Spruce Ridge Loft

Spruce Ridge Loft is a ski jumping game about four separate moments rather than one long ride. Each jump asks you for a different skill, and the score you walk away with is built the way a real hill builds it.

THE INRUN
Sit in the tuck and hold a drifting balance marker inside a narrow band with small left and right taps. Leave it alone and the drift grows on its own. Every moment you keep inside the band is speed at the table, and table speed is most of your distance.

THE TAKE-OFF
A marker sweeps the bar once and you get one tap. Land it on the green strip at the lip and you leave the table with full power and full marks. Early or late and you lose height, you are slow into the flying position, and five judges notice.

THE FLIGHT
Drag to set your body attitude against the air. Too flat and the lift falls away and you sink. Too steep and the flow breaks off the skis while the drag keeps climbing, so you bleed the speed you worked for. The best angle is not fixed: it opens up as you slow down, and a headwind closes it again, so you keep trimming the whole way down.

THE LANDING
One more tap, timed on the moment the skis meet the snow. Inside the window you drop into a full telemark and keep every style point. Outside it you land square or put a hand down, and a badly missed one is a stumble.

REAL SCORING
Sixty points for landing on the K-point, then the hill's metre value added or taken away for every metre either side. Five judges each mark you out of twenty in half points; the highest and the lowest are struck out and the middle three are added. Then the round's wind is compensated, because a headwind carries a jumper further and a tailwind does not. The full breakdown is laid out after every single jump, so you can see exactly where the points came from.

THREE HILLS
A normal hill at K90 and a large hill at K120, both with live wind, plus a training hill where the air is held dead calm and the best flight angle is drawn as a guide ribbon so you can learn the trim before you go chasing a score.

WHAT THE SEASON LOG KEEPS
Longest jump on each hill, best total score, style average, telemark count, fall rate and clean-run streak, with twelve awards to work through, from your first flight to a hundred jumps taken.

BUILT TO STAY OUT OF THE WAY
Completely offline. No internet connection is needed or used, no adverts, no analytics, no accounts, no purchases and nothing to sign up for. There is no sound at all, so it plays anywhere without disturbing anyone; the feedback is visual, with an optional haptic tap. The hill, the jumper, the trail and every gauge are drawn as vectors while you play, so the download stays small and the whole thing runs on a modest phone. Portrait only, and your season log survives closing the app.