GORGE

How to play

Two inputs, and one rule about walls

GORGE 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.

Controls

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. Wherever you first touch becomes the centre. The direction from that point to your thumb is your heading; pulling further out past a threshold starts the 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.
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 GORGE silent without losing the feedback.

The loop

  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.

  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 also the only way ordinary rock becomes 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

    There is no death screen. Your remains become food for whoever is nearby and you are already in a fresh arena, in a new digger, in under a second.

Boost is the whole economy

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 un-dug rock lethal. At normal speed you tunnel through rock harmlessly. Boosting into rock that has not been excavated 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.

The one rule people learn the hard way. Boosting is safe in open tunnel and fatal into a wall. This is why a fleeing digger heading for fresh rock is not automatically safe, and why chasing at full speed through unfamiliar ground is a way to kill yourself with nobody's help.

The five ways to die

Every death in GORGE 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 solid rock. 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.
Crushed The endgame cave-in landed on you. Nobody's kill.
Boundary You were caught outside the closing edge in the endgame. Nobody's kill.

Your tail shows what you ate

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.

How an arena ends

Your side of GORGE 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.

The collapse

Two things happen at once, and both of them kill on contact.

  • The interior caves in. Sections of tunnel fill back with rock at random. The arena is guaranteed to stay in one connected piece — you will never be sealed into a pocket with no way out — but a cave-in that reaches you is lethal.
  • The edge closes. An outer boundary contracts on a fixed clock, independent of the cave-ins. It does not fill anything with rock; the ground beyond it simply stops being survivable. This is what guarantees the round actually ends.

Expect ninety seconds to two minutes from the first cave-in to the end. Note what the collapse does to the game: by that point the field has excavated most of the walls, and walls are half of how you kill. The collapse hands them back.

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.
  • 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 GORGE that never gets revoked.

Ready for the parts that are not obvious? Read the strategy guide →