Mythril Arcade

Chain Reaction

Your tail is a colour queue. Eat fruit and it joins the back of it — line up matching colours and they detonate, which is the only way to get shorter. Reduce yourself to nothing and the wave is cleared. Seven waves, each starting you longer and moving faster, and the game is beaten.

Built with LLypses Keyboard Single player · seven waves Sound · starts on play
Desktop build · arrow keys or W A S D

From the workshop

Chain Reaction is the third cabinet in the Mythril Arcade, and like the others it is small on purpose — a game you can be playing thirty seconds from now, with no account, no launcher and no download, the way games on the web worked before any of that was required.

It was built with LLypses, our own desktop AI boardroom. The board locked two things before a line was written: hard walls rather than wrap-around, and detonation that pays in points rather than in survival. Both narrow the game — and a cabinet you can describe in one sentence is the only kind worth putting in a row of them.

Every fruit colour and position here comes from a seed, so the same run really is the same run twice — which is what makes a leaderboard worth having.

Controls

  • Steer WASD or ←↑↓→
  • Start a run Space
  • Difficulty 123
  • Pause P or Esc

The two pickups

  • Cut Detaches your last two segments — and can set off a match that was buried under them
  • Primer The next fruit you eat also recolours your last segment, so one fruit lands two matching colours

They are the white outlined tiles, never a fruit colour, and taking one costs you no length. One appears at a time, every few fruit — earned by playing rather than by waiting.

The difficulty tier changes how many matching colours a detonation needs — two on Easy, three on Normal, four on Hard — and Hard gets a bigger board and more fruit to make the longer run reachable rather than merely rarer.

Chain Reaction is one responsive build rather than a separate touch version — on a phone, swipe anywhere on the board to turn, or use the on-screen pad below it.

The weekly board ranks Hard runs only. Easy and Normal still earn achievements and Arcade Rank; press 3 on the title screen to play for the board.