One Must Imagine
Sep 28, 2026 — A punishing side-on physics climb through the myth of Sisyphus, where each thumb is a foot and the stone always comes back down.
One Must Imagine is the myth of Sisyphus as a rage game, in the spirit of Getting Over It. You push a lumpy two-metre boulder up a mountain, one step at a time. There are no checkpoints. The stone settles on its flat faces and lurches off them, scree slides out from under your feet, and when you finally reach the top the gods take it back. The title only finishes its sentence at the summit. Every summit is counted, and each one makes you a little stronger, up to a point. The first climb stays brutal. The mountain talks to you along the way, in a dry, stoic voice.
You control each foot on its own: on a phone, your left thumb is the left foot and your right thumb the right. Sisyphus is a rigid torso on "virtual legs" in planck.js. A planted foot holds him up and drives him forward along the slope as the leg straightens. That push fades as he speeds up, the way a real muscle does. Each foot has a friction limit that depends on the ground, so rock and dirt hold, while shoving too hard on scree makes your feet go out from under you. His hands grip the stone with a spring that has only so much strength, and pushing drains his stamina. Lifting a foot costs half your drive, so the whole game is choosing when to step: wait until the stone is resting on a flat face or wedged against a lip, or it rolls back over you.
It aims for realism, and everything is made in code with three.js. The rock and ground materials are procedural shaders with strata, lichen and cracks. The sculpted figure is posed from the physics and gathers dust and sweat as he tires. The view falls away down the mountain to the sea, and while you rest the camera drifts up the slope to show what's coming. The sound is all synthesized too: wind, footsteps and gravel by surface, the grinding roll of the stone, and a breath and heartbeat that tell you, even on a phone, when to stop and rest. The promo is rendered from the real game with an autopilot doing the climbing, and its soundtrack is built from the stone's actual roll and the actual scree slips logged during the render.