Sequential Echo

Sequential Echo is a reverse memory game with a spatial twist. Nine identical pads sit on a round sonar scope, and each round a few of them ping one after another, each with a rising note. Your job is to tap the sequence back in reverse order: the last ping first and the first ping last. It plays like the classic Simon Says sequence game turned backwards, a free sequence memory test that runs in your browser with nothing to install, and it sits between our puzzle games and our brain games.

On the game page Sequential Echo is endless: there is no clock at all, not even on your answers, so you can take as long as you need to think before each tap. You have three lives. Tapping the wrong pad costs one; the right pad flashes so you can see where it was, and you get a fresh sequence of the same level. The run goes on, round after round, until your third mistake, and your best run goes on the leaderboards.

The climb starts gently. The first rounds are three pings long and still, then four, then five. Then the scope starts to turn: the sequence drops back to three pings, and before you answer the whole board makes a quarter turn left or right, then four pings, then five. After that the rounds mix it up: a long sequence of six with no turn, then three pings with two turns, a half turn, a quarter turn and a half turn back, and each new stage adds a ping and plays a little faster, up to nine pings at almost three a second. The pads turn with the board, so you tap where they are now, not where they lit. An orange notch on the bezel turns with the board, so you can always see how far it went, but the rotation itself happens in your head. That is the mental rotation at the heart of this spatial memory game: hold a pattern, reverse it and picture it turned, all before your first tap.

Each correct tap scores 10 points plus 5 for every level above the first, a cleared round pays a bonus as big as its taps, and every clean round in a row raises a streak multiplier that reaches ×2 after four. A newcomer usually plays for a minute or two; a sharp memory keeps going for three minutes or more. Prefer a set length? The two-minute Timed run, where every tap also has five seconds on the clock, is what Swipe mode and the gauntlets play, which makes Sequential Echo one of our quick games too. Every run counts, and your best goes on the weekly and all-time leaderboards. Top scores are replayed on our servers before they are shown, so the competitive games boards list real results only.

Sequential Echo plays the same on a phone, tablet or computer. On a touch screen you tap the pads with a finger; on a desktop you click them with the mouse, and P pauses. The pads are big, the whole square around each one counts, and taps while the scope is pinging or turning are simply ignored, so an eager finger never costs you a life. On a wide screen the scope fills the left of the player with the score and the sequence strip beside it. You will find it among our mobile games and our PC games.

If you enjoy training your memory, try Copy That, where you hear a rhythm once and tap it back from memory, or test your eye for detail with Double Take. For a daily workout of reasoning puzzles, Daily IQ deals ten new questions every day. Sequential Echo is the one to play when you want a pure test of working memory: no words, no numbers, just pings, positions and a board that will not keep still.