Afterimage

Steer to swallow orbs before a delayed replay of your own path catches up and cuts you off.

Date: 2026-08-19 Genre: snake variant Status: Playable build

Concept

Afterimage is snake with a memory problem. Every move you make gets recorded and played back a few seconds later as a ghost body that occupies the exact cells you occupied, so the walls you're dodging are walls you built yourself. The longer you survive, the shorter that delay gets, until your past self is practically breathing on your neck.

How to play

Move with arrow keys or WASD (swipe on touch devices). Eat the glowing orbs to grow and score; avoid the solid walls, your own body, and the translucent cyan echo trailing your past moves. Head into any of those and it's over. Press R or tap the restart button to go again.

Core mechanics

• The echo: a ghost copy of your snake from D ticks ago, redrawn live every tick. It occupies real cells and kills on contact, just like your own tail.
• Shrinking delay: D starts around 5 seconds of lag and drops every few orbs, so the echo tightens toward your current position over a run.
• Speed ramp: the tick rate quickens with every orb, independent of the echo delay, so two separate clocks push on you at once.
• Second echo: past 10 orbs, an older, second echo appears further back in your history, so two ghost trails are live at once.
• Graze bonus: passing within one cell of an echo segment without dying banks bonus points, rewarding players willing to thread the needle instead of giving the ghost a wide berth.

Progression & scoring

Each orb is worth 10 points plus a speed bonus tied to the current tick rate (faster tick, more points). Grazing an echo segment on the same move that clears an orb adds a risk bonus. The tick interval starts at 160ms and steps down 3ms per orb to a floor of 80ms. Echo delay starts at 30 ticks and drops by 2 every 4 orbs, floor 8 ticks. At 10 orbs, a second, older echo joins the field: a new kind of hazard, not just more speed.

Look & feel

Dark navy playfield, a lime-green snake head with a duller body, and the echo rendered as a flickering cyan afterimage at reduced opacity so it reads as "you, but ghostly" rather than a generic obstacle. Orbs pulse gold. All sound is synthesized WebAudio: a soft blip on eating, a rising tone on graze bonus, a harsh buzz on death.

What makes it fun

• The death is always legible. You can watch the exact cyan cell your head touched and know it was your own move from four seconds back that killed you.
• The temptation to loop tight circles for orb density fights directly against the echo mechanic, since tight loops are exactly what turn your own trail into a cage.
• Two independent ramps (speed and echo delay) mean a run can go wrong two different ways, so no single strategy stays safe for long.