Afterimage
Every seven seconds you snap back to the pad and the run you just made returns as a lethal copy of yourself. Grab orbs before the arena fills with your own past.
Afterimage is an original arcade game written for squishes — there is no upstream version of it anywhere. You are a single dot in a dark arena collecting orbs, and every seven seconds the cycle resets you to the pad in the middle. The catch is that the seven seconds you just played come back with you: your exact route replays forever as a solid afterimage that kills you on contact. Two minutes in, the hardest obstacle on the screen is the clever line you took a minute ago.
Two pressures stop you from playing it safe. Your light drains the whole time and orbs are the only way to refill it, so waiting somewhere quiet just kills you slowly. The pad in the centre is the one patch of ground where an afterimage cannot touch you, and nothing ever spawns there, which makes it shelter rather than a hiding place. Every five orbs a blue diamond appears that deletes your three oldest selves — the only thing in the game that ever makes the arena emptier.
Controls
WASD or arrow keys to move, R to restart. On a touchscreen, hold anywhere and your dot steers toward your finger.
Tips
- Leave the pad in a different direction every cycle. Repeat a route and you build a wall across your own best path.
- Watch the ring around the pad, not the clock. When it closes you snap back, and whatever you were doing becomes permanent.
- Save the blue diamond. It clears your three oldest afterimages, so it is worth far more once the arena is crowded than it is early.