How to play

Shoot enemy ships and collect the plasma they drop to fill your power meter. When the meter is full your ship ranks up and gains firepower. All those extra bullets burn a lot of plasma, so the meter slowly drains over time. You also lose plasma when your ship takes damage.

In Conquest mode your ship has a health bar and the repair power-up fills it back up. It also has infinite continues, use that mode to learn the game. Other modes are less forgiving, so lock in!

Firing is automatic. Your ship isn't designed to contain plasma without constant venting.

Gamepad (Recommended)

Move	Left stick or d-pad
Bomb	A
Slow	Hold LB or LT for precise movement
Boost	Hold RB or RT to move faster if you're not on max sensitivity
Pause	Start

Mouse & keyboard

Move	The ship follows the mouse, or move with WASD / arrow keys
Bomb	B or Ctrl
Slow	Hold Shift for precise movement
Pause	Esc or Space

Enemies drop shields, weapons, wingmen, repairs, and bombs. Timed power-ups show an icon with a countdown so you know how long is left.

Bombs destroy every enemy bullet on screen and damage every ship when used intentionally. Enemy bullets also turn into points and plasma. A bomb will also trigger automatically to protect you from a hit, but the blast radius will be smaller and without extra points and plasma.

You earn bonus points for destroying every enemy in a formation and finishing levels quickly. Being fast and thorough is the best way to rack up a high score. The score multiplier climbs over time and resets when you get hit in Conquest mode.

Challenge mode is a fresh gauntlet every week: one seeded run with identical levels, enemies, and drops for every player on Earth. One hit ends it.

It's short and hard. You can finish in about five minutes if you survive that long, and finishing means learning the week's patterns and drops. When the week rolls over you get new levels and a fresh leaderboard, global or friends-only.

The mode needs to see Steam's clock once to know the current week, so if CHALLENGE is missing from the mode dial, run the game with Steam online and it appears. The free demo has this mode in full, the same gauntlet the full game is flying that week, on its own leaderboards.

Plasma Sky is a vertical game, and it can turn to match your hardware. The ROTATION dial in Options has TATE modes for physically rotated monitors, in both directions.

The STEAM DECK mode rotates the picture and the controls together, so you can hold the Deck sideways and fly a full-height vertical field.

I recommend the default rotation for most setups, it allows you to use the score tracer that lives in the margin, and there's an advantage in seeing more of the screen in one glance. Landscape mode sounds like a better idea than it actually is, please try any other mode first!