Published 2026-09-25
Most endless modes are the main mode with the ending taken out. REELS went the other way. Here is the whole subtraction list read out of the source, the two days in August 2026 when the mode was inverted, why the soul quota now lives only here, and the invisible clock that still runs behind a mode that shows you no clock at all.
Almost every roguelite ships an endless mode, and almost every one of them is built the same way: take the main mode, delete the ending, let the numbers climb. It is the cheapest mode a studio can add, because it is not a mode, it is a missing condition.
That version does not hold. Without an ending, the main mode's whole economy starts working against itself. Anything you buy between levels accumulates forever. Anything priced against a finite run is mispriced against an infinite one. Every reward is now paid an unbounded number of times, and the difficulty curve that was tuned for a run that ends is being asked to describe a run that does not.
So in REELS, Endless is not adventure with the ending removed. It is adventure with a list of things removed, and the list is long. Here it is, out of the source file, with the dates.
The commit that added the mode says exactly what it was: no quota, drafts paced by the clock, only death stops you. The comment sitting on the enum case at the time said the same in the game's own voice: the machine no longer asks for anything, it takes.
That is the standard endless mode. Adventure, minus the requirement. It lasted two days.
At 12:15 on 14 August the comment on that enum case was replaced, and the new one describes a different game:
> No more falling clock: time goes up, and the draft arrives when the soul threshold is crossed, not every 60 seconds. The rhythm is the harvest. No surplus: you pick a card and you dive back in.
Both halves of the loop swapped roles. In adventure, the clock is the judge and the souls are the currency. In Endless, the souls are the judge and the clock is not shown at all. The HUD proves it in one line: the same digits, fed by `runDuration` instead of `timeRemaining`, counting up instead of down, because here time is a score and not a deadline.
On 15 August the soul quota was removed from adventure and from the daily challenge. The reasoning in that commit message is short and I still agree with it: you already have to survive the sixty seconds to clear the toll, so demanding a quota on top of that judged the same minute twice, and the second time on a number the player does not steer. You kill what comes. You do not choose how much comes.
One boolean carries the whole rule, and it reads `mode == .sansFin`. Everything follows from it: the quota bar disappears, the soul counter loses its denominator, "you are N souls short" becomes "hold until the clock runs out", and the draft screen announces a duration instead of a number.
Which leaves the quota with exactly one home. Endless is the only mode in REELS where souls decide anything, and the level ends the instant `soulsThisToll >= quota`.
The curve it inherited is unchanged: 110 souls at level 1, times 1.5 per level.
| Level | Souls required | |---|---| | 1 | 110 | | 2 | 165 | | 3 | 248 | | 5 | 557 | | 8 | 1 879 | | 10 | 4 229 | | 12 | 9 515 | | 15 | 32 112 | | 20 | 243 852 |
That shape is the mode's entire difficulty design. The first levels fall in fifteen seconds, which is why Endless feels absurdly generous at the start, and by level 20 it is asking for a quarter of a million souls in one sitting. It climbs fast, then it walls. No content gate does that work. The exponent does.
Each of these is a real removal in the source, gated on that same mode check, and each one is there for a reason I had to argue with myself about.
The surplus. In adventure, everything you harvest during a toll becomes spendable at the counter after it. In Endless, `draftSurplus` is set to zero at the end of every level, and the counter is not drawn at all. The comment says why in one sentence: here, a soul is a counter, not a currency. It cannot be both. If souls both end the level and buy things, then farming past the threshold is free progress and the threshold stops meaning anything.
The pact. The between-levels contract, the one that raises the quota in exchange for something, has nothing to raise in a mode where raising the quota is the difficulty. Gone with the counter.
The paid reroll on the level-up offer. Removed on 17 August. In adventure that reroll costs souls from the current toll, and it is a cost you feel, because it delays the quota. In Endless those same souls are literally what brings the next level. Rerolling would mean delaying your own progression to change one card. The panel is reduced to a single button that says TAKE.
The carny's hammers, the rewiring offer that shows up at tolls 3, 6 and 9. Gated on adventure. An offer tied to specific tolls does not translate to a mode where you pass level 3 in under a minute.
The last five seconds of music. There is a musical sting that fires when the countdown drops below five, written to land its final beat exactly on zero. In Endless there is no zero to land on, so it never starts.
