read it, then go and get it right
walk into a subject · 0 facts learnt so far
WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE
A hall with four ways out of it, one to each subject: MATHS, WORDS, SCIENCE and WORLD. Walk into one and it begins. There is no menu and nothing to click — where you walk is what you choose.
WASD to move, mouse to look, SHIFT to hurry, SPACE to jump, click to fire. M mutes. ESC gives the pointer back.
Every drill opens in front of a screen with something to read on it: the rule, the table, a worked example. A few lines, not an essay. It is there because being tested on a thing you were never told is not learning, it is guessing. Read it, and when the door beside it lights, walk on.
The question is on the screen and four blocks come down out of the dark, one of them right. Shoot it. Shoot a wrong one, or let the right one reach the floor, and you have missed — and the right block lights up and hangs there so you see it while you are still looking at the one you picked.
Then a half you answer by walking. Three doors with an answer on each: the right one opens onto the next chamber, a wrong one shuts you in for a moment with the right answer written on the wall in front of you. Some sets send you up a tower instead — four storeys, a question on each landing, and a wrong gate brings the hauler down the well to set you back on the ground floor. Then you climb it again, answering everything you had already passed. Nothing is ever lost; what it costs is the climb.
Some things cannot be asked in words. Geometry stands four solids on plinths and asks which one rolls. Geography hangs the world on a wall and asks you to find Peru on it. And the words people really get wrong are asked as a sentence with a hole in it: shoot a word into the gap, and whatever you shoot goes in and stays there to be read back.
Every fact is remembered separately. Get one wrong and it returns a few questions later, and again the next time you play. Get one right and it waits longer each time before it asks again — which is, as far as anyone can tell, the cheapest way to make a thing stick. The bars on the title screen are how much of each subject you have.