Neon Lines
About Neon Lines
Neon Lines is a falling block puzzle in a well ten columns wide and twenty rows deep. Seven shapes come down one at a time, you rotate and slide them into the gaps, and a row filled across all ten columns clears while everything above it drops a step. The fall speeds up every ten lines, and you can start as high as level nine if you would rather skip the slow part. The stack is the clock here, so tidy stacking buys more than fast fingers.
How to play
Press Start, then use the pad to move and rotate. Drop sends the shape straight to the bottom and locks it there.
Rules of Neon Lines
- The well is ten columns across and twenty rows deep.
- Seven shapes turn up in the queue: the bar, the square, the T, two S shapes and two L shapes.
- One cleared row pays forty points, two pays a hundred, three pays three hundred and four at once pays twelve hundred, each multiplied by your level.
- A hard drop also pays two points for every row the shape falls through, so dropping from the top is worth more than nudging it down.
- Every ten cleared lines raises the level by one and the pieces fall faster.
- The next shape is shown in the panel beside the well, which lets you plan one move ahead.
- The run ends when a new shape has no room to enter at the top of the well.
- Start level can be set anywhere from one to nine before a run, and a high start still counts towards your top level record.
Controls
- Rot, Left, Right and Down on the pad
- Drop for a hard drop
- Arrow keys, or 4, 5, 6 and 8, on a keyboard
- Space for a hard drop and P to pause
- Set opens the start level, your saved memory and a reset
What makes it worth playing
- Score, best, lines and level are all on screen at once, with last score, games played and top level below.
- A start level picker, so a returning player does not sit through level one every time.
- Short synthesised blips for a move, a lock, a line and the end of a run, with a button to silence them.
- A large touch pad sized for thumbs rather than a row of small buttons.
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-09-14.
Tips from playing it
- Keep the stack flat and leave one column open at an edge for the bar. Four rows at once pays more than four singles.
- Rotate before you slide. Settling the shape first means you only have to count columns once.
- Use the soft drop while you are still learning a level's speed. A locked mistake cannot be undone.
- If the stack reaches halfway up the well, stop chasing big clears and take singles until you are level again.
Why this game is here, and what we changed
This one came to us dressed as a green handheld from the nineties, complete with a plastic case drawn around the screen. We liked the layout and kept it, but the colour scheme belonged to somebody else's joke, so we rebuilt it: a dark well, mint blocks, a hot pink status line and our own name across the top. We also stripped a settings button that pointed off the site and a line of help text about installing a file we do not hand out. We played several runs on a phone and cleared lines at level one and level five before publishing this.
More on how we pick and fix these: how we make our own editions of classic games and how we test a game.
We wrote about this one
- How we make our own editions of classic games. A tableau of cards, a sliding tile square, four discs in a row. Nobody owns those rules. Here is what goes into turning one of them into a game that holds up on a phone.
- Category
- Arcade
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Portrait
- Players
- One player.
- Difficulty
- Level one is a warm up. Level six is a scramble.
- Typical session
- Four to twelve minutes a run.
- Last tested by us
- 2026-09-14
