About Skyward Beat
A vertical precision platformer where the level runs on the music. Every platform, hazard and boost moves in time with a 138 BPM synthwave track, and so should you.
Most rhythm games ask you to press buttons in time. Skyward Beat asks you to move in time. The world pulses on quarter notes: platforms rise and fall on the beat, lasers fire on the measure, boost pads charge on the downbeat. You can play it as a pure platformer and finish it, but you will be fighting the level. Play it on the beat and the level starts carrying you.
Controls
| Action | Keyboard | Touch |
|---|---|---|
| Move | Arrow keys or A and D | Virtual thumbstick |
| Jump | Spacebar, W or up arrow | Jump button |
| Restart stage | Settings menu | Settings menu |
The beat multiplier
Jumping on the downbeat triggers an on-beat leap: 25% extra jump height, and your score multiplier steps up. The multiplier climbs from 1x to a maximum of 8x as you chain on-beat jumps together. Missing the beat by more than about 150 milliseconds drops you straight back to 1x.
That extra jump height is not cosmetic. Several gaps in the later sectors are only clearable from an on-beat leap, so the rhythm is load-bearing rather than decorative. If a jump looks impossible, you are probably off-beat rather than in the wrong place.
Jump buffering
There is a 120 millisecond input buffer on the jump. Press jump slightly before you land on a moving platform and the input is held and fired on the first frame of contact. For speedrunning this is the whole game: buffering means you never lose a frame waiting to register the landing, and it lets you keep a rhythm chain alive across platforms that would otherwise break it.
Scoring
- The global scoreboard ranks by completion time, measured to hundredths of a second.
- Every fall or respawn adds a 3.00 second penalty — far more costly than the time you lose falling.
- The platinum target is all 20 vertical sectors in under 90.00 seconds with no deaths.
Because deaths are penalised so heavily, the fastest route is rarely the most aggressive one. Runners who consistently break 90 seconds are usually playing slightly conservatively and never dropping the multiplier, rather than taking every risky shortcut.
Getting started
- Play the first three sectors without trying to go fast. Learn where the beat sits.
- Turn the sound up. The visual pulse is a backup cue, not the primary one.
- Start buffering your jumps early — it feels wrong for about a minute and then feels obvious.
- Only then start chasing the clock.
Skyward Beat runs in the browser with no download and no install. The soundtrack is original and generated with Web Audio, so there is no audio file to wait for.
More
The master game guides cover speedrun routing in more depth. The rest of the arcade is at makecade.com/arcade.