60
seconds
A small round climber in a scarf, a stack of ledges with words on them, and a glowing tide that will not stop rising. Type a word and you jump to it. Keep typing and you keep climbing.
You start on the grass at the bottom of the screen. Above you sit two or three ledges, each with a word written on its face. Type one of those words and your climber crouches, leaps and lands on that ledge. There is no Space or Enter to press: the jump fires the moment the last letter goes in. Then the next row is waiting.
Every word on a row starts with a different letter, so your first key already picks the ledge. The ledge lights up, a dotted arc shows where you are about to fly, and the letters fill in as you type. If you are quick, you can type the next word while you are still in the air and the climber will chain the jumps.
A glowing tide (a pink mist on the light themes) rises from below the whole time. It starts slow and gets faster with every metre you gain, and the words get longer as you go. The chip in the top corner tells you how far below you it is, and the edges of the screen go red when it is close. When it reaches your feet, the run ends and your height is your score.
Coins and the odd star float between rows. Jump through them to collect them.
On Standard a wrong key just breaks your combo and leaves your progress in place, so you can fix it and carry on. Advanced starts with longer words and a faster tide, and a wrong key wipes the word you were typing. An average typist reaches somewhere between 100 and 200 metres; fast, accurate typists can get a lot higher.
Climbing high in Skyward depends on reading the next word before you finish the current one, and that is also what keeps a normal typing test flowing. The faded words on the row above are your next choices, and the players who climb highest are already looking at them mid-jump.
No. The jump starts the moment the last letter of a word is typed. Space does nothing in Skyward.
The ledge shakes, your combo resets and the key counts against your accuracy. On Standard the letters you already typed stay; on Advanced the word is cleared.
Your score is the highest point you reached, in metres. Each row of ledges is 2.5 metres, and mushrooms count for two rows.
Yes. On a narrow screen the ledges rearrange to fit, and you can type with the on-screen keyboard.