Echo Chain

One button. One pulse. Tap the moment it arrives, or the chain breaks. Echo Chain is a one-button timing game and nothing else. There is no stick to steer, nothing to aim, and no second chance in a run — only whether your finger arrives when the pulse does. The window narrows the longer you last and the pulse keeps gathering speed, so a long chain is a run where you were right several hundred times in a row. How close you are is scored. A tap dead on the moment pays more than one that merely counts, and every few bounces raise a multiplier, so a clean streak is worth far more than a scrappy run of the same length. THE STATIONS Reflector — the ordinary one. Tap as the pulse arrives and it fires on. Resonator — fires as normal and hands you a shield, which absorbs one mistake and keeps alive a run that would have ended. Portal — throws the pulse clear across the field. Keep watching it. Splitter — pays four times the bonus for that bounce. Worth reaching for. Dead relay — ends the run if you tap it. The only station where the skill is not tapping. THREE LEVELS Easy, Standard and Hard change the timing window, how quickly the pulse builds speed, how soon shields appear, and how many dead relays are in the field. A point is worth the same at every level, and each level keeps its own score table and its own achievements, so a run is only ever compared with runs like it. TWENTY-SEVEN BADGES Nine achievements, three rungs each, with their own targets on every level. The wall shows what you have earned and what the next rung asks for. Your best score also unlocks new colours for the chain. MADE FOR SHORT SESSIONS A run lasts minutes at most, and most last a good deal less. It is a game for a bus stop, a queue, or the ninety seconds before something else starts. The game runs offline. There is no account, no sign-in and nothing to connect: every score, setting and badge stays on your phone, and Settings can erase all of it whenever you want. Free, with an advertisement between runs now and then — never during one. A reflex game interrupted mid-run would be unplayable, so it does not happen. An arcade game about precision, one button wide.