Starship Rescue — a gravity slingshot puzzle for iPhone

01 · The idea

Aim into a gravity field

There is no thrust and no steering. You get one decision — the direction and strength of the launch — and then you watch physics answer it. The aim line is a real trajectory from the same integrator that flies the ship, cut short so it hints without giving the answer away.

From sector nine, moons orbit the planets. They block, they never pull, and they keep moving while you aim. So when you release matters as much as where you point.

The full guide — how power trades against curve, how to read the grid, and what to try when a sector resists — is on how to play.

02 · Screens

A vector display, not a filter

Wireframe rocks, phosphor bloom and a grid that warps under gravity. Every sector is drawn as line work — the only artwork in the game is the title screen, which is the same picture the app launches into.

03 · The part nobody else does

Every sector is solved before you see it

Levels are not hand-placed and hoped over. Each one is built from bodies alone, then a solver brute-forces nearly two thousand launches through the real physics and keeps only the routes that reach the wormhole with genuine clearance and a watchable flight time. The crew are laid along a route that actually works.

Where moons are involved it goes further, tuning the orbits until there is a clear window long enough for a human to aim in — because a level that is statistically passable in a tenth of a second is a lottery, not a puzzle.

If a sector cannot be proven beatable, the build fails and it never ships. That check runs on every single change.

The physics underneath it is a real manoeuvre, and not the one most explanations describe: what a gravity slingshot actually is.

04 · Details

What you get

Platform

iPhone

Price

Free to try
£3.99 unlocks the rest · no ads

Sectors

100
The first 15 are free

Controls

One thumb

Account

Not required

Network

Plays offline

Accessibility is built in rather than bolted on: reduced motion stops the grid warp and spin, high contrast thickens the strokes and cuts the bloom, and line weight and glow are yours to set. Each way of losing sounds different, so the outcome is never carried by colour alone. The support page lists every setting and what it changes.

05 · What it costs

Play the first fifteen sectors free

Starship Rescue is free to download, and sectors 01 to 15 are yours without paying anything. That is not a trailer: it is the first fifteen sectors of the real campaign, in order, ending on the one where the ship’s guns arrive. One payment of £3.99 unlocks the other eighty‑five.

You can play those fifteen sectors right now, in a browser, without a store or an install: play the demo. It is the same build that ships to phones, carrying the free sectors and nothing else.

That single unlock is the only thing this game ever sells. There are no adverts, no subscription, no second tier, no currency and nothing that expires — and there is no advertising SDK in the build, which is why the privacy page can say what it says.