Mochi Beam

About Mochi Beam

Mochi Beam is a single-beam reflection puzzle. A cute mochi lamp sits on the edge of the board and fires one glowing beam straight inward. That beam keeps going in a perfectly straight line until it meets a diagonal mirror, hits a sleepy cushion, or runs off the grid - and your job is to steer it so it passes through every sparkling crystal on the board. The moment a crystal sits on the beam's path it lights up, and lighting all of them at once clears the level.

You steer with the mirrors. Each ordinary mirror is a diagonal bar that points one of two ways - a forward slash or a back slash - and tapping it flips between the two, instantly re-routing the beam so you can watch it swing to its new heading. Because the beam is always shown live, Beam is less about hidden math and more about reading the bounce: nudge one mirror, see where the light lands, then nudge the next.

The 20 hand-tuned levels are grouped into five candy worlds - Berry, Citrus, Mint, Ocean, and Galaxy - and each world layers in a new piece. Mint adds sleepy cushions that stop the beam dead so you must route around them. Ocean bolts some mirrors at a fixed angle (you can't flip those) and introduces rail mirrors that you drag along a track instead of rotating. Galaxy brings portal pairs, where the beam dives into one swirl and pops out of its twin on the same heading, carrying the light across gaps a cushion would otherwise block. Boards grow from a tidy 5x5 up to a busy 10x10 as you go.

There is no timer, no move limit, and no way to lose - Beam is a calm, take-your-time puzzle. Every board is built backward from a guaranteed solution and re-checked before you ever see it, so you can experiment freely knowing a real answer always exists. Clear all 20 levels and Endless mode opens up, generating brand-new boards with every mechanic switched on from the first one and difficulty that keeps ramping past the curated finale, so the puzzles never run out.

How to play Mochi Beam

1. Spot the smiling mochi lamp on the edge of the grid - that is the emitter, and it fires one beam inward in a single fixed direction.
2. Tap any bright candy mirror to flip its diagonal bar between its two angles; the glowing beam re-routes the instant you do, so you always see exactly where it goes.
3. Bend the beam so its path runs through every crystal on the board - each crystal lights up and sparkles the moment the beam crosses it.
4. On later worlds, drag a mirror that sits on a slide rail (look for the chevrons) along its groove to the cell where it bends the beam correctly - its angle is fixed, so it's a position puzzle.
5. Light every crystal at the same time to clear the level, get your three stars, and unlock the next puzzle.
6. After level 20, choose Endless to keep solving freshly generated boards for as long as you like.

Controls

Tips & strategy

• Work backward from a crystal you still need to light: figure out which direction the beam must arrive from, then set the nearest mirror to send it there.
• Watch the whole beam, not just the crystal you're aiming at - flipping a mirror to catch one crystal often swings the beam off one you already lit, so lighting them all at once is the real challenge.
• Sleepy cushions and bolted mirrors never move; treat them as fixed walls and plan your bounces to flow around their angle.
• Bolted mirrors look dim and have little bolts at each end, and tapping them does nothing - recognising them early saves wasted taps.
• For a rail mirror, drag it slowly and watch the live beam: the right slot is wherever the light suddenly snaps toward your crystals.
• When a board has a portal pair, the beam leaves the twin swirl on the exact same heading it entered - use that to leap across a cushion wall instead of going around it.
• Every board starts with exactly one piece already in its solved state and the rest scrambled wrong, so the opening position is close to solved on purpose; look for the small set of changes that finishes it.
• Nothing is timed and you can flip mirrors as many times as you want, so try things freely - every Mochi Beam board is guaranteed to have a solution.

Game features

• A live, single-beam laser puzzle: one mochi-lamp emitter, one beam, and crystals you must light all at once.
• Tap diagonal mirrors to flip their angle and watch the glowing beam re-route in real time.
• 20 hand-tuned levels across five candy worlds - Berry, Citrus, Mint, Ocean, and Galaxy - with boards that grow from 5x5 to 10x10.
• Four stacking mechanics that arrive world by world: sleepy cushions that block the beam, bolted fixed mirrors you can't flip, drag-along rail mirrors, and portal pairs that teleport the light.
• Endless mode after level 20, with every mechanic on from the first board and difficulty that keeps ramping instead of resetting easy.
• No timer, no move limit, and no fail state - plus every board is built from a real solution, so you can never get stuck on an impossible one.
• A neon two-pass beam glow, sparkling diamond crystals, and a celebratory three-star burst when you clear a level.
• Looping background music plus synthesized Web Audio: a soft chime each time you flip a mirror and a rising arpeggio on every win.
• Your unlocked levels and stars are saved on your own device, and it plays instantly in any browser on phone, tablet, or desktop.

Tug the Light Like a String

What sells Mochi Beam is that the light is never hidden. There is no fire button, no commit step, no waiting to see whether a guess paid off. Flip a candy mirror and the glowing line snaps to its new heading right under your finger, so the loop is flip, glance, flip again. That tightness changes how the puzzle feels: you stop doing angles in your head and start reading the bounce by eye, treating the beam like a piece of string you keep tugging until its single path threads every crystal at once. The crystals only count when they are lit simultaneously, which is the whole tension.

Underneath, the boards are grown from an answer, not sprinkled with one. A billiard walk fires the beam in long straight runs across the grid, drops mirrors at the far ends and deliberately keeps them spaced apart so the layout never clumps into a knot. Cushions are placed only on cells that solution beam never touches, and portals split one straight run so the gap between them can be sealed off. Then the whole thing is re-traced to confirm it still lights, and only the movable pieces are scrambled. The upshot you feel: never chaos, just a handful of fixes to spot.

The reward layer is small on purpose and lands hard anyway. The beam draws in two passes, a faint wide halo under a white core, with dashes that crawl along its length so even a solved, still board keeps moving. A flip gives a tiny springy squash, a short triangle blip and a faint shake; clearing a level fires sparkles out of every crystal under a five note climb and a soft flash. The clear card simply notes the tap count, a curiosity rather than a grade, since every solve hands you the full three stars no matter how you got there.

One quiet touch carries the kid-first design. When you idle for a few seconds, or rattle off a run of taps that lights nothing new, a pointing hand bobs over the one piece still set wrong, the one the live beam reaches first. It never solves the board, only says where to look. The mechanics stack world by world, cushions in Mint, bolted mirrors and slide rails in Ocean, tinted portal pairs in Galaxy, and the real spike is meeting all of them on a busy ten by ten. With no timer and no fail state, it suits an unhurried, thinky sitting.