This Experience Cannot Be Canceled

You accidentally pressed the Manual Control Experience button in your spaceship taxi. You don't have a license, and you need to get back for your niece's birthday party with the cake intact. This experience cannot be canceled. Good luck flying pilot!

How to fly (you can't, legally, and you've never done this before)

Without knowing exactly what buttons to push to fly this thing, your controls are going to be iffy at best. The ship, when in manual mode, only does what the command console tells it. Once per second, every command underneath the highlighted tetromino piece fires, all of them, even conflicting ones. In this game, you don't pilot the ship directly, you control the piece.

• WASD / Arrow keys - slide the piece around the 5×5 command grid
• Q / E - rotate the piece</l>
• Esc - quit to menu

That's everything, it'd be simple, if you knew what you were doing, but you don't. How the ship moves depends on where the tetromino is on the grid: thrusters run along the top of the grid, brakes along the bottom, turn commands down the sides, and the rest - shields, lasers, sonar, battery cells, all the things you need to survive - is scattered throughout the middle, different every run. Cover a battery icon to recharge your power. Everything else costs energy, and commands you don't have energy for just do nothing, which can be dangerous if your trajectory has you headed towards an asteroid!

Your goal each sector is to use the sonar and follow the ping to two navigation relays and brake your ship inside a relay's influence for a couple of seconds to bring it online. After both relays are active, the exit gate is revealed. Fly through it, get a reward (or repair), and repeat. It's a short trip home, if you're good, the few jump gates you'll need won't take long and you'll be back for your niece's birthday party in no time.

Just watch that cake. Every asteroid you bump ruins the Cake Integrity, and newly seven-year-olds don't want cake crumbles, they want the whole shebang!