Knife throw timing

Paintblade

The bar never stops. Throw where it is going to be.

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Paintblade, formerly called Rebound, is a precision timing game with a single, unforgiving geometry: your cannon rides a rail along the bottom and fires straight up, and nothing else about the board holds still. A bar sweeps back and forth overhead carrying the coloured zones you have to hit, hazard bars cross the gap in between, and you get a fixed number of knives and a running clock to pin the lot.

How Paintblade plays

Two moving problems at once

Because the cannon only fires vertically, aiming is really two questions answered together: will the lane above me still be open when the knife arrives, and will a zone be sitting over it when it does. Guessing one right and the other wrong looks identical to not aiming at all.

The bar hangs at the edges

It does not travel at a constant speed — it slows and lingers at each end of its sweep and races through the middle. Nobody tells you this. You work it out by noticing which throws keep landing, and from then on you pick your moment differently.

Mistakes cost throws, not lives

A knife that buries itself in bare timber is gone, and one that meets a crossing hazard gets carried off the side with it. Neither ends the run directly; both spend from a budget that has to cover the whole board, which is what stops you throwing until something happens to work.

Levels you keep

Three short lessons teach the throw, and the first levels clear the gap entirely so there is nothing to read but the sweep. Hazards arrive once leading the bar is something you can already do, and from level 9 some levels split the bar into two halves sweeping in opposite directions. Every level you clear stays cleared: there are no lives, a failed level is just played again, and each one has three stars to earn, the third for not wasting a knife.

Every hit paints the floor

Every ten levels is a chapter, and every chapter is a pixel picture lying on the floor under the cannon, in a room painted a colour of its own. Each zone you pin throws its paint onto the picture in the colour you hit, and splashes the walls while it is at it. Clearing the chapter finishes the picture and hangs it in your gallery; there are twelve, and the ones you have not reached stay hidden.

At a glance

Genre: Knife throw timing
Platforms: iOS and Android
Input: Drag to place, release to throw
Price: Free to play

Official site

→ paintblade.devcraftai.com