You are Glim, a hungry spark racing through glowing neon mazes. Collect every speck of light while four Shades pour out of their den to hunt you down. One touch costs a life — unless you have swallowed a power orb, in which case the hunters become the hunted.
It is a maze chase game in the arcade tradition: a fixed maze, a collect-everything goal, and four pursuers who are not wandering at random. Each Shade has its own rule for deciding where to go, and learning those four rules is the whole game.
The goal
Clear the maze of every pellet and power orb. Do that and a new stage begins: faster, meaner, and in a fresh labyrinth.
How to play
Glim never stops moving — you steer the turns.
- Eat everything. Pellets score 10, power orbs 50.
- Use the orbs. Swallow one and the Shades turn dark and flee. Catch them for 200, 400, 800 then 1600 points in a single chain — but watch for the blink that means they are about to recover.
- Grab the bonus. Twice per stage a crystal appears in the centre. It fades.
- Know the tunnels. The side tunnels wrap around the screen, and Shades slow down inside them. That is your best escape route.
Eaten Shades race back to their den as drifting eyes and rejoin the hunt, so the pressure never really stops. Extra life at 10,000 points.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
Arrow keys or W A S D | Steer |
| Swipe | Change direction on a touch screen |
| On-screen pad | Steer with buttons on phone or tablet |
P | Pause |
Turns are buffered, so you can enter your next turn early and Glim takes it at the corner.
Meet the Shades
| Shade | Targets | What that feels like |
|---|---|---|
| Ash | Your tile, directly | A bloodhound. Never loses the scent, always behind you. |
| Veil | Four tiles ahead of you | An ambusher. Meets you at the corner you were about to take. |
| Echo | The line from Ash through the point two tiles ahead of you, doubled | A flanker. Works with Ash to close a pincer you did not see forming. |
| Moss | You — until you are within eight tiles, then its own corner | A coward. Stalks from a distance and bolts the moment you turn on it. |
None of that is decoration: those are the actual rules the game runs. If you want them explained properly, with the arithmetic and the exploits, how ghost AI works in maze chase games takes them apart one at a time.
There is also a fifth behaviour that is easy to miss. Every so often all four give up the hunt at once and head for their own corners — scatter mode. It lasts a few seconds and it shortens on every stage. Those lulls are when you clear the dangerous parts of the maze.
Three quick tips
- Don't eat power orbs on sight. Save them for when Shades are close, then feast.
- Use the wrap-around tunnels. They lose speed in there; you don't.
- Clear the dangerous corners early and save the easy corridors for the endgame.
Want the deeper game?
How ghost AI works in maze chase games explains what the four Shades are actually computing, why the ambusher has a blind spot, and how scatter mode became the thing good players build their route around. Everything in it is running in the game above, so you can test each claim in about a minute.
And if you want the lineage: a short history of the maze chase genre sets out what actually came before 1980 — collecting dots is a year older than the game everybody credits for it.
About the game
Glimmer is an original game inspired by the classic maze-chase genre that Pac-Man made famous. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Bandai Namco. All characters, mazes and artwork are original creations. Pac-Man is a trademark of Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc., used here only to describe the genre this game pays tribute to.
