Cat Drift — One tap. All night. A wind-down endless runner for iOS.
One tap. All night.
A round little cat rides two glowing strings above a sleeping city. Gates close one of them; a single tap hops you to the other. You open it to stop, not to be tested — so the run can end, but the journey never resets.
The road is always two strings. A gate closes one. Be on the other.
Tap to jump. That is the entire input — a second button has never been added, and none should be. All the depth lives in what you choose, never in how you press. And a mis-tap at speed is meant to be survivable: you can hop freely right up until the tick a gate lands, because recovering is the skill.
Stumble grace
Just stumbled? For the next half-second, gates pass straight through you.
Moon Shield
Granted every 24 gates, one banked at a time. It spends itself and you keep going.
Stumble
A one-time bump onto the safe string — which hands you the grace window above.
The run ends
Only once every mercy is gone. And the game names what got you.
note — Every death is one you could see coming — telegraphed, shape-coded as well as colour-coded, and named afterwards. “A closed gate” reads differently from “the string dissolved underfoot.”
Every eight gates, the road forks
One string opens into two children — calm on the inside, risky on the outside. The other connects to nothing: it is cut short, capped with a trap, and sweeps in from the right. Survive the trap first. Then tap to pick your road, and glide onto it at the node. Choose nothing and the road chooses for you.
Calm
A genuine breather. Plain road, nothing chasing you. Calm is the default here, never the punishment for not being good enough.
Bounty
Gems laid across the lanes while the gates keep coming. Greed against safety, for twenty-four gates.
Peril
The speed surges — and holds there for the whole stretch.
note — The whole fork is gate-free. It only launches once the road is clear, so nothing competes with the crossing.
Moon Glide
Every calm stretch, the strings dissolve beneath the cat and it lifts free — the one time in the whole game it leaves the road. For twenty-five seconds it drifts above the clouds through firefly arcs, bead lines and lantern clusters, steered by gently tilting the phone. Then the strings glow back in and it settles onto the nearest lane.
No gyro, or Reduce Motion switched on? Hold to rise, let go to sink. Not a downgrade — a first-class second control, with a tilt/touch toggle on the stretch's very first frame.
25 seconds
Plus a 1.5s lift-off and a 1.5s landing. About one glide every 75 seconds of play.
Tilt to steer
Position, not velocity — and neutral recalibrates at entry, so lying down plays exactly like sitting up.
No stakes at all
No gates, no fail state, no mercy spent. Missing everything costs nothing and makes no failure sound.
Never queasy
The camera never tilts with the phone. The world stays level and only the cat moves.
Straight from the build
Captures from the game running on device — no mockups, no marketing renders.
Six regions and a very round cat
The night is not one backdrop. Every two forks the road crosses into a new region, each owning its own sky, city, strings and accent — entered on a two-second sweep across every layer, with a name card. About one crossing every ninety seconds, so a minute of play never looks like the last.
Glow
Fireflies build a ×1→×5 multiplier on everything moment-to-moment. Take a gate and it drops exactly one tier, never below ×1 — a hit costs glow, not joy.
Chonk Star
Roughly every sixty gates. The cat inflates round and huge for four seconds, wide enough to sweep both strings at once. Pure comedy and zero risk — it can neither end a run nor save one.
Campfires
A checkpoint banks every twenty-four gates. Die, and you resume from the last one for free — the restored run is identical to one that never died.
Night Notes
The journal: cards and wind-down techniques you collect by playing. No energy system, no pay-to-win, nothing useful hidden behind a pity timer.
Built to be left running
Everything earned in a run is kept when it ends — cards, regions, milestones, the streak. There is no leaderboard to chase and no life meter to wait out. It is the little game that helps you unwind, and it is happy to be closed mid-run.
Coming to iOS
Cat Drift is in the last stretch of polish, on its way to the App Store. Follow the studio while it heads to launch.
Something wrong? A human answers.
Bugs, a run that vanished, a question about what the game stores — mail me directly. No ticket system, no bot.