Rope Swing

Swing hook to hook across all eight crossings and land on the far cliff each time before you run out of hearts.

Rope Swing

PhysicsMedium 4.4

How to play Rope Swing

Rope Swing is eight crossings of a flooded gorge, made one hook at a time. You hang from a rope under a hook, and the swing is a real pendulum: lean with it as you pass through the bottom of the arc and it climbs higher each time, lean against it and it dies away. You can also climb up or slide down the rope, and because your angular momentum is kept while you do, pulling yourself in at the bottom of the arc speeds the swing up.

Letting go throws you along the line of the swing with exactly the speed you had at that instant, so the moment you choose is the whole game. Let go on the way up and forward and you sail; let go too early, too late or on the back-swing and you drop short into the water. Fly through the ring around the next hook and your hands close on it — but only the part of your speed that runs across the new rope survives the catch, so a catch that meets the rope head-on leaves you almost still, pumping again from nothing. Reach the next hook but one in a single jump and it counts as a skip.

Each crossing adds a hook, spreads them further apart and shrinks the catch rings. The first two draw the path you would take if you let go now; from the third some hooks slide on rails, from the fourth some are fragile and snap a few seconds after you catch them, and from the sixth a crosswind pushes on every swing and every jump. A fall costs one of three hearts and puts you back on the last sturdy hook you caught.