Retrace

The scan paints down the screen. When it lands, the frame is over.

The formation is a raster scan: it sweeps, drops a line, and keeps painting its way down toward you. Shoot the pixels out of it — and when you finish a complete scanline, the beam retraces a row back up. That is the whole argument of the game: shoot what's closest, or finish the line.

Every pixel you shoot falls as afterglow and charges the phosphor wall under the scan, so where you kill is where your cover grows. Pixels pay 25, a retraced scanline pays 100, every wave survived banks 250. The ladder is authored past what a person can survive — nobody clears Retrace, they just get deeper. Depth is the score.

Then race it live: two minutes on a clock, a shared seed, winner is the highest score when the clock runs out. Challenge a friend or find a match, no account needed. Or bring your crew — up to eight cursors on one shared scan, because throughput is the only thing the beam respects.