Bounce up the canyon. Keep finding the next ledge — and mind the ones that crumble.
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Billy is a vertical bouncer. A bighorn goat climbs a mountain that has no top to it, and he does the jumping himself: he leaves every ledge he touches at exactly the same speed, every time, whether you were ready or not. There is no jump button, and there is nothing to charge or time. The only thing you ever decide is where he is when he comes back down.
That single constraint is the whole game. Because the height of a bounce is fixed, a ledge is never out of reach for being too high — it is out of reach for being in the wrong place, and the only way to fix that is to have started drifting sooner. Good play in Billy looks like patience: steering towards where the next ledge is going to be while you are still on the way up to the one before it.
The ledges are not all the same, and none of them is a trap — each one is information you are allowed to act on before you land. Some slide from side to side, which makes them a moving target on the way down and a moving launchpad on the way up. Some crumble the moment you touch them, so they are a bounce and never a place to think. And the occasional one throws you most of a screen, which is the fastest way up the mountain and the fastest way to overshoot the run of ledges you had been reading.
The world wraps. Walk off the left edge and Billy comes back on the right, at the same height, mid-flight — the mountain is a cylinder, not a corridor, and the wrap is a route rather than a wall. The eagles use it too, which is why one that leaves the side of your screen will be back.
Eagles cross the mountain and they will end a run on contact — but they are not invulnerable. Come down on top of one and you stomp it, the same way you would land on a ledge. A bird you saw early is a hazard to steer around; a bird you saw early enough is a free bounce, and stomps are counted for their own sake.
Underneath all of it, the floor is rising. It never stops and it never slows down, so there is no safe ledge and no reading position — a perfect sequence of bounces that does not gain height is just a slower way to lose. Standing still is not an option the game offers. Height is the score, measured in metres, and the only question a run ever asks is how far up you got before the mountain caught you.
There are three climbers, and which one you wear is purely cosmetic — every one of them bounces the same height off the same ledges. Two of them are locked behind two things at once: a best climb, and a number of eagles stomped. A long run alone will not open them, and neither will a stomping spree; the game would rather you got good at both halves of it than ground out one. The third is not advertised, and what it wants is left for you to find.