GORGED

How to play

Two inputs, and one rule about walls

GORGED takes about thirty seconds to learn. The whole game is steering, one resource, and the fact that solid rock kills you when you are moving fast enough.

Two inputs. That is the whole cabinet.

There are two inputs and there will never be more than two. Anything that cannot be expressed as a direction plus are you boosting is out of scope by design, on every platform.

Touch Press anywhere and drag to steer. Wherever you touch becomes the centre, and the direction from there to your thumb is your heading — push the way you want to go. Hold a second finger anywhere on the screen to boost. There is no on-screen stick and no boost button, so nothing sits on top of the arena you are trying to read.
Mouse Steer toward the cursor. Your digger turns toward the pointer. Hold the left mouse button or the space bar to boost.
Boost Hold it for half a second and it fires. A ring winds around your drill head while it charges — that is your boost spooling up, not the game lagging. During that half second you are still steering, and if what is ahead of you is lethal the warning is already on screen. Let go and nothing is spent. Taps do not boost at all, which is deliberate: it gives you that half second to see what is ahead before anything is committed.
Turning Every digger turns at the same fixed rate, roughly a quarter turn per second. You cannot out-corner someone; you can only out-plan them.
Sound and haptics carry real information. Eating, boosting, changing layer and dying each have their own cue. On a phone, the haptics exist precisely because arcade play is usually muted — you can play GORGED silent without losing the feedback.

Eat, dig, cut off, go again

  1. Drop in

    You join a shared arena already in progress. Empty slots are filled with bots so the field is never thin, and a real player arriving takes a bot's place.

    You are told which ones they are. The standings put a dot before every bot's call-sign — ·SLAT rather than SLAT — and the column heading says what the dot means. Your own row is never marked. A bot that dies keeps its dot on the way out, because who was in the field is exactly what you want to know when you are reading back over a fight.

    The dot says which seats are bots and nothing else. They grow, kill, die and leave remains by the same rules you do, and the standings rank the whole field together rather than sorting the humans into a list of their own. You were fighting all of them, so you are ranked against all of them — a board that quietly re-ranked around the dot would make the number less honest, not more.

  2. Eat

    Mineral pellets are scattered through the rock, and every digger that dies leaves remains that are worth eating. Eating is the only thing that makes you longer.

  3. Dig

    Moving through solid rock at normal speed carves a tunnel. It costs nothing, it is permanent for the life of that arena, and it counts toward your country's explored percentage whether you survive the round or not.

  4. Boost — carefully

    Boost doubles your speed and eats your own body to pay for it. It is the only way to close a gap or break one, and it is the only speed at which impassable terrain and the arena's edge become lethal. See below.

  5. Cut someone off

    You have no attack. You kill by making a rival run into something solid — your body, or a tunnel wall you steered them into. That is the whole offensive game.

  6. Die, and keep going

    Your remains become food for whoever is nearby, and you get a short account of the run — what killed you, how long you got, what you mined, where you placed. One tap anywhere puts you in a fresh arena in a new digger. Nothing to confirm, nothing to navigate.

Boost costs body

Boost does three things at once, and it is worth being explicit about all three, because most new players only notice the first.

  • It doubles your speed. That is the part you wanted.
  • It shortens you, continuously, while held. The length you spend came from pellets you ate. A long boost is a real amount of body.
  • It makes impassable terrain lethal. At either speed, ordinary un-dug rock tunnels through harmlessly. Boosting into impassable terrain — solid rock, bedrock — or off the edge of the arena kills you — no rival required.

There is also a floor: below a minimum length you simply cannot boost. A digger that has spent everything is a digger that cannot chase and cannot escape, so the resource runs out at exactly the moment it matters.

Because the third of those is lethal, boost does not fire the instant you press it. It charges for half a second first, drawn as a ring winding around your drill head, and the game spends that half second telling you what the boost is about to hit: a marker on the exact cell and a banner across the screen. Let go before the ring closes and nothing was spent — you never boosted. It is the cheapest escape in the game and the one most players do not know they have.

The one rule people learn the hard way. Boosting is safe in open tunnel and safe through ordinary un-dug rock too — you carve it exactly as you would at normal speed. What it is not safe against is impassable terrain (solid rock, bedrock) and the edge of the arena. Both are visible before you hit them, so a boosted death is always a read you missed, not bad luck.

Two kinds of rock, and how to tell them apart

Almost everything dark around you is carvable — plain rock with a fine grain, which you tunnel through at either speed without a scratch, boosting included. Some of it is not, and the map says so in one unmistakable way.

