Mirror Mayhem: bounce the beam and find the one perfect angle

How a level works

Your laser cannon stands on the left; the power crystal waits somewhere on the other side. Turn the cannon to an angle and fire. The beam bounces off mirrors, gets stopped by rocks and crates, and if your angle is right it reaches the crystal and charges it. Light the crystal and the level is yours.

You only get a few shots each level — between four and eight — so look before you fire. A dotted line shows where the beam will go, and a pink dashed line shows where your last shot went, so every miss tells you something.

What light does

Only the shiny front of a mirror bounces light — the back and the edges are a wall. Crystal mirrors keep almost all of the light, gold and steel ones lose a little, and dusty ones lose nearly half. A prism splits the beam into red, green and blue rays that fan out, and a shiny puddle on the floor is a mirror lying down.

Light goes straight through glass, but hold the beam on it long enough and it shatters. Ice and steel blocks bounce back a little and get in the way. Wood, rock, TNT and the pals swallow the beam: wood breaks, TNT goes BOOM, and pals pop.

🔆The crystal needs a strong beam for about a second. A route through too many dusty mirrors can be the right angle and still too weak.

Exactly one winning angle — promised

Every level is built so that one window of angles works, and only one. Before a level is shown, the game fires 2,300 test beams across the whole fan of angles; if it finds a second way to the crystal it blocks it and checks again. The window starts wide on the first levels and gets thinner and thinner — so it is always a real puzzle, never a lucky shot. Level 12 is the same level for everybody, which makes it fun to compare.

Six worlds, nine pals and a king

The levels never end, and every one is a little harder than the last: more mirrors on the route, and a dotted guide that shows less and less of the way — until some levels are a blind shot. New things arrive as you go: TNT, glass, prisms, dusty mirrors, floor bounces, bubbles, swinging balls, ice and steel.

A new world opens every four levels: Meadow, Desert, Frost, Neon, Volcano and Space, where gravity is low. Nine funny pals live in them — they watch the beam, gasp when you fire, yelp when it hits them and cheer when you win — and every tenth level King Gloop turns up, who is very hard to pop.

Stars, hints and your progress

Finish a level with few shots and you earn up to three stars; spare shots and popped pals add to your score. Stuck? Press the 💡 hint to see a small band of angles where the answer hides — it costs the third star on that level. Your levels, stars and score are saved in your browser on your own device, so you can come back any time and carry on.

Five tips for your first levels

1. Work backwards: start from the crystal and ask which mirror could send light into it.
2. After a miss, look at the pink dashed line and move your angle a little, not a lot.
3. Use the arrow keys for the last tiny turns — Shift makes them even smaller.
4. Hover over a mirror to see how much light it keeps. Shiny beats dusty.
5. Popping pals is fun, but the crystal is the goal. Save your shots for it!

For parents

Mirror Mayhem is a puzzle for one player — there are no other players, no chat and nothing to talk to. The pals pop in a cartoon puff when the beam hits them; there is no blood. It needs no account, no download and no real name. The game shows no ads and runs no analytics, and its fonts come from Google Fonts.

Progress is kept only in your own browser, on your own device. Clearing your browser data starts the game again from level 1. As in all our games, a player may choose to keep a name by confirming a link sent to an email address — a grown-up's is fine — and nobody has to. The privacy page has the details.