This is a big one. New players get a proper guided tutorial, Story mode gets cutscenes and a redesigned interstitial look, and Spiral mode graduates from experiment to the real thing. Underneath that, a long list of fairness fixes to spawning, matching and docking timing.
## Features
- A guided opening tutorial teaches rotating, matching, reading cues, slamming and powerups, with frozen demo shapes you can study before you take over.
- Story chapter intros now play as 16-bit cutscenes with signal degradation, backed by new art and a redesigned interstitial look. Chapter completions share the same frame, and a fresh run always opens on chapter one.
- Spiral mode ships properly: shapes bank rotationally into the curve, the laser curves with them, and Spiral now closes out the final Story chapter.
- Octahedron gets a new upper-right spawn lane, plus a short tutorial the first time it turns up in Quick Play so the lane geometry is not a surprise.
- The NEXT panel gained an arrival-lane compass and a handoff animation, so you can see where the next shape is coming from before it appears.
- Your level and Story progress are now visible in the HUD, and the active powerup slot shows a persistent key hint with ready, spent and empty states.
- The pause menu now opens settings in place with an audio panel, and adds a skip track button.
- Leaderboards are grouped by mode, Story has its own local board, and empty or Steam-unavailable boards now explain themselves instead of showing nothing. After a Story run the high score screen opens on the Story tab.
- Finishing a run now earns an achievement and unlocks the Skrrt track.
- Accessibility: high-contrast shape textures make shapes identifiable without relying on color, yellow star and yellow hexagon are now clearly distinct, and locked Music Gallery text meets contrast standards.
- Keyboard prompts are drawn as keycaps, and the direction indicator shows per-key rotation arrows.
- An extra life is now a permanent stock item in the Story shop, and the shop itself was rebuilt with a clearer reward-screen layout.
- A reminder hint appears if you sit on a slammable shape without slamming.
## Fixes
- The lives panel no longer drops to zero hearts mid-run, and only shows the hearts you actually have left.
- Leaderboard tabs no longer show each other's results, Tab and Shift+Tab move between them again, global stats display correctly, and a slow Steam connection now retries and tells you it is waiting.
- Fixed the gamepad A button unpausing instead of confirming in the pause settings, the settings panel drawing under the HUD, and vertical input not reaching the review prompt opt-out.
- Your fullscreen preference is no longer cleared on startup.
- Continue Run keeps your full state, including streak, when you quit mid-run, and it no longer replays tutorial staging.
- Saving settings can no longer overwrite your cloud save with an empty state after a failed read, and interrupted saves are recovered.
- Run-end, pause, Steam overlay and controller-disconnect dialogs now queue instead of stacking on top of each other.
- Removed the hitch on level up and on first sight of a new shape by warming visuals ahead of time.
- The laser no longer balloons when you toggle a match rapidly, keeps a constant width, and stays visible while a shape approaches from off screen.
- Several tutorial stalls are gone: refused slams, demo shapes drifting out of frame, and stages that would not advance.
- Every cube spawn lane is now fully on screen, and the NEXT preview shows the lane the shape genuinely uses.
- Switching language now retranslates on-screen message cards immediately, and stale character sets no longer show up in CJK text.
- Boss repaints no longer hit shapes already docked on the cube.
- Tiered achievements now unlock the tier you actually earned.
- Shop cards size to their content on short screens, the description strip no longer overlaps, and SELL cards drop the redundant OWNED badge.
- Steam status now reflects what you are actually doing.
- Menus and store text use the same Runs vocabulary throughout.
## Balance
- Spawns are now checked against your live speed for solvability, so a shape does not arrive without enough time to deal with it.
- A rotation that lands just before impact gets a short grace window, that grace no longer applies mid-drag, and stale matches break at the snap threshold while dragging.
- Matching keys off the visible shape rather than its collision volume, and docking starts and ends at the exact moment of arrival instead of the next frame. The combo window is exactly as long as it says.
- Scheduled spawns pull forward when the field is empty, cutting dead time.
- Spiral decoys can no longer start from the axis opposite the landing lane.
- Octahedron encounters are restricted to Quick Play after level 5.
- First-run music and effects volume defaults are lower.