Gridweave — Every crash becomes a wall

What is Gridweave — Every crash becomes a wall

Gridweave puts you on a light cycle that never stops. The first sector is a seven-by-seven grid holding three cores and one exit portal, and the machine crosses about five and a half cells a second whether you touch the controls or not. You steer with the arrow keys, WASD, a swipe or the on-screen pad, and you can never turn back on yourself. Behind the cycle runs a ribbon of light that is solid to the touch and, unlike a snake's tail, never shortens: every cell you cross stays lethal until you leave the sector.

What the game does with failure is what sets it apart. You carry three rez for the whole run, not three per sector. When you derezz, the ribbon behind you does not vanish — it petrifies into an orange wall that lasts for the rest of the sector, and you restart at the same spawn point in an arena your own mistake has narrowed. Box yourself in badly enough that a core or the portal becomes unreachable and the system purges every wall. Clear the sector instead and the grid grows, the cores multiply, and from sector three pulsing flux barriers switch on and off across the floor.

How to play

1. Steer with the arrow keys, WASD, a swipe or the on-screen pad. Three turns can be queued ahead, and you can never reverse into your own ribbon.
2. Absorb every core — the spinning cyan diamonds — before heading for the portal: it stays grey and sealed while one core remains on the grid.
3. Your live ribbon, the orange walls from earlier crashes and any lit flux barrier are solid. Touch one and a rez is gone, and your ribbon turns to wall.
4. Reaching the open portal clears the sector and sends you deeper: a wider grid, more cores, faster driving. The run ends when the third rez is spent.

Strategies that work

• A clean route always exists: each sector is built along one self-avoiding walk, with the cores dropped at evenly spaced points on it and the portal on its final cell. During the countdown, look at the cores and the portal and picture a single continuous sweep. The routes that fail are the ones that cut back across the middle.
• Do not agonise over which core to take first. Each pays a hundred points times your multiplier, which climbs half a step per core to a ceiling of four, so any order pays the same total. The crash is what costs you: straight back to one times, and the two hundred for a flawless sector gone with it.
• Sweep the edges and keep the middle open. Your ribbon never shortens inside a sector, so every cell you cross is removed for good; a lap of the perimeter spends the same cells as a scribble through the centre, but it leaves the free space in one connected piece.
• Flux barriers start at sector three and are never placed on the walk the cores sit on, so you are never obliged to cross a lit one. Each blinks as an outline for the last three hundred milliseconds before it lights: read that flicker as an order to turn, not as a dare.
• Your three rez cover the whole run. Sectors one and two are seven by seven at the slowest speed in the game, so spend nothing there; by sector eleven the grid is twelve cells wide and the cycle is doing just over ten cells a second.

A little history

Gridweave was written for puzzle-me.com. Its furniture comes from the light-cycle duel in Disney's TRON, released in 1982, where the machines leave solid ribbons behind them and a rider wins by making the other one run out of room. The puzzle underneath is plainer: the self-avoiding walk, a path on a grid that may never touch itself. Snake made that idea famous and softened it, because a snake's tail eventually moves on. Here nothing moves on — a crash turns the ribbon into wall, so the arena you finish a sector in records every attempt you made at it.

Frequently asked questions