The Shaft (Amstrad CPC)

An original #Amstrad CPC, 8bit game Humanity has lived for generations inside the Shaft. The surface is taught to be toxic and lethal. Mechanics keep the great pumps alive at the bottom; the agricultural terraces feed everyone from the middle levels; the elite rule from the light-flooded top. You are a bottom-level mechanic who has found a forbidden artifact proving the official history is a lie. There is only one way to the truth: up. Controls: cursor keys + Space + Z, or joystick 0 (fire 1 = jump, fire 2 = lasso). Walk left/right, climb ladders with up/down (mount-assist snaps you onto the rails). Space jumps — real ballistic arcs with air control, head bumps, mid-fall ladder grabs. Z cracks the cable lasso: snares any person on your walkway within 16 pixels, in the direction you face. Down ducks (debris and swings pass over your head), Down + direction slides — a fast low burst, one per press, momentum enough to carry you off an edge. Platforms have jumpable gaps: leap them, or drop through as a one-floor shortcut — but a fall of more than one floor costs a life (the landing stings, play continues where you hit). Everyone faces where they walk: the mechanic has a two-frame leg cycle (walking, a back-view hand-over-hand cycle on ladders, and a stride pose mid-air), and patrollers carry shield or crowbar on their facing side. Coat men step every 2nd frame, riot guards every 4th — you can outrun both. The climb is fully bidirectional: ladders are continuous between screens, so climbing down off the bottom floor descends to the level below. Levels 1, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 have an elevator on the bottom floor — stand at the door and press up/down to ride between stops you have already reached on foot. Health: you carry energy (5) and lives. Any hit — enemy contact, falling debris, red lubricant drips from the ceiling pipes (white ones are just oily water), or a fall of more than one floor — costs one energy point and grants 3 seconds of immunity (the sprite flickers). At zero energy a life goes and the tank refills. Medical crates appear every few levels, worth 1–4 points; spill past 5 and the surplus banks a whole life (cap 9). Security doors come in five colours (green, cyan, yellow, white, red — tinted by each zone's palette) and their keycards are never beside them: a door's key waits on a lower platform, the bottom floor — or an earlier level entirely. Levels sow spare keys for doors further up the shaft; 28 doors have no key on their own level at all. And about a quarter of all keys sit inside sealed vaults: somewhere on an earlier level is the wall switch that opens each one (its state persists for the whole run), so the deepest chains run switch → vault → door across three different levels. Red is the vault colour: every red key sits sealed behind a switch and no other colour ever does — red doors are always the deep chains. And the chains run both ways: about half the vaults sit 1–3 levels BELOW their switch — you throw the lever high, climb back down for the key (opened doors stay open, so the return is quick), and carry it up past the switch again. And no switch is free: each one is guarded by a patrolling enemy, a red leak overhead, or a steam vent right under the lever. Opened doors stay open for the whole run — every door has a persistent id in a 128-bit ledger, and revisited levels reload with their unlocked doors already gone (and every key cell has its own id too: a taken key never reappears — the supply is exactly what the generator placed, which the build-time verifier proves sufficient). Medical crates only start appearing from level 20. The lasso aims from the cursor: plain Z whips sideways as before; hold up for a straight overhead snare (2 px wide, 16 tall), or up + a direction for a 45° rising diagonal — all clamped at walls and roof, all drawn as stepped rope segments. The build-time verifier threads one global key inventory through the whole 59-level climb, so the forward route always works — and if you miss a key it is still lying where it was, and what you took you keep — so with downward travel and the elevators nothing is ever softlocked. Mechanical runs at most one local pair; Agricultural introduces cross-level keys; Administrative chains up to three doors a level. The HUD: key icon with five colour counts (left), level number, a four-digit score (+1 a snared enemy, +2 a pocketed key, +3 an opened door — capped at 9999), energy bolt, and a heart with lives (right). #8bit #retro #retrogaming