  • Diagonal stripes with a jagged edge mean you cannot dig it. Solid rock cores and the bedrock floor of the world are struck through with 45° hazard banding and a saw-toothed rim where they meet open ground. Nothing else in the world is striped. At normal speed you slide along that face; boosting into it kills you.
  • Open tunnel is lit at its edges, never striped. Ground you or somebody else has already dug is a lighter floor with a thin bright cut-line where it meets rock. That is the one thing you can move through freely.
A digger at full speed down a tunnel, its body streaked with motion blur, with unbroken rock directly ahead of it.
Boosting, and the wall that ends it. Concept art.

The five ways to die

Every death in GORGED is one of these, and the game tells you which. Three of them have somebody to blame and two of them do not.

Body You ran into another digger's body. They get the kill, and you become food.
Head-on Two heads meet. Both die. There is no size advantage and no winner — being longer does not save you from a head-on, and this is deliberate.
Wall You boosted into impassable terrain (solid rock, bedrock) or off the edge of the arena. If a rival was in close pursuit at the time, they are credited with the kill; if nobody was near you, it is nobody's kill but yours.
Boundary You were caught outside the closing edge in the endgame. Nobody's kill.

What you ate is on your back

Pellets come in mineral types drawn from the geology of whichever country the arena is set in, and every segment of your body renders the mineral you ate at that point. A Mexico tail does not look like an Iceland tail.

This is purely cosmetic. Every pellet is worth exactly the same length — there is no mineral that grows you faster and no build to optimise. What the tail buys you is information: you can look at a rival across the arena and read how much they have eaten and where they have been, instead of looking at a scoreboard.

Each mineral is drawn from how that stone actually grows or breaks. Pyrite is a cube, because pyrite grows cubes clean enough to look manufactured; quartz comes to a point, calcite cleaves to a rhomb, opal is a rounded nodule shot through with colour, and pumice is a froth of holes. So the four minerals of a country stay apart even where their colours sit close together — and stay apart if you cannot separate those colours at all.

One mineral in every country is rarer than the other three, and it is marked: a bright rim, and a four-point sparkle where the others carry a plain dot of light. It is worth no more than anything else — nothing here is — but a tail carrying several of them belongs to somebody who has covered ground.

Four raw mineral specimens on dark stone: black basalt, olive-green olivine, vivid yellow sulfur, and chalk-white zeolite.
Iceland's four minerals. They are deliberately far apart in colour, in brightness and in shape — a tail is only information if two beads cannot be mistaken for each other at a glance, and colour alone does not survive being small, moving, or seen by an eye that reads it differently.

Endless for you. Not for the arena.

Your side of GORGED is endless. The arena's side is not, and it moves through four states.

Open Players can join. Bots fill any empty slots so the field is always full.
Lock The arena stops accepting anyone — players and bots both. Any bots still present forfeit and leave without dropping remains. What is left is a human-only field.
Elimination After the lock, death is permanent removal from that arena. The field can only shrink.
Collapse Once enough of the map has been dug out, the ground starts coming back. Last digger standing wins and the arena is destroyed.

Then the ground comes back

One thing happens, on a clock, and you can watch it the whole way in.

  • The edge closes. An outer boundary contracts from both sides on a fixed schedule, toward a full-height shaft. It does not fill anything with rock — the ground beyond it simply stops being survivable, and it is drawn in the arena and on your minimap from the moment it starts moving. This is what guarantees the round actually ends.
  • Nothing else is coming. The interior used to cave in at random as well, and that is gone: no tunnel fills back behind you in the endgame, and no death arrives without having shown itself first. The arena you finish in is exactly as open as you dug it.

Expect ninety seconds to two minutes from the moment the collapse starts to the end. The closing edge kills on contact regardless of speed and does not care whether you were boosting — but it never surprises you: it has been visibly closing for the whole minute and a half, and getting caught by it is a place you failed to leave.

An excavated cavern seen from above, with a glowing boundary closing inward around the survivors.
The endgame: the edge closing in on the survivors. Concept art.
You can always dig. A near-sealed pocket with one exit and a rival in the corridor is a bad position, not a lost one. The arena is built so that being trapped with no options is impossible; being trapped with only dangerous options is very much on the table.

What you keep

  • Live rank — inside an arena you are ranked by your current length, right now. It is visible, contested, and anyone can take it off you. The standings in the top corner list every digger in the arena, yours highlighted, updating as they eat: a row climbing past you is the thing that just cost you a place.
  • Explored % — every tunnel you carve is banked to that country's permanent exploration total the moment you dig it. Dying does not take it back, and neither does the endgame collapse burying the tunnel you carved. This is the long game, and it is the one thing in GORGED that never gets revoked.
  • The crew, and a career — the campaign is a single-player mode against nine bots, with a difficulty dial you set before every run and a career total that unlocks the other eight diggers. Only a win banks it, and the total is ranked: the server replays your run from your own inputs to work out what it was worth. The systems page has the roster, the rungs and the arithmetic.

Want the roster, the difficulty dial and how the board works? Read about the systems → Ready for the parts that are not obvious? Read the strategy guide →