Wick can come apart. He is not given these shapes by the houses he hunts: each is taken from a fellow victim, and the game’s whole road is built on what each one can pass. The rule fits in one line, and it is the most useful line in the Manual.
Bats ignore gates. Crows ignore hedges. Mist ignores doors. The bat goes through barred gates, low and heavy. The crows fly over hedges and garden walls, fast, and cannot fight. The mist goes under doors and through cracks, slow, along the floor. Nothing of his crosses running water, in any form.
The table
| Obstacle | On foot | The bat | The crows | The mist |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| floor, road | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| a gate: bars, a grille, a portcullis | no | yes | no | yes, slowly |
| a solid door, not sealed | no | no | no | yes, under it |
| a vent, a crack, a floor grating, a flue | no | no | no | yes |
| a hedge, a fence, a low wall, graves, carts | no | no | yes | no |
| a high garden wall or palisade (marked as such) | no | no | yes | no |
| a building’s wall, rock | no | no | no | no |
| a pit or a drop | no | no | yes | down only |
| running water | no | no | no | no |
| salt, or a door sealed by the priest | refused | refused | refused | refused |
| under a roof | yes | yes | refused | yes |
| wind, open fire | blown apart |
- What you can see through, the bat can go through. Iron bars with the floor showing between them are the bat’s. Every gate the bat may pass carries a small red bat sign on its post.
- What you can see over, the crows can fly over. A hedge or a fence with sky above it is theirs.
- What you can see light under, the mist can pour under. But only later, and never on the story’s road.
- A story lock is a person, a seal or a solid door. No form opens one. When a guard or a sign says a way is shut, believe it.
The bat
Taken from the Marquis Andrevel, drunk in the graveyard court at the end of the prologue, on every path. A gaunt thing with long ears, a fox-bat’s snout, trailing hind legs and wings made of his own red cape. It is a land bat: it can barely lift its own weight, so it flies low, and it flies to feed.
- Change
- B on keys, LT on an Xbox pad, L2 on PlayStation, BAT on touch. Press again to land.
- Cruise
- about 90 px a second, just under his run.
- Dash
- 168 px a second after 0.45 s held straight. Costs about 0.008 of the orb a second.
- The turn
- more than 45 degrees drops him to cruise, with a flare of the wings.
- The bite
- A near a foe. The latch-and-drain. See Blood.
- What it passes
- gates, bars, grilles. Nothing standing that is not a gate.
Fast on a straight, slow in a turn. The bat is built for long lanes: hold a direction and feel it open up, then pay for the corner. The King’s Labyrinth is laid out as five long straights and hard turns for exactly this reason.
It eats on the move. A bite on a lone body is the quick drain, under a second, and after it he keeps most of his speed in the way he was going.
It cannot fight anything big. Lieutenants and heads throw it off; the dead shake it off.
The crows
Freed from the Singing Saint’s cage on the Height, at the end of the gardens, on every path. Wick bursts into a flock of black birds, each with one red eye, his, and the flock is his horse for the rest of the game.
- Change
- V on keys, LB on an Xbox pad, L1 on PlayStation, CROW on touch. In flight, press again to land.
- Speed
- 240 px a second, two and a half times his run. Full speed in about a fifth of a second.
- Take-off
- 0.06 of the orb each time. Nothing while flying.
- What it passes
- hedges, fences, graves, carts, low walls, high garden walls, pits.
- Fighting
- none. A, B and C do nothing in the flock.
- Phase
- most blows pass through the flock.
They phase. While the flock is up, most blows, bolts and grabs pass through it, and no fixed guard wakes for it. The burst and the landing are not phased: that half-second is the window.
What still catches them. Five things can hurt the flock:
- Hounds, and anything bred to hunt birds. They snap crows out of the air, even over a hedge. Three bites in one flight tear the flock apart and force him down.
- A bell’s stroke tears the flock apart within its ring.
- Salt, thrown or lying, refuses them.
- Heads, lieutenants and bosses: their blows land on the flock, and a boss’s ring keeps the flock on the field.
- Fire that fills an area: the flock is paper to it.
Dogs. The one thing in this garden that eats birds.
Never under a roof. The flock will not rise indoors. The panel dims the crows there, and the saint’s warning plays the first time.
They take no exits. The flock never fires a trigger, a mark, a door or a scene change. Land to use anything. That is why no form can skip the story: every lock on the road is a door, a trigger or a person.
Sealed · Mid-gameThe long roadsBreak the seal to read
At the opening of the world, Mother Carrion’s rooks come for Wick and teach the flock the long roads. On the Gallows Downs and across the Wastes, holding the crow key through the burst rises to a view of the whole region, drawn from above, and he flies between roosts he has already walked to on foot. The rooks will not land where he has not been. The same burst, darkening and re-forming is the game’s fast travel between crypts and roosts.
Not there. They won’t land where you’ve not walked. They’re rooks, not angels.
Not over running water. Not you, not them. They’ll take a bridge like anyone.
The mist
The mist was chosen for the game on 4 October 2026 and its rules are designed. None of it is built yet, and every number here may change TBD.
Sealed · The endingWhere the mist comes fromBreak the seal to read
The mist is the optional third form, taken late, in the open world, from Ambry, the Man of Secrets, when Wick challenges and drinks him. Ambry’s fight has a move called the Mist (“he is not there, and then he is on you”), and drinking him teaches Wick how. A short cinematic, the lantern goes out, shows it: Ambry falls, his lantern rolls and goes out, and Wick comes apart into a low white mist that pours under the grotto’s door, along the allée, under the Pleasance’s oak door and out across the gutter’s cobbles, under every shut door in the street.
What it does. The mist goes under and through what is shut but not sealed: the gap under a door, a keyhole, a vent, an air shaft, a crack in a wall, a floor grating, a chimney flue. Solid doors were a wall to the bat and to the crows. They are the mist’s way.
What it cannot do. It is slow and low, about 40 px a second along the floor. It cannot climb or clear anything: hedges and fences stop it, and so do gaps and pits, except that it can spill over an edge and re-form below. It cannot fight or feed. Blows pass through it.
What breaks it. Wind (an open height, a bellows, a mill’s draught) blows it apart and forces him back into shape. Fire burns it off. Running water is still a wall. Salt on a sill refuses it. Every story door has salt on its sill or the priest’s seal on its lock.
What it costs. Blood while it holds, about as much as the bat’s dash, and 0.6 s to change each way, with no protection while he changes.
What it is for. Reward only: relics, lore rooms, shortcuts, fragments of the god’s origin. Nothing on the road to any ending needs it. The mist’s rooms are listed, sealed, in Walkthrough 13.
Running water
Nothing of Wick’s crosses running water: not his feet, not his beam, not his thread, not the bat, not the crows, not the mist. Still water he can wade, slowly. The ways across are: a bridge someone built, the slack or flood of a tide, a boat poled by a living hand, and, once he has it, the tide, a gift that carries him over a short run of water for blood.
The King’s own garden. Even the water here is too proud to let me cross.
Forms in a fight
- The bat is a meal, not a weapon. Use it on stragglers and summoned adds: the Penitent’s flagellants, the Rat King’s rats.
- The crows are a way out, not a way in. Lift off to cross a room or break off a fight. They cannot win one, and a boss’s blows still land on them.
- Change on a quiet moment. The change itself is a window.
- Watch the socket. In the status panel, between the orbs, the bat and the crows show in bone when he can change, dim when he cannot, lit red while he wears one, and gold for a few seconds after a form is earned.