How to play Acrobeat.

You hear two short beeps. The silence between them is your target. Reproduce that silence and your climber leaps up a step. The closer your copy, the cleaner the leap. Miss by too much and you drop back to the ground and start the climb again. That is the whole loop, and it never changes. What changes is how little room for error you are given.

The loop, step by step

1. Press the key. Two beeps play, a short one and then another. Listen to the gap between them, not to the beeps themselves.
2. Hold that gap in your head. Do not count it. Treat it like a rhythm you are about to echo back, the way you would clap a beat someone just clapped at you.
3. Reproduce it. Start your own gap, then end it when the silence feels the same length. The on-screen bar moves while you do this, but it is only a loose guide.
4. Climb or fall. Land close enough and you step up a level. Land outside the window and you fall to the ground. Then you go again.

Two ways to control it

Open the settings gear in the top left to switch control schemes. They suit different people, so try both before you decide which feels natural.

Tap

Tap once to open your gap, tap again to close it. The time between your two taps is your answer. Tap tends to feel best on a phone, and it lets you place the start and the end as two deliberate moments.

Hold

Press and hold to open the gap, then release to close it. The length of your hold is your answer. Hold can feel more physical, like leaning on a note and letting go, and some players find it easier to feel a duration in their finger than to split it into two separate taps.

On Android there is also an optional buzz mode in settings that plays the cue as a vibration alongside the sound. It is off by default, and it cannot run on iPhone or desktop, where the browser has no way to vibrate. More on that on the accessibility page.

Reading the climb

Two small readouts sit at the top of the screen, styled like instrument gauges.

Peak is the highest level you have ever reached. It is the number most players chase. Avg drift is the average distance between your timing and the target, in milliseconds, across your recent landings. Lower drift means a sharper ear. Watch drift fall over a week and you can actually see yourself improving, even on runs where you do not beat your peak.

Every level tightens

At level one the window for a good match is a forgiving 75 milliseconds. Each level you climb removes about five milliseconds from that window, and it keeps shrinking until it bottoms out near 15 milliseconds, which is close to the limit of what a person can perceive at all. The beep gap itself also moves from round to round, somewhere between roughly 350 and 750 milliseconds, so you can never lock onto one fixed number and coast.

Listen again

Once both beeps have played, a listen again button appears. Use it. Playing the gap a second time before you answer does not cost you anything, and on the tighter levels a second listen is often the difference between a clean landing and a fall. There is no penalty for being careful.

When you fall

A miss drops you to the ground, so a long run is really a test of consistency rather than one perfect leap. The most common reason a good run ends is not a hard level, it is rushing the next answer while still annoyed about the last one. Take the half second to reset. From a deep fall you will sometimes get one chance to hold your step instead of dropping all the way down, so a high climb is never wiped out by a single slip without warning.

A few things that help

• Let both beeps fully land before you move. Answering before the second beep has even finished is the classic beginner fall.
• Stop watching the bar around level six. It means less and less as the window tightens. Players who stare at it plateau; players who close their eyes and listen keep going.
• Go wired, or calibrate. Bluetooth headphones add a small delay that the tightest levels will punish. Go wired or use the speaker, or open settings and run calibrate by ear so the game corrects for it. How we fixed latency explains it, and the science page covers why a few milliseconds matters this much.

Two modes to play in

Everything above applies to both modes. Free climb is the endless one where you chase your peak, and it is where most of the game lives. The daily challenge is a fixed ten-step run that is the same for everyone that day, with a single attempt and a shareable result. It has its own page: how the daily challenge works.

Keep reading

Questions about the game? Write to acrobeat@proton.me.