The settings screen

Press SETTINGS to open it. It opens over whatever was on the glass — the game list, or a game in progress, which is held still and untouched behind it. Press SETTINGS again to close and go straight back to what you were doing.

Up and down choose a row. The big round button changes whatever the caret is pointing at. That is the whole interface: the settings screen is a list, not a menu of menus.

Only six rows fit the glass at once. The list scrolls when the caret reaches the edge, and a small arrow appears in the left column when there are rows above or below.

SOUND

On or off. It silences everything at once — the blips, the clears, the level notes and the tune that plays when the device wakes up.

VIBRATE

On or off. Short taps on the moments that matter: a piece locking, a line clearing, a level going up, a game ending.

Your phone still has the last word. If you have turned haptics off system-wide, this switch cannot turn them back on — it only decides whether the app asks.

GLASS

Three positions: AUTO, LIGHT, DARK.

• LIGHT is the daylight panel — dark ink on green, the way the plastic units read in a lit room.
• DARK is the backlit panel — glowing dots on near-black.
• AUTO follows your phone. Set it and the device turns itself down at sunset.

The case changes with the glass. A glowing panel set into unchanged daytime plastic reads as a bright screen in a lit room, which is the one thing it is not.

DOT

The shape of a lit cell: BRICK, FINE, SOLID, SPLIT, WHEEL or ROUND.

SPLIT cuts the cell corner to corner and reverses a circle across the cut — a pale circle on the dark half, a dark one on the pale half. It was called ROUND until September 2026, and if you had it selected before then, the device will have gone back to BRICK — pick SPLIT again and it stays.

WHEEL is a rim with a round hub at its centre and four spokes out to the corners. It was called STAR until September 2026 — nothing about it is star-shaped, and if you had it selected the device will have gone back to BRICK.

ROUND is now the brick cell with its corners softened.

This is the single largest change you can make to how the screen looks, and it is worth trying all six — a dot style that reads well on one glass can be muddy on the other.

BRICK is the default and the closest to the hardware.

FRAME

The line drawn around the screen: INK, BLACK, HAIRLINE or NONE.

The hardware runs a thin border around the whole display, and it is what makes the dots read as a screen rather than a pattern printed on the plastic. INK is that line as the device has always drawn it, in the same ink as the dots. BLACK is a moulded bezel, HAIRLINE is the pale metal line the more expensive units had, and NONE takes it away entirely.

It changes the outer border only. The line dividing the playfield from the score panel stays as it is: that one is not decoration, it is where the game happens.

BLACK is not the same black on both glasses. On the backlit panel the screen itself is nearly black, so a true black border would simply vanish; there it is the darkest ink the panel can print and still be seen.

INK is free. The other three come with the unlock.

CASE

The plastic the device is moulded in: AZURE, CLASSIC, GRAPE, SLATE, SCARLET, COSMIC, FOREST, KAWAII and STICKER.

The button changes the case and the device wears it immediately — so you can walk the whole collection and see each one on your own screen before deciding.

GHOST

Off by default. Turned on, a falling piece shows a faint outline of where it would land if you dropped it now.

It appears in the three games with a piece to drop — Tetromino, Pentamino and Virus — and nowhere else, because nothing else has one. The outline is drawn at half strength so it is never mistaken for anything that has already settled.

The hardware had no such thing. It is there for people who want the help, and off for people who want the original.

CLIMB

On by default. It decides whether a run gets faster and harder as it goes.

Turned off, the game stays at the speed and level you set on the dials. You still score, you still clear lines and pass cars — it simply stops speeding up underneath you.

Useful for practising a particular setting, or if the climb outruns you before the game gets interesting. Turn it back on for a score you want to compare with anything.

Some things still progress either way: a tank still sends the next wave, a frog still has another crossing to make, a cleared board still deals the next one. What CLIMB holds back is everything that would make the run harder — the speed, and the level a finished board would have moved you up to.

TIPS

On by default. It decides whether the device explains its own controls.

The caps are printed with what they do, so most of them need no explaining. Five things are not printed anywhere: that the picture on the left of the glass is the game you are about to start, what the numbers on the right of it are, which of the two dials is the speed and which is the starting height, that the device settings and PRO are behind the SETTINGS cap, and that RESET goes back to the game list and keeps your score rather than wiping anything.

Each dims the case around the control it is naming, and each appears once. They come one after another, so a screen says everything it has to say in one go — dismiss a card and the next one follows. NO MORE TIPS on any card stops them there and turns the lot of them off, leaving this row reading off.

Each game also has a card of its own: one line saying what the game is for, shown the first time you start it, with the game held still until you have read it. This row governs those too — turning tips off turns them off, and turning tips back on shows every one again.

Turning it back on makes every tip new again, including ones you have already read — if you are asking for them back, that is what asking for them back means. There is no third position, so turning them off and on again is not a way to keep the record.

PRO, RESTORE and PRIVACY

Three rows about the one-off purchase rather than about the device.

• PRO shows the price and opens the purchase. Once it is bought the row fills in and there is nothing left to sell.
• RESTORE asks the store whether you already own it. It works on a new phone and after a reinstall. The unlock belongs to your App Store or Google account, not to an account here — there is none to sign in to, and the store’s receipt is what proves it.
• PRIVACY opens the privacy policy. Where the law requires a choice about ads, it reopens that choice instead.

RATE

Opens this app’s page in the App Store or on Google Play, on the review screen, so you can leave a rating if you feel like leaving one.

It is a plain link out to the store. It does not open the little rating box that sometimes appears over the game — both stores ration that box, neither will say how much of the ration is left, and a button that quietly does nothing for half the people who press it is worse than no button. This row always goes somewhere.

HELP

Opens this page in your browser.

It is the last row on the list, below the ones that cost money, because it is what you reach for when the rest of the screen has not explained itself. The device has no room for words — the glass is a list of one-word labels and a ring — so the explanation lives out here instead.

What the unlock changes

Bought from the PRO row above. It removes the ads, and it opens the rest of the cases and dot styles.

Everything else stays exactly as it was. Every game, every dial, every score is in the free version — the purchase changes how the device looks and whether ads appear, and never what the games do.

Locked values still show a small PRO beside them, and the button still walks onto them: the device wears the case you are looking at whether you have paid for it or not. It just will not keep one you have not.