Support
NOCTULE
Something broken, confusing, or just worth saying? Email support@bendigogames.com and you will get a reply from a person. It helps to include your device model and OS version.
How to play
Tap to flap. That is the whole control scheme, and there is no second button.
Each flap is also a bat’s call: it lights the cave ahead in a wavefront that expands and then fades. Glide and you keep your altitude longer, but the map goes dark. Flap and you can see, but you climb. The deeper you fly, the shorter the light lasts.
The run does not start until your first tap. Nothing moves and nothing can kill you until you have touched the screen. The opening light still fades while you wait, so a long pause leaves you in the dark — tapping is how you get it back.
Common questions
I die immediately when I start
You should not — the world is frozen until you tap. If the bat is falling before you have touched anything, that is a bug and worth an email. If it is falling after your first tap, that is gravity, and the answer is to tap again sooner: the flap sets your upward speed rather than adding to it, so a rhythm of small taps flies flatter than one big one.
There is no sound
Check SOUND and MUSIC in the game’s own settings first — they are independent of the system volume. Settings is reached from the BEST page on the title screen, and from the game-over screen.
On iPhone, the game deliberately plays through the physical silent switch, because it is a game and not a notification. If it is silent with the switch off and the system volume up, that is a bug; send the device model.
The board says LOCAL BOARD - THIS DEVICE ONLY
That build was compiled without a leaderboard server, so the top 100 is a private list on your own phone, nothing is ever published, and the game makes no network connection at all. The App Store and Google Play releases are built with the global board switched on.
The board says NO CONNECTION - LOCAL BOARD
The global board could not be reached, so the game is showing your device’s own list instead. The board itself retries and will show the global list again once the connection comes back.
A score does not go with it. A qualifying run made while you were offline stays on your own board and is not published later — there is no queue that sends it on the next launch.
My score did not go on the global board
The board holds the best 100 distances ever recorded. If your run did not beat the hundredth, it is kept on your own device and never leaves it. If it did beat it, it went up by itself the moment you died.
How do I stop my scores being published?
You cannot, from inside the app — there is no switch for it, and a run good enough for the top 100 goes up automatically with no prompt. What you can do is change the name it goes up under, and ask for any row to be removed. See below.
Where did that name come from? I never typed it
The app invents one for you the first time it runs, from a fixed word list. It is a label, not a guess about you. You can change it from the board screen at any time.
Invent something when you do. The board is public and permanent — do not use your real name.
It will not accept my name
A name is three to eight characters, letters A–Z and digits 0–9 only — no spaces, no punctuation, no accents. The game tells you which rule you tripped as you type. Some words are blocked outright.
There is an offensive name on the board
Hold your finger on the row. That reports it — the row and your installation’s anonymous identifier, and nothing else, so there is no free-text box to fill in — and a person reads every report. Names that should go are removed. The score keeps its place, because it is the name that is the problem and not the run.
You can also email support@bendigogames.com with the name and the score.
Take my score off the board
Email the name and the score to support@bendigogames.com and the row will be deleted. There is no account to log into, so this is done by hand.
My progress disappeared
Your best runs, your name and your settings are stored on the device only. Deleting the app clears them, and there is no cloud save and no account to restore from. A score already published to the global board stays there.
Does it need an internet connection?
Only to show the global leaderboard and to publish a score to it. The game itself is entirely offline: the cave, the physics and the sound are all generated on your phone, and it plays identically in aeroplane mode.
Can I change how it looks?
Yes. In settings: COLOUR is the cave, PULSE is your call going out, DEPTH is how hard the colour sits, and WALLS is the wall thickness. RESET puts all of it back.
Is it free? Are there ads?
It is free, and there are no ads, no in-app purchases and no subscriptions.
Privacy
NOCTULE asks you for nothing. The one thing it sends is a run good enough for the global top 100, which is published automatically under the short name your device carries. The full detail — what a row contains, what the anonymous identifier is for, and how to have either removed — is in the privacy policy.
Contact
Last updated: 20 August 2026