Sonaris is played in landscape — a thumb on each side.
Survive as long as you can. Tap anywhere and you dash to that point. There is no health bar and there are three ways to die: come to a stop in open space, let the field go dark, or break a doorkeeper's shades out of order.
Reach is earned. A dash charged by your last link crosses about a quarter of the map; an unearned one crawls. Your first few links buy most of your speed, so the opening of a chain is where it changes fastest.
A clock runs between links. Land the next one quickly and it is worth more — putting around is not a strategy.
Pass through a glimmer to fill your SHINE and add a link to your chain. Light pays in three tiers: a loose pickup pays the flat rate, a link on a charged dash pays more, and several bodies in one dash pays most of all.
Your own body is the meter. It spins as fast and as brightly as the shine you are holding, and goes still when you have none.
Fill the bar and it converts to a SURGE: for a short while dashes never run out.
THE BEND. Hold instead of releasing and the dash charges. Drag across the line and the path bows away from the drag. It spends all your shine — the more you had, the further it throws you. Break a hostile while the arc is still bending and it pays double.
THE FLASH DASH. Reach the number under CHAIN and you carry one until you spend it. Time crawls while it is open; mark your targets and the route resolves at once — and everything the line passes through falls, not only what you marked. You hold one at a time.
Keep a chain going for 20 links to light the level segments. The first ten count toward twenty and earn a Flash Dash; you keep it even if the chain breaks. Each further twenty links adds more light. Faster streaks earn up to 25% extra. Breaking a chain empties RADIANCE, but lit segments stay.
From level 11, the final dashed segment needs twenty links in 20 seconds. A late streak adds no light; it does not end the run. Flash Dash targeting pauses this clock, and its hits do not fill RADIANCE.
HOSTILES. Only speed breaks them. Cross strike speed and your ring turns white while their shields drop — that flip is your window, and it is drawn on both bodies every frame. Drift into one slowly and it takes all your shine.
UMBRAE. They hunt your light, not you. Every glimmer one swallows is gone, and it grows. Break it at speed and all of it comes back, with interest.
BLACK HOLES. One holds you. A line sweeps around it — tap when it points where you want to go and it slings you out faster than you arrived, chain intact. Fall in slow, or wait too long, and your chain breaks.
GATES. They answer only if you arrive carrying enough shine, so solving one is a question of routing rather than aim.
SIGNALS. A signal asks for 60 shine and gives none back. It pays in points, enormously, and it is always across the map — that dash is one you did not spend staying alive.
DOORKEEPERS. A ring of shades bound into one body, guarding levels 5, 10, 15 and onward. Break them in spectrum order, at full speed; the wrong one ends the run, and the order is stated on screen. Take a whole doorkeeper in a single Flash Dash and that is a SONARIS — it pays triple.
WHAT THIS PAGE SENDS. When a run ends, it records how far you got — level, chain, score, how long it lasted and how it finished — plus your window size, so the game can be tuned against how people actually play rather than against a guess. It also stores a random string in this browser so that twenty runs by one person can be told apart from twenty people; that string is not a name and is not joined to your leaderboard name. Your name is sent only when you type one into the board. If you arrive through a tagged Sonaris Instagram link, we also record the campaign label, this page visit and each game start with that same random browser string, to see whether visitors play again. We do not send your full link or Instagram identity, and we do not send these events to Meta.