Questing: A Tick's Tale

You are a tick. This is your one shot.

Real ticks do something called questing: they climb to the tip of a blade of grass, stretch their front legs into the air, and wait — sometimes for months — for something warm to brush past.

You are that tick. The wind is your slingshot.

Hold. Read the wind. Let go at exactly the right moment.

Grip the blade and the wind bends it. Release on the forward whip and you're launched — a live trajectory arc shows where you'd fly right now, so every miss is yours to own.

Land on a host to latch on and drink. Hit the sweet spot for a CAPILLARY CRIT. Chain hosts without missing and your score multiplier climbs to 3×. Come up short and you'll clip a nearby blade tip mid-flight, grab on, and keep going — crossing the whole map perch by perch without ever touching the ground.

Four places that each break the rules of the last

• 🌾 The Back Lawn — Gusty, unpredictable wind. A guinea fowl that crouches, telegraphs, and leaps to snatch you out of the air. Fly high and you're safe.

• 🛋️ The Living Room — Indoors, on potted houseplants. No weather here — a ceiling fan makes a slow, learnable draft you can time to the beat. But the fan is now the hazard above you. Suddenly high is the dangerous place. A house cat is watching.

• 🏡 The Front Lawn — Faster gusts, two predators from the start, pop-up sprinklers that wash you out of the sky, and a lawnmower that does not check for ticks.

• 🔬 The Lab — You were collected. In here the air isn't weather, it's machinery: one extractor on a printed schedule that pins every perch flat, then releases them into the hardest, highest launch in the game. Read the clock, not the wind. Mind the pipette arm.

Pick your parasite

• Ixodes — Deer tick. Balanced. The classic quester.

• Amber — Lone Star. Her power meter [i]sweeps[/i] instead of filling; nail the green sweet-spot for a bonus-power launch that guarantees a crit. Steers in mid-air.

• Bruno — American dog tick. Heavy, powerful, iron grip, and completely ignores the wind.

• Pip — A nymph. Tiny, floaty, rides every draft, and scores 25% more for the trouble.

Also true

• 52 hand-tuned levels across four zones, with a level picker so you can drop back in anywhere you've reached.

• Hosts worth chasing — mice, rabbits, the family dog, a crawling baby, deer, and joggers you can only catch by the ankle.

• Earn a fourth life. Feed cleanly enough and your host sheds a fat bead of blood onto a nearby perch. Go get it before it dries.

• An original soundtrack with an in-game jukebox — loop, shuffle, or repeat, and newly unlocked tracks play first.

• Runs on anything. The whole game is a single file: hand-drawn 2D over one custom shader.

• Full controller support. Play start to finish on a pad — every menu and card is reachable without a mouse, with on-screen button prompts. Built and laid out for the Steam Deck's native 1280×800.

"Questing" is real. Ticks climb, they reach, and they wait. Everything else here is your fault.