You have one cursor. The game has two. The second is a translucent copy of yours, replaying your motion 1.5 seconds behind. Catch yellow coins with the live cursor for one point. Catch purple coins with both cursors at the same instant for five. Avoid red hazards — they kill on either cursor.

Three lives, spawn rates ramp with time. The longer you play, the more crowded the field gets and the less margin you have for darting moves your future-shadow can't afford.

The twist

Your past is in the playfield. Every move you make replays itself, verbatim, 1.5 seconds later. Most arcade games let you treat movement as free — you decide, you dart, you forget about it. Echo makes every dart a debt. The shadow will run that same path in a second and a half, no matter what you do, and the hazards you swept past will still be there.

What the two scoring tracks are for

Yellow coins exist so there's always something obvious to do. Purple coins are the reason I built this. To collect one, you need your live cursor on it and your shadow on it, simultaneously. Which means you had to stand on that exact spot 1.5 seconds earlier — knowing then that you'd want to return now. That's a planning loop tucked inside a reflex game, and it's where the run-to-run skill gap lives. Best round, best echo count both get tracked.

Hazards do the inverse work: they punish darting through space carelessly. A red dot you brushed past at second 3 is sitting in wait for your shadow at second 4.5. Some of my deaths in playtest were entirely self-inflicted that way — me dying to a hazard I'd already avoided.

What I'm not sure about

Whether 1.5 seconds is the right delay. At one second you can almost react to your shadow live, which kills the planning layer. At two, you've forgotten the path entirely and it feels like a separate agent. 1.5 was the gap where I started thinking ahead instead of reacting backward. Could be tuned per-player; for now it's fixed.