INTO THE PITS — The Pit Survival Manual

Everything we wish someone had told us before our first Wall of Death.

What kind of game is this?

INTO THE PITS is a physics brawler about being a metalhead at a metal show. You are one body in a heaving mosh pit; everyone around you is swinging, charging, and occasionally cartwheeling. Your job is to stay on your feet longer than everyone else, knock moshers down for score, scoop the gold they drop, and survive whatever the pit decides to do next — which every half minute or so is something organised and terrible, like the entire crowd splitting in half and charging itself.

A run (we call it a set) ends when your health hits zero and the crowd carries you out. Between sets you spend gold on permanent upgrades and new abilities, tweak your look, and go straight back in. Sets last anywhere from forty seconds (bad Wall of Death placement) to ten minutes and beyond (you, a legend, dancing through the chaos).

Controls — your fists work on their own

The single most important thing to understand: you do not press a button to punch. Get near a mosher and your character swings automatically at the nearest target, as fast as your punch speed allows. All of your actual inputs are about where you are standing and which special move to fire:

• WASD / arrow keys (or left thumb on mobile) — move. This is 90% of the skill.
• SPACE, Q, E, R (or the round buttons on mobile) — fire the ability equipped in that slot. You choose which four abilities to bring in from the menu.
• Standing still — your metalhead headbangs. This does nothing. It is still the correct thing to do while you wait for a cooldown.

Because punching is automatic, positioning is everything: face the crowd from an angle where one mosher is in reach and three aren't, and you win the exchange. Wade into the middle and five of them auto-punch you.

Score vs gold — two different currencies

Every knockout pays twice, in different ways:

• SCORE is your bragging number. It arrives instantly, scales with your combo (knockouts within 3 seconds of each other chain: 100, 200, 300…), and posts to the global scoreboard. Score resets every set.
• GOLD is the economy. It does NOT arrive instantly — it physically falls out of the people you flatten and lands on the floor as coins. Walk over coins to scoop them. Coins fade after about twelve seconds, and the crowd doesn't pick them up, but a Wall of Death happening on top of your unclaimed earnings is a tragedy we've all lived.

Moshers knocked out by other moshers (it's a pit, it happens constantly) also drop a little change. A patient scavenger can fund an upgrade habit without throwing a single punch of their own. We don't judge. The pit judges, but we don't.

The seven upgrades

The eight abilities — and building your loadout

Abilities unlock with gold, level up to 3, and you can only bring four into the pit — pick them in the menu and they map to SPACE, Q, E and R in the order you equip them. A few honest scouting reports:

🪙 Throw Change (cheapest unlock)

Flings five of your gold into the crowd in front of you. Everyone hit stops dead for over a second, mid-swing, presumably doing the mental arithmetic. The best panic button in the game and the funniest crowd control we have ever shipped. Bosses are not interested in your money.

🦵 Big Boot

One heavy kick with roughly triple knockback. The victim doesn't just fall — they travel. Use it to launch a charger off their line, or to donate a body to the far side of the pit.

💢 Excessive Elbows

A one-second flurry of overhead elbows into whoever is directly in front of you. Highest single-target damage in the game. This is your boss-melter: back a boss into the barrier and elbow like your grandmother is watching.

🤸 Hardcore Cartwheel

An untouchable roll in your movement direction that clips everyone you pass through. It's a dodge first and a weapon second — cartwheel through the Wall of Death, out of a closing circle pit, or straight through Shawn's charge like an absolute lunatic.

🚜 The Lawnmower

You stop, plant your feet, yank the pull-cord twice — and then mow a dead-straight line through the pit, bodies flying off the blade. The wind-up is real: half a second of standing still, committed. Aim before you pull.

🌀 Windmill

Arms out, everything within range gets hit, repeatedly, for about two seconds. The classic. Best used standing in the densest part of the crowd, which is also the worst place to be standing — that's the trade.

🌪️ Spin Kick

One full spinning kick that hits everyone around you, hard, instantly. Shorter cooldown than Windmill, no channel time. When you're surrounded, this is the answer.

