Every weapon is also a key
Chakan starts with the Twin Swords and never loses them. The other four each wait at the end of an element's first level, and every one of them doubles as the only way past a specific obstacle. If you're stuck staring at a wall you can't break, the game is telling you which weapon you haven't grabbed yet.
Twin Swords
Always equipped, can't be dropped. The detail that matters: they're one of only two weapons that let you pull off the double spin jump, the Grappling Hook being the other. Switch to the Scythe or Axe and that extra height in the air disappears, so keep the swords in hand for tricky platforming.
Scythe
Found in the first Fire level, Elkenrod's realm. It tears through the sticky spider webs that choke the Earth dimension, and nothing else will cut them. If a web stops you cold, you skipped Fire.
Battle Axe
Waiting in the first Earth level, the Spider-Queen's nest. It splinters doors and walls the swords just bounce off. The Air dimension's second phase locks you behind a door that takes six axe hits to break, so don't show up without it.
Grappling Hook
Picked up in the first Water level, Mantis' domain. This is your navigation tool. Heave it onto ram's heads and fixtures, then swing over pits or haul yourself up walls you could never jump. It also restores the double spin jump, and half the later levels quietly assume you're carrying it.
Battering Mallet
Hidden in the first Air level, the Dragonfly King's floating castle. It bashes through walls and rocky obstacles, and it's what gets you down through the frozen floors of the ice world to reach the exit. Without it, whole stretches of the Elemental Plane stay sealed.
Alchemy turns potions into spells
Potions come in four colors tied to the elements: green for Earth, red for Fire, blue for Water, clear for Air. You can carry four of each, and on their own they do nothing. The spell book is where they earn their keep, mixing two potions into a single effect that can flip a losing run around.
Reading the spell book
Press Enter to open the book. Spells sit as icons across the two pages; move the cursor onto one and confirm to brew and equip it. You can only brew a spell while you're holding both potions it needs, so the book doubles as a shopping list for what to collect.
The combinations worth knowing by heart:
- Two blue: Invisibility — enemies lose sight of you
- Green + clear: Invincibility — shrugs off every enemy hit, but pits, lava and spikes still kill you
- Blue + clear: Jumping Boots — a super-high jump that reaches ledges you otherwise can't
- Green + red: Smart Firebomb — wipes out most enemies currently on screen
- Blue + green: Slow — drags enemy speed down for a while
- Two clear: First Aid — refills your health
One more is worth its own mention. Passage opens a portal that drops you into hidden or otherwise sealed spots, and it's the key to one of the game's biggest shortcuts, covered below.
The trick that breaks half the bosses
Most bosses here charge in a straight line, and Chakan's weapons keep hitting as long as you hold the attack button. Put those two facts together and a lot of the roster beats itself. Back into a corner, hold K so the weapon stays extended, and let the boss run onto it. You don't dodge and you don't time anything. The weapon deals damage every time the boss touches it.
It's almost comically reliable. The Spider-Queen goes down in twelve hits if you corner her and hold the Axe out; her Spi-taur guardian needs eighteen, with a quick release and re-press of K between rams. For the Mantis, sit in the bottom-right corner with the Grappling Hook extended and let it die without ever moving. The Dragonfly King is the same idea with one tweak: duck while he charges, hook still out, and he flies into it on every pass.
Elkenrod in the Fire dimension is the exception. Clear out the enemies hanging around her arena first and the fight collapses to a handful of hits; skip that step and she's a wall. You can try all of this online in the browser right now, and the early bosses are the safest place to learn the pattern before the Elemental Plane stops being so forgiving.
The infinite double jump
This one isn't in the manual; players dug it out on their own. Make a normal jump, then alternate quickly between Space and K while airborne. Each clean back-and-forth buys another jump, so with a steady rhythm you can keep Chakan up far longer than the game ever meant to allow.
The catch: hit Space and K at the same instant and you'll fire off a spinning attack instead, which grounds the trick until you land. Keep the presses strictly one after the other. It's worth drilling, because it turns the deadly gap jumps, the ones where a single miss restarts the whole plane, into something you can practically float across.
Practice mode is your sandbox
Switch the Options menu over to Practice Mode and your potions never run out. That's the real reason to bother with it. This is the one place you can brew every alchemy recipe back to back and watch what each spell actually does before it costs you a run, so you walk into the real game already knowing which ones you'll lean on.
It's also the safest spot to rehearse whatever keeps killing you. Memorize where enemies sit, drill the gap jumps, run a boss pattern until your hands know it cold, all without the hub waiting to swallow a real run's worth of progress.
Skip straight to the hard half
There's a way to leap past the entire Terrestrial Plane and arrive on the Elemental Plane with every weapon already in hand. From the hub, walk right and down the stairs onto the platform, then keep going right until you reach a small floating platform sitting off on its own, just past the navigation chart. Stand on it, open the spell book with Enter, and cast Passage.
You'll hear a heavy, thunderous sound when it takes; that's your confirmation it worked. Do it in Practice Mode and you arrive with unlimited potions, which is the sane way to handle what's waiting, because the Elemental Plane is the brutal half of the game: the lava world, the ice world, the mud world, and the sky stages you fight from the back of a flying creature. This isn't a shortcut for a first run. It's for when you already know the early dimensions cold and want to spend your time where the real fight is.