Players ask about this in support emails more than anything else, so here's the actual mechanism rather than the marketing version.
Nothing about your keyboard changes. What changes is a small in-memory object — three physical input slots (left, right, up) each pointing at one of three actions (moveLeft, moveRight, jump). On level 1, the mapping is always the identity: left is left, right is right, up is jump. From level 2 onward, those three actions get reassigned to the three physical slots at random every time you clear a level.
WASD isn't a separate system — W/A/D are just alternate physical keys for the same up/left/right slots, so they shuffle in lockstep with the arrow keys automatically.
This wasn't an accident or an oversight in testing — it's deliberate onboarding. If the very first thing a new player experiences is confusing controls, they bounce before they understand there's a game underneath the joke. Level 1 teaches you what normal even feels like, so the first shuffle at level 2 actually registers as a twist instead of just "the controls are broken."
The dash ability is bound to Shift or E, completely outside the left/right/up mapping. That's intentional: every player needs at least one input they can trust unconditionally, especially mid-fall with no time to read the hint text. Without a fixed escape option, a bad shuffle at the wrong moment would be pure bad luck rather than a skill check. Coyote time and jump buffering work the same way regardless of the current mapping — they smooth out execution, they don't add to the chaos.
After every shuffle, a hint at the bottom of the screen spells out the current mapping in plain text: "← = Move Right | → = Jump | ↑ = Move Left," for example. This isn't a nice-to-have — it's the fairness mechanism. The game will absolutely make you relearn your inputs constantly, but it will never make you guess. Every hard moment in this game is a "can you execute" problem, not a "do you have information" problem.
This same system is exactly why the newly added on-screen touch controls had to sit in fixed physical positions rather than being labeled by action — see the next post for that part.
Full breakdown of weapons, abilities, and zones in the strategy guide.