always warns you before it falls — the whole game is whether you saw it coming. FOUR ROCKS, FOUR CONSEQUENCES • Basalt — filler. Fuses and vanishes. • Cinnabar — fusing releases heat. The one you route around. • Cryolite — fusing vents coolant. The one you detour toward. • Pyrite — fusing pays a score multiplier. The greed play. Heat is the clock. Cinnabar drives it up, cryolite pulls it back, and the drone cooks if you stop paying attention. Every route down is a bet about how much heat you can afford on the way. ONE THUMB, PORTRAIT Tap the left or right third to shift a column, drilling through whatever is in the way. Hold low to drill straight down. Swipe up to climb back out. That is the entire control scheme. An optional d-pad is in Settings if you prefer it. EIGHTEEN TIERS, TWO STRATA Work down through TOPSOIL and SEDIMENT. Each tier sets an objective — reach the tap line, break seams, extract pyrite, set off a chain — and three markers to chase: reach it, recover the buried artifact, and make the pyrite quota. The artifact is never on the middle column, so a drone that only ever drills straight down will never find one. Difficulty spikes at tiers 8 and 16, and both are marked on the map long before you arrive. DEEP DIVE Endless, from the surface, no boosts, no safety net. Ranked on a weekly board that wipes clean every week, so a good run is worth something and then it isn't. A GARAGE WORTH COMING BACK TO Fifteen drone chassis, from the Standard that every other frame argues with to the Legendaries that reshape a run outright. Rarity buys volatility, not raw power: a fully fitted drone is about 30% stronger than base, not 300%. Upgrades fit to the chassis, not the account, so a new frame arrives unfitted and has to earn its place. STANDING CONTRACTS Three at a time — break seams, recover artifacts, fuse cryolite. They never expire and they carry across runs, so nothing you do underground is wasted. WHAT WE WILL NOT SELL YOU Nothing in the economy extends the fall delay. Reading a collapse is the skill this game is built on, and it is not for sale at any price. Boosts compress a run's hardest stretch; they do not delete it. You can equip two at most, and Deep dive refuses them entirely. Plays offline. Portrait only. No account required.