NEON FUSE — a single-screen platformer run on a burning fuse

What is NEON FUSE — a single-screen platformer run on a burning fuse

NEON FUSE drops you onto one screen of floating platforms with a handful of dark plasma cores resting on them. You cannot take them yet. A fuse runs under the sector and lights them one at a time, in a fixed order, with a small amber ring counting down around whichever is next. Sector one leaves 2.6 seconds between ignitions; by the middle teens the gap has tightened to 1.15 seconds and never shortens again. The game is about standing beside the next core when it catches: a core taken within three seconds of the last one raises your combo, and each core pays a hundred points times that combo.

Everything else in the sector exists to break the chain. Enemies arrive through three fixed portals along the top edge, each announced by a purple spiral a second before anything appears. Drifting wisps come from the start, bouncers join in sector two, seekers in sector three, and phantoms that fade in and out of solidity from sector five. You have three lives and no weapon, only one answer: land on an enemy from above and it freezes into a crystal. Cores, gems and crystals all pay experience, and every level-up deals you three upgrades out of seven. Thirty sectors, a boss on every fifth.

How to play

1. Move with the arrow keys or A and D, jump with the space bar, and hold the jump key as you fall to glide over an enemy.
2. Watch the amber ring around the next dark core: it is a countdown. Be beside that core when it lights, and take it at once.
3. Take a second core within three seconds of the first to raise the combo. Each core pays a hundred points multiplied by that combo.
4. Land on an enemy from above to freeze it into a crystal, then touch the crystal. Clear a sector unhurt for a thousand-point bonus.

Strategies that work

• The clear screen pays two bonuses of very different size. Time gives ten points per second under par, and par is roomy: sector one, with eight cores, allows 35.6 seconds while the fuse alone needs 19.4. Finishing untouched pays a flat thousand. Play safe, not fast.
• A hundred points times the combo makes the chain almost the whole score. Eight cores taken back to back pay 3,600; the same eight with the chain broken every time pay 800. The window is three seconds, and the Combo Fuse upgrade adds a second to it.
• Stomping pays 150 and the crystal another 100, but the freeze lasts six seconds, and a wisp or seeker that wakes moves 35 per cent faster for the rest of the sector. Take the crystal at once or leave the enemy alone: a half-finished stomp only makes the sector harder.
• A boss hovers well above you and cannot descend past a fixed line, so staying on the ground keeps it out of reach and you out of its. Climb the arena's top platform and it follows you into stomping range. Its charge is telegraphed by a dashed line, and a wall stuns it for most of a second.
• Take a shield into a crowded sector and every enemy you touch dies for 120 points and two gems, turning a bad crowd into currency. Save a Nova for a boss: it deals three damage in one press, more than a third of the first boss's eight hit points.

A little history

NEON FUSE was written for Puzzle-Me and belongs to the family of single-screen arcade platformers, where the level is one screen, the goal is to empty it, and the pressure comes from what keeps arriving rather than from a clock. What this one adds is the fuse. Because the cores light one at a time in a fixed order, the sector chooses your route instead of you choosing it, and the three-second window turns standing still in the right place into a skill. The run economy on top, gems into experience and experience into a draft of three upgrades, is a much more recent idea.

Frequently asked questions