Cadence is a four-lane tap rhythm game with a synthwave aesthetic. Notes scroll downward on four vertical lanes; press the matching key — A, S, D, or F — as each note crosses the magenta hit zone at the bottom of the screen. Six tracks span 90 BPM all the way to 200 BPM, each generated live by the Web Audio API with no external audio files. It plays in your browser with no download or signup — pick a track and start tapping.
Select a track from the menu to begin a 3-2-1 countdown. The sequencer starts and notes fall in time with the beat. Hit within 120 ms for a Perfect (100 pts base), within 220 ms for a Good (50 pts). Misses reset your combo. Your multiplier grows with your combo: 2x at 10 combo, 3x at 30, and 4x at 50 — chasing a streak on the fastest tracks is where the real scores happen. When the track ends, your results screen shows score, accuracy percentage, max combo, and letter grade.
Dusk Drive (90 BPM) — sparse intro pattern, good for learning the hit timing window. Grid Lock (120 BPM) — standard 4/4 beat, doubles on the back half. Pulse City (140 BPM) — syncopated eighth-note runs begin. Static Rush (160 BPM) — dense streams require consistent finger placement. Voltage (180 BPM) — sixteenth-note bursts test hand speed. Overdrive (200 BPM) — polyrhythm pattern; the hardest track, reserved for high scorers.
Every hit in Cadence is weighed twice: once for accuracy and once for streak. A Perfect lands within 120 ms of the hit zone and pays 100 base points; a Good lands inside 220 ms and pays 50. Your combo multiplier stacks on top of that base: 1x from zero through nine, 2x at ten, 3x at thirty, and 4x once you cross fifty. A Perfect tap on a fifty-combo chain is therefore worth 400 points, four times what the same tap pays at the start of the track — which is why the highest scores on the leaderboard almost always come from clean runs rather than dense ones.
Every eighth scheduled note becomes a power note, drawn with a pulsing green ring; landing one adds a flat +200 bonus on top of the multiplier-scaled base. The results screen converts your final accuracy into a letter grade: S at 95% or higher, A from 85%, B from 70%, C from 55%, and D below that. Cadence keeps a separate personal best per track in your browser, and the leaderboard widget submits each run under its own track mode so the board stays comparable.
Cadence layers four visual cues on top of the falling-notes mechanic so timing is never guesswork. The magenta hit-zone bar pulses on every beat, growing thicker and brighter on the downbeat and decaying before the next — a built-in metronome you can read out of the corner of your eye. Each lane carries a faint vertical gradient that intensifies near the bottom, drawing approaching notes into a glowing target zone rather than a flat strip. Notes themselves pick up a soft shadow glow during the final 30% of their travel, so you can pre-load a tap before the note even reaches the bar.
On contact, three things fire simultaneously: the lane flashes its color for 80 ms, six to eight colored particles burst outward from the hit zone, and a floating judgment label — PERFECT, GOOD, or MISS — rises and fades in the lane you struck. Power-note hits replace that label with "+200 POWER!" in green. Together these signals turn every tap into an unambiguous yes-or-no, which makes it possible to self-correct timing mid-track instead of waiting for the results screen. If you enjoy this kind of reaction-tight scoring, try Neon Blocks for a stack-and-clear variant, Vapor Type for keyboard speed under pressure, or browse the full arcade category for more reflex-driven games.
