NEON BEAT

Arrows fall. You hit them on the beat. That is the whole game, and it is enough.

NEON BEAT is a rhythm game in the tradition of the arcade dance cabinets: four lanes, one arrow per beat, and a combo that lasts exactly as long as you do. Nine tracks, three difficulties, and a soundtrack that is not in the download, because the app writes it while you wait.

HOW IT PLAYS
Tap the pad under an arrow the moment it reaches the outline. Hold the long ones until they run out. Every hit is judged PERFECT, GREAT, GOOD or MISS, and the multiplier climbs while the chain holds. Miss too often, the energy bar empties and the track is over.

One thumb is enough. Switch to two buttons in the menu and the whole left half of the screen becomes one target, the whole right half the other. Same song, same chart, half the reach.

NINE TRACKS, SYNTHESISED AND NOT SAMPLED
There is not one audio file in this app. Every track is built by a synthesiser on your own phone, each with its own tempo, key and drum kit:

MIDNIGHT CIRCUIT · 142 BPM · classic synthwave
CHROME SUNSET · 118 BPM · cruising halftime
VOLTAGE DRIVE · 165 BPM · fast and mean
GHOST PROTOCOL · 100 BPM · dark halftime
PIXEL FEVER · 150 BPM · arcade chiptune
DEEP RESET · 124 BPM · deep house
SOLAR FLARE · 174 BPM · drum and bass
IRON LULLABY · 88 BPM · the slowest and the hardest
STATIC BLOOM · 136 BPM · broken beat

The picture is made the same way. The grid, the arrows, the glow and the logo are drawn by shader code rather than loaded from files. Nothing streams, and nothing downloads after you install.

THREE DIFFICULTIES
EASY · climbs slowly across the song, quarter notes at most
NORMAL · quarters in the verse, eighths in the drops
HARD · everything: 16ths, jumps, freezes

MADE FOR A PHONE
Portrait, with the pads where your thumbs already are. Phone audio is never quite on time, so the pause menu carries an offset calibration and a scroll speed. Set them once and every track follows.

WHAT YOU GET BACK
A score, an accuracy percentage, your longest combo and a rank from D up to S+. Then the retry button, which is the one you will actually press.

THIRTEEN LANGUAGES
English, German, French, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Danish and Russian. The game follows your phone until you pick one yourself.

NEON BEAT is free. A banner sits in the menu and nowhere else: while a track is running, the bottom of the screen belongs to your thumbs. No account, no sign-in, and everything except the ad works offline.