THE TEAR

THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD

After bone there is nothing left to build with. The sixth world is the floor of the terrarium: a deep blue dark with nothing in it but falling stone. On an island of glass in the middle, the five monuments of the worlds above lie broken together, the crystal, the tower, the mushroom, the colossus and the spine, all on one pile. Nothing in the Tear stands up.

The road wobbles. A wave runs around the loop, lifting and dropping the lanes as it passes, and like the Spine it takes one lane away. The face never rises here. Only the hand comes.

NEW HERE: THE RAIN

The roads of the worlds above are falling in. A slab of paving drops out of the dark toward the road, and before it arrives, a shadow grows on the lane where it will land and an X marks that lane. When it hits, it shatters, and for that one moment it is a wall.

The rain is the only hazard in the game that exists for a single instant. You do not have to avoid the lane for long, only at the moment the shadow is full, so the trick is timing rather than distance: step out, let it land, and step back in.

HOW A RUN ENDS HERE

There is no gate at the end of the Tear and no seventh world below it. The run goes on until Kai is caught, and when he dies here he does not fall: he is thrown, gets up, and rises out of the frame. Every run ends in the same place, and the next one opens at the top of the Moss Ring again. That is the loop the game is named for.

Reaching the Tear at all is the real achievement. Very few runs get this far, and because the multiplier on a release keeps growing the deeper a run goes, a release here is worth more than anywhere above it.