The Core
Level 5 — a hollow world, a rocky sun and a way back to the surface
Below the Mine the rock ends and the world turns inside out. The Core is a sphere within the planet, lit permanently by a molten sun hanging in its centre, with the landscape curving up on every side instead of falling away to a horizon. It is the strangest level in the game and the one where the art style shifts: still pixel art, but denser and more detailed, as though the game itself had jumped a hardware generation between the Mine and here.
A world made of borrowed dreams
The Core is openly a collage of the science fiction and fantasy the game is made of. There are steaming marshes with mycelium the size of trees, forests of species that never existed, ranks of perfectly straight crystal towers, basalt organ-pipe cliffs, geyser fields, and creatures halfway between dinosaurs and something no fossil record would explain.
The level nods twice to Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth without naming it — most directly through a set of initials carved into rock, left by a traveller who went down long before you did.
Because the sky is a sun and the ground curves upward, several rooms are deliberately hard to read: you cannot always tell whether you are looking at a distant landscape or at the underside of the world.
The last stage: a choice, for once
The final stage of the Core introduces the only human being in the game. He is as surprised to see you as you are to see him, and he knows a way back to the surface — a shaft, a gallery, an improbable electrical machine, a ride on the back of a creature.
You can follow him, take a different route out, or refuse both and keep looking. For the first time the level asks for a decision rather than a guess. Everything is shown from your own eyes; the game never draws your character in these rooms.
Reaching 100%
The Core has the largest and most varied room set in the game, so completing it takes the longest. Its bonus artwork places the creator inside the hollow world with the three objects recovered there.
The three objects of the Core
An African luck charm
A small stone wrapped in paper and bound round and round with cotton thread, small enough to close your hand over. It brings back the vague impression of a journey.
A battered game controller
Black, scuffed, cracked, its cable torn open. Utterly anachronistic here, and instantly recognisable to anyone who was a child in the right decade.
An ear trumpet
A hearing horn of the kind used before hearing aids existed. Held to the ear, it makes the hollow world sound even larger than it is.