The purest arcade games have one input. Not one button that does many things; one button that does ONE thing, at a moment you choose, where choosing well is the entire game. COMET is that shape: you circle a planet, and the only thing you will ever do is let go. What makes it a strategy game is what the sky puts in front of that one choice: several planets at once, so the same release window can mean the safe near ring or the gold-paved far one; meteors drifting through the crossings; freighters on telegraphed lanes; and a spacesuit that will forgive exactly one of your mistakes.
Why it exists
Timing games work because the skill is legible: you can SEE the right moment approaching, feel yourself commit a hair early or a breath late, and know precisely whose fault the miss was. The dotted tangent line makes that honest; every flight goes exactly where the line pointed, and it warms gold when the line catches somewhere clear and flushes red when traffic crosses it. Robots prove the fairness before any release: an optimal pilot must chain twenty orbits through the weather, a random one must die fast, and a deliberately laggy one, the mechanical stand-in for human hands, must be able to live in the traffic too.
One button, many lines
Planets arrive in spreads, and some line up one beyond another, so a single line can cross two rings. Skipping the near planet for the far one is a real shot, and missing one can still catch the next. The strategy is not when to press; it is which line to press on.
The space between fights back
Meteors drift through the crossings, and from deeper runs freighters cross on lanes telegraphed before they arrive. Every ring pushes the rocks away, so home orbit is always safe; the danger lives exactly where you chose to fly.
Greed has a shape
Gold gems mark the risky lines and bank STARDUST across runs. A spacesuit survives one hit and is spent. A repeller shoulders rocks away for three hops; a magnet widens the catch and draws the gold. On the title screen, OUTFITTING turns banked stardust into a suit you launch with, a longer magnet, or a longer tail.
Dead-centre pays triple
Any catch scores. A flight line through the planet’s heart is a PERFECT, pays triple, and climbs a combo. Speed rises with every hop to a plateau, where the game stops getting faster and simply asks you to be better.
The quiet parts
No account, no ads, nothing following you around. Your best flight and your stardust live in your own browser. Every run’s sky is a pure function of its seed, which is how the robot pilots can replay identical universes to prove the game fair before it reaches you.