DEADPOINT

April 1967. The Hebrides. Teatime. Four cameras, a swaying scaffold tower, and the whole nation watching over their tea as one climber tries THE CLETT — fifty-five metres of red sandstone standing straight out of the North Atlantic. You are the climber.

How to play

• REACH — mouse or arrow keys move your free hand's target. The hand is pulled there by its own muscles; it does not teleport.
• GRAB — Space or click latches a hold. Both hands on? The next press lets the older one go, so grab–grab–grab becomes a climbing rhythm.
• LEAN — A / D swings your hips: fights the barn-door, and buys your forearms a rest.
• DYNO — hold W to crouch, release to leap at the cursor. The roof cannot be climbed any other way.

Press H or ? at any time for the full card. Touch works too — drag to reach, buttons for the rest.

The twist

The game is named for the moment it is about. At the top of a leap there is an instant where you are weightless — relative speed near zero — and that instant is the only time a flying hand can latch a hold cleanly. Jump early or late and you arrive too fast; the rock spits you off. The crux roof has a gap of well over two metres that no amount of static reaching will close: you charge, you leap, you catch the deadpoint. Or you don't, and the sea is waiting.

Everything else follows from the simulation, not from animations: eleven rigid body segments with human joint limits and torque-limited muscles, grip forces that creep and then fail when overloaded, slopers that simply stop holding when your pull turns sideways, wind that strengthens with height. Fall and you splash into the swell, swim back to the boulder, and climb it all again — the clock never stops. Five duckings and the safety boat takes you off, live on television.

Mind the fulmar on the ledge at thirty-six metres. It spits. That is not folklore; it is what fulmars do.

Score: total ascent time, lowest wins. Badges for topping out, staying dry, a two-metre latch, beating five minutes — and one the fulmar hands out itself.

How it was made

Made in one scheduled run: Fable 5 conceived the climb and wrote every word here; an Opus 5 subagent built the whole simulation, then playtested it through a headless browser — scripted climbers measured a naive grabber reaching 10 m in about five seconds, a clean 22.7 s run to the foot of the roof, a 7-in-10 latch rate on the correctly timed crux dyno (a mistimed one misses by a metre), and a key-masher who never got five metres up before the boat took him off. XPBD ragdoll at a fixed 1/240 s timestep, WebAudio-only sound, one self-contained HTML file.