Short version Drag, or hold WASD or the arrow keys, to move. You are exposed the whole time a control is held. Release every control to stop and let Camo rise. Esc or P pauses. The speaker button mutes. There is no jump, no attack, and no second stick.
The control table
Mottle Game controls stay small on purpose. The difficulty is not remembering a combo. It is accepting that the button which moves you is the same button that gives you away. This page is the reference. The how to play Mottle Game page explains rounds, points, and lives without repeating every key.
| Input | Action | What the Seekers see |
|---|---|---|
| Mouse drag or one-finger drag | Walk toward the pointer | Exposed while the button or finger is down, even if you stop moving |
| Release | Stop. Camo starts to fill | Visibility falls only as the blend finishes, about three quarters of a second |
| WASD or arrow keys | Walk on that axis. Diagonals are allowed | Same exposure as a drag, for as long as any movement key is held |
| Esc or P, or the pause button | Pause during Hide or Seek | The field freezes. Resume continues the same life |
| Speaker button | Mute or unmute | Nothing. Sound is local and optional |
| Enter or Space on the title | Start a run | Only on the title screen. During seek, Space does not move you |
| Quit on the pause card | Return to the title stroll | The run ends without a score submission anywhere |
Pointer and touch
The arena listens to a single pointer. Put it down inside the canvas and the character walks toward that point at a steady pace, not as a teleport. Move the pointer and the destination moves with it. Lift, and the walk ends immediately. On a phone, that lift has to be a real lift. A finger resting on the glass is still a held pointer, so Camo will not climb and the body stays at least partly vivid. Players who “stop” by ceasing to slide, while still touching, feel cheated by the Seekers. The Seekers are applying the rule.
Touch the canvas, not the meters. The HUD sits beside the square arena in landscape and above and below it in portrait. Dragging on a meter does nothing useful and can scroll the guide page if you started outside the frame. Inside the frame, the page should not scroll under your finger. If a browser gesture steals the drag, open the full-screen field so the arena owns the viewport. The online play notes cover that layout.
Keyboard
W, A, S, D and the arrow keys share one vector. Holding two neighbours walks on the diagonal at the same top speed, not faster. Letting one key up while another stays down still counts as moving. Camo begins only when the set of movement keys is empty and the pointer is up. That matches the drag rule: exposure is about intent held down, not about distance travelled this frame.
Esc and P pause from Hide or Seek, including when the iframe has focus. Click the field once if a key seems to do nothing; the browser only sends keys to the focused frame. Pause from the guide page’s own menu is a different Esc: if the navigation menu is open, Esc closes that menu first when focus is on the page rather than the field. Click into the arena before you rely on pause. Leaving the tab or hiding the browser also pauses a live round, so you do not need a reflex when a message arrives.
What the meters are asking
Camo is a percentage of the blend. It is not a shield you activate. It drains in a fraction of a second once you steer, and the body is forced up to a clearly visible state while steering even before the drain finishes. That is why a tap-and-release still flashes you. Alert is the life bar in disguise. It is not a score. It rises when a cone sees enough of you, faster if you are brighter or if two cones overlap, and it decays when they do not. The hint under the meters is a sentence for the same facts: revealed, blending, hidden, or spotted.
Hearts are lives, three at the start of a run. The round number and the seek timer tell you how long this garden has to be endured. During Hide the timer counts the countdown instead, and the label changes so you do not treat it as time you can spend running. None of these readouts are part of the article text around them. In the field they sit on a layer marked to stay out of search snippets.
Sound, pause, and what is absent
Sound is generated in the browser when you start a run. Collect, blend, a catch, a round clear, and the last seconds of the clock each have a small tone. Mute remembers itself in local storage on this device. There is no music stream and no remote audio file. There is also no fullscreen button inside the HUD. Use the full-screen link on the guide, which is just the same field in its own tab. There is no click-to-shoot, no hide button separate from release, and no way to shove a Seeker. If a control list online mentions those, it is describing a different game.
If a key or a drag feels wrong, check three things: is the round still in Hide, is pause up, and is a finger or button still down? The FAQ answers the cases where the field itself will not start. For route choices once the controls feel ordinary, switch to the strategy notes. They assume you already know that release means hide.