How to play
BLADE DASH is a one-screen samurai action game drawn in black ink on paper. Each stage is a single room full of enemies, and your job is to cut down every one of them. You do not walk. You tap or click anywhere and your samurai dashes 300 pixels that way, slashing anything in the path. The aim is forgiving: if an enemy is within roughly 25 degrees of where you pointed and no more than 480 pixels away, the dash bends onto him and carries you all the way through.
You have two dash charges. Every kill refills both and gives you a quarter of a second of floaty low gravity, so a good run is a chain from one enemy to the next without ever touching the ground. Landing also refills your charges, but it breaks the chain.
Enemies never hurt you by touch. The ones on foot wind up first: a red ! appears and the sword goes up for about half a second before the swing. Dash into them before it lands, or dash out of reach. While you are mid-dash, their swings cannot touch you. Arrows kill you, and so do the gaps in the floor, which have spikes at the bottom. If you die, the room restarts on its own a second later.
Holding Space (or the 集中 button on a touch screen) is focus, a slow motion that runs the game at 30 per cent speed. The red meter holds two and a half seconds, refills slowly on its own, and every kill tops it up by half a second. On a keyboard you can also dash with J, K or Enter, towards the mouse pointer or in the direction you are holding on the arrow keys or W A S D. R restarts the room and Esc or P pauses.
Tips and strategy
- Lanterns are stepping stones. The floating paper lanterns never attack. They are there to be cut so you can stay in the air, so use them to cross the gaps and to climb to the high platforms.
- Dash through arrows. Archers draw a red dashed line at you before they shoot, and the arrow flies at where you are when they let go, not where you are going. Keep moving, or dash through it to cut it.
- Come down on shields. A shield guard blocks any dash that hits him in the face and knocks you back with a CLANG. Hit him from behind, or dash down onto him from above.
- Save the barrel carrier for a crowd. Cutting a bomber sets off a blast that kills everyone within 170 pixels of him, and every one of those kills counts towards your chain. A general caught in the blast loses a hit too.
- Generals take three hits. Each hit throws you up and back and refills your dash, so you can bounce on a general three times in a row without landing.
- Focus costs you time. The par clock runs in real time, so slow motion helps you aim but makes beating par harder. Use it to line up a hard chain, then go back and do the room fast.
What's in it
Thirty stages in three chapters of ten: the Bamboo Forest, the Red Castle and the Night Temple. Every room is built from a fixed seed, so stage 12 is the same room for every player. Rooms start with two enemies and grow to as many as fourteen. New enemies arrive as you go: lanterns from stage 3, gaps from stage 5, archers from stage 7, shield guards from stage 11 and barrel carriers from stage 14. Stages 10 and 20 end their chapters with a general, and stage 30 has two.
Each stage has three stars, ninety in all. One for clearing it, one for beating the par time, and one for a single unbroken chain at least as long as the number of enemies in the room. In practice that means killing every enemy without landing, though each hit on a general also counts as a link, so general stages give you a little slack. The par is two seconds, plus 1.1 seconds for each enemy, plus 0.8 seconds for each gap, and the clock only starts on your first dash. Clearing a stage unlocks the next.
Endless is an open arena with three platforms where waves of enemies keep appearing, one after another. Wave one has four enemies, each wave adds one more up to twelve, archers join on wave two, shields on wave three, bombers on wave four, and every fifth wave brings a general. A kill is worth 100 points times your current chain, so a kill at chain eight is worth 800. Cutting an arrow is worth 50. One hit and the run is over.
Questions
How do I get the third star?
Kill every enemy in the room without landing once. Every kill refills your two dashes, so as long as the next enemy is within reach you can stay in the air forever. Plan the order first, and use lanterns for the long jumps.
Why did my dash bounce off?
You hit a shield guard from the front. Go round behind him, or come down on him from above.
Can I play on a phone?
Yes. Tap to dash and hold the 集中 button in the corner for slow motion. Turn the phone sideways, as the game plays in landscape.
Does it save?
Yes, in your own browser: your stars, your best time on every stage, the stages you have unlocked, your best endless score and your volume settings. Clearing your browser's site data clears the save.