The workshop tuning, what the game calls the note. This one I got wrong first. I originally argued it should apply, and I checked it by asking whether each modifier still bit in this mode. Wrong question. The right question was the price of the reward. A tuning purse pays out as soon as one toll is cleared, and a level closes far faster here: level 1's 110 souls take an ordinary run about fifteen seconds to collect, against the sixty you must hold in adventure. Setting the note to notch 18, clearing a single Endless threshold and dying would have banked all eighteen purses for three to four times less effort. So the note applies in adventure only.
The shared record. Until 19 August both modes wrote to the same best-depth number, which was nonsense: adventure depth is measured in minutes survived, Endless depth is measured in an exponential soul count. Averaging them into one number described neither. Endless got its own record, and its own line on the ticket booth.
The draft screen itself, sometimes. When there is nothing left to offer, no charm left in the pool or the one that silences the draft in hand, Endless skips the between-levels screen entirely and dives straight back in. In adventure there would still be a counter and a pact to visit. Here the screen would be empty, and an empty screen between two fights is just a loading pause with a border on it.
Two things survived the cut, and they are the interesting half.
The first is the without-a-scratch badge. Clear a level without taking a single hit and you bank one free draft reroll. It pays in Endless too, and the comment on that line is blunt about the reason: this is the mode where you chain the most levels, so there is no argument for it being the one place the badge does not pay. Note what that produces. The paid reroll is gone from this mode, the surplus is gone, there is nothing to buy. So in Endless, the only reroll you will ever see is one you earned by not getting hit. The shop was removed and the skill reward became the whole economy.
The second is the clock. Endless shows you no countdown, but `timeRemaining` still ticks down behind it, every frame, exactly as it does in adventure. It is simply never read as a verdict. It is read as an input, by two systems.
Spawn pressure is one of them. The pit's birth rate is geometric in the level number, times 1.15 per level, plus the time elapsed inside the current level. In adventure that second term is bounded, because the level ends at sixty seconds no matter what. In Endless nothing stops it. If you cannot reach the threshold quickly, elapsed time keeps climbing past sixty and the pit keeps getting denser while you are still standing in it.
The Accountant is the other. He spawns at the halfway mark of the nominal level, from level 4 onward, and while he is alive he takes a cut of every soul you pick up. In a mode where souls are the clock, a beast that skims souls is not a damage problem, it is a time problem. He does not hurt you. He makes the level longer, which makes the pit denser, which is the same sentence.
So the mode with no clock is the one where the clock is most dangerous, and it is dangerous in a way you cannot read off the HUD. I am fine with that, because it is the thing that keeps an unbounded mode from being a victory lap: a player whose build has outgrown the pit clears levels fast enough that pressure never has time to build, and a player whose build has stalled is slowly buried by the seconds they are spending. The mode self-corrects without needing a difficulty setting.
Endless was, for its first week, a dead end. Nothing depended on it, and the one run statistic that could have measured it, best run duration, only got written on a soul record, so "held ten minutes" was not being recorded anywhere at all. That was fixed on 19 August: seconds held in Endless is now a tracked career record, kept as the best single run.
Three things hang off it. Counterweight, a workshop upgrade giving 0.12 extra seconds of invulnerability after a hit, opens at 7 minutes. Big Dipper, the charm that multiplies your take per level, opens at 5 minutes, which is the right home for it: it should be earned where levels chain. The Prism, which I will say plainly is the strongest charm in the game, opens at 10 minutes, at the end of the hardest axis the game has.
And the mode itself is locked until you reach toll 08 in adventure, because it is explicitly the power sandbox and not a fairness test. You are allowed to break it. You have to earn the right to.
An endless mode is not the main mode with the ending removed. It is a different question asked of the same engine, and every system in the main mode has to be re-examined against the new question, one at a time, with the default answer being cut it.
The list above is nine removals for two additions, and the mode is better for the ratio. The parts that survived did so because someone had to say out loud what job they were doing once the ending was gone. Most of them could not answer.
REELS is free to try through toll 05 on iPhone, and one purchase unlocks the whole machine, permanently: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6801441632
If you want the other half of this, what the machine itself is allowed to change, that is seven machines, and the one rule each is allowed to break.