I have been setting up a couple of secondary accounts on Sly, to send Hearts to myself, because you need a zillion hearts and there isn’t any reliable way to accumulate them with any speed. Even having alts, it’s slow as heck.

With the Steam version of the game, this is a lot easier to do, especially since I have several machines capable of running the game. Ideally, I might automate this task, but for now, I am fine with doing it manually. I probably won’t do it consistently either since sending hearts takes 3 candles, which are easy to get, but it does require some actual playing.

For my latest alt, I decided to try something different. When you first enter the world of Sky, you have no cape. Which means you can’t fly or glide, you can only walk and run and sort of hop around. A minute or two into the game, you are prompted to collect your first Winged Light, which unlocks the cape and most of the game’s mechanics.

A thought occurred to me.

What if I just… Didn’t?

I landed on the Idle of Dawn, a fresh unwinged moth. You can’t swim around the first mountain, there is wind blocking the way. So I proceeded through the story cave and came out, prompted to collect my cape. The game strongly encouraged this because the Winged Light (WL) is in a little cratered area, you have to be able to fly to get out.

Or do you?

You can’t swim off the main area here, I tried that. So it was back to the edge of the mountain. To my surprise, you can simply cop up the edge of the crater, and escape, no WL needed.

There was another obstacle though, the desert area that follows is also surrounded by a tall rock wall, too tall to even fly over with one WL. The proper path is to collect your first Spirit, then unlock a Spirit Gate, and climb up a rock cliff, where you jump into the clouds and fly to the next area.

Fortunately, there is a cloud wall along the right side edge of the desert. And fortunately, you still bounce up in the clouds, even without a cape. So I was able to scale the wall. But then I also glitched out and fell into an out-of-bounds (OOB) area just under the terrain.

After exploring a bit, I headed towards the glitched area under where you are supposed to leap off the rock face. Fortunately, the geometry of the world worked out, and I was able to ride clouds from here, out of the OOB area, and up to the temple at the end of the zone. First major hurdle passed!

The second zone, the Daylight Prairie was pretty easy to pass through. All of the needed activities can be passed without flying. You can burn the bells from the ground and ride the mantas up to the temple. The main thing I needed to keep track of was not to collect any of the WL along the path. Fortunately, you have to actively press a button to collect them.

My other concern was in the temple. To pass to the next area, you do a deep call and ride some butterflies up. My worry was that the butterflies would not carry me without a cape. Fortunately, they did.

The Hidden Forrest presented the first real challenge. Shortly after entering, it starts to rain. The rain constantly drains your energy. Now, for those who don’t know how energy works in Sky: CotL, its your cape. The more WL you have, the longer you last before you burn out and once you burn out, you can rapidly perish.

Having no cap, I had no energy.

I managed to skirt around for cover and recharging well enough. I got stuck though at the end of the zone. You have to hop between some flying jellyfish to get to the temple. Maybe, MAYBE on mobile, I could have done it, the momentum is funny and weird on PC, and after many failed tries, I could not make the jumps, at all. So I had to cheese it a bit by bringing my main account on and handhold flying my alt up to the temple.

The butterflies also carry you off at the end of the Forest zone, which was good.

The Valley of Triumph was also very simple to run through. The trickiest part was avoiding the WL on the downhill slide areas. Unlike every other WL, these are automatically collected on contact. And I did NOT want to collect any.

After the Valley was the Golden Wasteland. I was worried this one would be impossible, because of how much can damage you. There are several points where you have to trudge through sludge that drains you. While I took long routes to find short paths across the sludge, a few times I came close to completely draining.

Then there was the Krill. The huge dragons that patrol around. Apparently, I have gotten good enough to just, know their paths, because they were no problem.

The Vault zone afterward was pretty straightforward as well. I was worried it may have been tricky because some of its puzzles are easier with flight. Easier, but its not required. There are little jump pads you can light and use in most cases. Or you can wait for someone else to do them.

Upon reaching the final summit, I was greeted with another barrier. You need to have unlocked 20 Spirits to enter the final zone. I had done zero, intentionally. I logged in on my phone again and pulled the alt past the barrier.

I am happy to say, I have gotten very good at Eden as well. I had almost no trouble passing through the entire area. This means, taking no damage as well. When I go through Eden on my main with a mighty 11 wing flaps unlocked, I can usually take like 2 hits before it becomes a problem. With zero, any damage would basically one-shot me down to injured and near death.

I made it almost all the way and picked up some accompaniment along the way. I imagine they were intrigued by my lack of a cape. Then, right at the very end, things got messy. I took a hit, and while crawling to the safety of light, the Krill that patrols right before the exit spotted me. Somehow, I managed to crawl to cover before it struck.

But then my new friends showed up. And it spotted them, and they would get to cover, but then they would get hit by a rock and lose WL, and trigger the Krill again.

And despite my better judgment, my instincts said, “Help them, help collect their lost WL, they were helping you.”. Which just made things worse possibly.

The Krill never did strike and finally left, but it was a slightly comical moment of people losing WL to rocks and me getting dropped to slow crawling all while we scrambled for cover.

But we all made it to the final cave and the final zone.

I was wondering what would happen in the final zone, given that I had, zero WL. Well, as soon as I entered, I died. Before the opening cut scene bit ended.

My friends cried over me, it was nice.

I watched them complete the end scenario, but then y game wigged out and I had to quit and resume things, so I lost them. Which was sad, because I wanted to chat with them at the bench in Orbit.

Then the normal ending moments happened, and I made it to Orbit.

No spirits greeted me there. No ascended candles were given. I just, walked to the exit to be reborn.

And when I was…. The game had given me the default 1 WL cape. Which was irritating.