About Nearmiss
Nearmiss gives you one axis — left and right — and then makes every obstacle on the road ask the same question. The wide gap is safe and slow. The narrow one pays. Passing close enough to something to have been killed by it is the only thing in the game that puts speed back, and your speed bleeds away constantly on its own, so playing it safe is not a strategy you can hold.
Behind you there is a wall of dark that does not chase and does not care. It advances at its own pace and gets quicker the further you run. The gap between it and you is therefore a running total of every decision you have made, which is the most honest scoreboard a game like this can have — you can watch yourself losing in real time, several seconds before it matters.
Grazes are also the experience. Chain them and each one is worth more; fill the bar and the run stops for three upgrade cards. About half of them change a number and the other half change a rule — a wake that counts passes behind you, plating that turns one crash into a graze, a window that eases time when the dark gets close — and because you only see a handful per run, the craft you die in is never the one you started with.
Seven kinds of obstacle, each a different silhouette rather than a different colour, because you are reading them at nine hundred units a second out of the corner of your eye. Like the rest of the big games here it is one self-contained file: every texture is drawn by code when it loads and every sound is synthesised sample by sample, so there is not one image or audio file in it.
How to play
- Steer with the mouse, with A and D or the arrow keys, or by dragging on a touchscreen. That is the whole control scheme — there is no brake, no boost button and nothing to fire.
- Your speed falls back toward a floor the entire time. Passing close to an obstacle without touching it is the only thing that raises it.
- The ring drawn around your craft is the graze window. If an obstacle passes inside that ring and you did not hit it, it counts.
- Grazes in quick succession build a chain, and the chain multiplies what each one is worth. Let it lapse and it resets to nothing.
- Grazing is also experience. Every full bar stops the run for three upgrade cards; take the rule cards over the number cards when you can.
- The dark behind you advances on its own schedule and speeds up the further you run. The meter up the left edge is how much room you have left.
- A crash costs a life and most of the speed you had earned. Five crashes end the run — but the dark almost always gets there first, which is the point: a crash is dangerous because of the speed it takes, not because of the life.
- Every fourth band the corridor narrows into a SQUEEZE. It is announced, it is survivable, and it is where most runs end.
Five tips that actually move your score
- Pick the gap you will have to thread, not the one in front of you. The craft accelerates toward where you point rather than arriving there, so a lane change begun late is a lane change that lands on the obstacle.
- Chains are worth more than any single graze. Two easy passes in a row beat one heroic one, because the multiplier applies to everything that follows while it holds.
- A gate shuts as you approach it. What looks like a comfortable opening from a distance is not the opening you will arrive at — commit to a side early and hold it.
- Spend the first upgrade on a rule, not a number. Trailing Wake and Ghost Plating change what the road is; +18% speed per graze changes how fast the same road goes by.
- Treat the chase meter as the real health bar. Lives only limit how many mistakes you get. The dark is what actually ends runs, and it is gaining whenever you are not grazing.
- Go through a squeeze slow and clean. It is the one stretch where the safe line is correct: a crash in there costs the speed you need to get out of it, and the dark does not slow down for you.