😤 Berserk (most expensive)

Five-plus seconds of seeing red: more damage, more speed, half incoming damage. Turns a cornered situation into a highlight reel. If a boss and a circle pit ever happen at the same time, this is why you bought it.

Pit events — the crowd organises

🧱 Wall of Death

The big one. The crowd splits to the left and right walls, a three-second countdown runs, and then both halves charge each other at full sprint. During the countdown the crowd behind you physically closes ranks — there is no hiding at the front or the back of the pit, and the chargers actively aim for your row. Your options: join a wall (charge with them — moving with the wall makes head-on hits survivable), dodge through (slip through a gap in the oncoming line — a cartwheel makes this trivial), or tank it (bad plan, but Berserk makes it a plan). Surviving pays a gold bonus. The two lines annihilating each other also leaves the floor absolutely covered in coins. Just saying.

🌀 Circle Pit

The crowd forms an evenly-spaced ring and runs counter-clockwise, spiralling tighter as it goes. Run with the flow inside the lane and you earn a steady gold trickle. Stand in the lane going the wrong way and you will be reminded which way the lane goes. And do not — do not — camp the middle: in the final seconds the pit closes, the whole ring collapses inward, and anyone caught inside gets swarmed.

🤸 Stage Diver

Someone launches off the stage. A pulsing ring marks the landing zone; you have about a second and a half to not be in it. The impact knocks out everyone at the epicentre — which, again, is a lot of coins on the floor if you happened to be standing just outside.

💚 Power Ballad

Rare. The band drops into something slow and a circle of warm light appears on the floor. Standing in it heals you fast. So does everyone else want to. The healing circle is the most violently contested real estate in the game and we find that very thematically correct.

The bosses

💀 Skinny Jean Gene

You'll hear him before you see him. Gene is a full head-and-a-half taller than the crowd, all elbows and hair and immaculate denim, and he has zero interest in the pit — he walks at you, at your speed, forever, under his own purple spotlight. Anyone who crowds him gets caught in a massive 360° sweep. The play: keep moving, let the crowd absorb his sweeps, and chip him with drive-by punches. He never stops. Neither should you.

💪 Shirtless Shawn

Wide as a doorway, no shirt, short hair, unbothered by your best knockback. Shawn is slow — until he plants his feet and flexes. That flex is your half-second warning: he is about to bull-charge in a dead straight line at tremendous speed, trampling everything on it, you included. Step sideways during the flex. That's it. That's the whole trick, and under pressure you will still get it wrong, and it will still be your fault.

Boss knockouts pay 1,000 score and a fat coin drop. Bosses arrive from about ninety seconds into a set and keep coming on rotation.

The crowd is alive

Between brawls — and especially during the lull when a song ends — the pit entertains itself. You'll see moshers stirring an enormous invisible pot, two-stepping, shadowboxing demons only they can see, hopping around slapping their own backside (we are told this is called Butt on Fire and that it is traditional), or having a full-body disagreement with gravity. None of this hurts you. All of it is accurate. When the next song kicks in, the crowd floods back and the violence resumes.

Your metalhead, your rules

The 🎨 STYLE menu lets you set skin tone, shirt, jeans, hair style (long, mohawk, short, bald), hair colour and beard. Long hair is objectively correct because it whips when you headbang, and your character headbangs whenever you stand still, because obviously.

The scoreboard

Set a pit name in the 🏆 SCOREBOARD panel and your best survival time posts automatically after each set. No account, no email — the name and the time are the whole profile. The board shows the top 25 pit legends worldwide.

Frequently asked questions

Why am I punching on my own?

Because in a real pit, the swinging is not the decision — the standing-there is the decision. Your buttons are for the moves that deserve buttons.

I equipped fewer than four abilities. Is that allowed?

Yes. Empty slots stay empty; we will never fill them behind your back. A minimalist one-ability loadout is a legitimate lifestyle.

Does the music matter?

The crowd headbangs, the lights pulse and the strobes fire on the beat of whatever track is playing, and between songs the pit genuinely calms down until the next one kicks in. So: yes, spiritually.

Is there a way to test my build without dying?

Survive longer. Sorry.