Vector Zero

What is Vector Zero?

Vector Zero is a free arrow escape puzzle you play in the browser. A dead station's navigation core is still holding a schematic, and the schematic is drawn in frozen evacuation orders. One order is a vector: a run of cells laid end to end, one cell wide, bending where the corridor bent, with an arrowhead that knows exactly one direction.

Tap a vector and the whole run leaves the plate along the way its head points. It only goes if every cell between that arrowhead and the edge of the plate is empty. Clear the plate and the picture underneath is yours. Authorise one whose ray is blocked and nothing moves, but the core loses a segment, and a core carries three.

Forty sectors, forty different schematics, from a nine vector plate you can read at a glance to a twenty four cell drawing carrying a hundred and forty six of them.

How to play

• Tap any cell of a vector. Not just the arrowhead. The whole run answers, which matters when the head is buried in the middle of the picture.
• Read the whole ray first. It has to be clear all the way to the edge of the plate, not just the next cell. One vector anywhere on that line refuses the authorisation.
• The space around the drawing is empty. A vector pointing out of the picture has nothing to cross and is always free. Those are the moves you take while you read the harder ones.
• Hold a vector to look at it safely. A long press lights up its ray and the first thing standing on it, dims everything else, and authorises nothing.
• Turn the grid on. A ray thirty cells long is hard to trace by eye across a dense picture. The lattice is there to be switched on and it costs nothing.
• Pinch and drag. Late plates are bigger than a phone. Zoom out to see the schematic, zoom in to work, and double tap to swap between the two.

What makes a plate hard

Nothing about a plate can trap you. Vectors only ever leave, so a ray that is clear stays clear and the set of moves available to you never shrinks. There is no losing order and there is no deadlock. A plate that can be cleared can be cleared in any order at all.

That is deliberate, and it moves the whole difficulty somewhere else: into reading. What a big plate costs you is finding the vector whose line is genuinely empty inside a picture where forty other strands cross it, under a budget of three mistakes. The campaign is measured on exactly that, the number of cells a scanning player has to trace, and every sector asks more of it than the one before.

Strategy tips

1. Work the outside of the picture first. A vector on the rim pointing away from the drawing has no cells to cross, so it is free whatever else is happening. Clearing those opens rays deeper in.
2. Trace with your finger, not your eye. On the later plates the blocker is often eight or ten cells out, past three other colours. Following the line physically costs a second and saves a segment.
3. Colour is identity, not direction. Two strands of the same colour are two different vectors that happen to be drawn in the same region of the picture. Only the arrowhead says which way anything goes.
4. Spend the long press freely. It is the one look that costs nothing at all: no score, no seal, no segment.
5. Protect the seals, not the clock. Time is worth at most nine hundred points on a plate. A single fracture costs two hundred and fifty, drops your flow to nothing and takes the third seal with it.

FAQ

Is Vector Zero free?

Yes. It runs in the browser, there is nothing to install and nothing to buy.

Do I need an account?

No. You can play the whole archive without one. An account is only for the leaderboard and for carrying your progress between devices.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes, and it is built for one first. The plates are sized so the largest of them still reads at a phone's width, with pinch zoom and a magnifier for the dense middle sections.

Can I get stuck on a plate?

Not in the sense of an unsolvable board. Every plate in the game is grown backwards from an empty plate, so a full solution exists by construction and stays available whatever order you play in. You can still lose one, by spending all three segments of the core on rays you misread.