re86 — ARC-AGI-3 game guide

Level 1

• Up, Down, Left and Right slide the selected piece 3 pixels. Only the selected piece moves, and there is no clicking in this game.
• ACTION5 switches control to the next piece in a fixed order, wrapping back to the first. It costs a step, the same as a move.
• RESET puts every piece back the way it started (position, color and shape) and refills the step bar. There is no undo.
• Each level shows small target dots: one colored pixel inside a darker gray ring. They are on the board from the start, drawn under the pieces.
• The level clears the moment every dot's colored center pixel is covered by a piece of the same color. Any piece of that color will do, the gray rings don't count, and pieces lying over empty board don't matter.
• Pieces are thin outlines, so only their lines cover anything. Level 1 has two plus-shaped crosses, one yellow and one blue, for the yellow and blue dots.
• Pieces slide straight through each other and never block one another. Where two overlap, the one drawn on top is the one the win check sees.
• A piece can hang partly off the edge of the board, but a move that would put its middle off the board is refused. The refused move still costs a step.
• If the steps run out before the level clears, the game is over. There are no lives. The win check runs first, so clearing a level on your very last step still counts.
• Every action spends one step: moves, refused moves and piece switches all count. Budgets are 100, 100, 200, 200, 250, 200, 300 and 400 steps for levels 1-8.
• The bar along the bottom row of the screen is the step budget: purple for steps left, light gray for steps spent. It refills at the start of each level.
• The selected piece has a single white pixel in its middle, and no other piece has one. White is not a color here, so a dot sitting exactly under that pixel is not covered while that piece is selected.

Level 2

• X-shaped pieces (two crossing diagonal lines) and a hollow diamond appear alongside the crosses. With no walls on levels 2-5, they slide exactly like the crosses.

Level 3

• A single straight line piece appears. On level 3 all three pieces (an X, a hollow diamond and the line) and every dot are red.

Level 4

• On levels 4, 5, 7 and 8 no piece starts in the color of any dot, so each piece you need has to be repainted on a pad first. Level 6 has no pads.
• Color pads appear: small squares with a gray border and a solid colored middle. When a piece of another color slides onto a pad, the whole piece is repainted in the pad's color. Pads never block, and a piece that is already the pad's color crosses it with no change.
• A repaint plays out as an animation inside that one move: the new color starts where the piece touches the pad and spreads along its lines until the whole piece has changed, then the white selection pixel comes back. It costs one step like any move.

Level 5

Level 6

• Walls appear: light gray rings, 8 pixels wide on levels 6 and 7 and 5 pixels wide on level 8. No piece passes through a wall, but what happens instead depends on the piece's shape.
• Push a cross so one of its lines runs into a wall and it does not stop: the line that would hit stays where it is and the other line keeps moving, so the two lines now cross at a different point. Once they cross at the very end of a line, pushes that way are refused. This works both when a line hits the wall side-on and when its tip hits it end-on.
• A bent cross stays bent. Sliding it away moves it as it is, and only RESET straightens it. The white selection pixel stays in the middle of the piece's outer box, so on a bent cross it can sit off the lines.
• Push a hollow square into a wall and it squashes: each push makes it 3 pixels thinner in the push direction and 3 pixels longer the other way, with the edge touching the wall staying put. At 4 pixels thick, pushes that way are refused. It never springs back before RESET.

Level 7

Level 8