Runners: Gate and Go

Runners: Gate and Go is an endless three-lane runner in 3D where you travel in time. Swipe left and right to change lanes, up to jump, down to roll, and keep going: low barriers are jumped, high ones rolled under, full blocks run round, and the roofs of the vehicles parked along the way are a road of their own, reached by a ramp. You are a robot escaping a chaotic future: every run starts in Neon 3000, and every 600 to 800 metres three doors stand across the track, each one the door to another century.

The lane you run the gate in is the century you get, and the doors show where they lead: the Frontier in 1870 with its boxcars and steam locomotive, a medieval Kingdom in 1250 with horse-drawn wagons, the Pharaohs in 1300 BC with stone blocks on sledges and a royal barge, the Jurassic with fallen trunks and a long-necked dinosaur walking straight at you, and Neon 3000 with maglev trains. After a time tunnel the ground, the obstacles, the vehicles, the light and the music all change at once. A century you have not been to in this run raises your score multiplier by one, so the choice at every gate is a new place against one you already know.

There is no board. Green coins come in short lines, and ten of them switch on the Gate Sneakers: winged shoes that glow green for ten seconds and jump high enough to land straight on a roof or clear a wall — and if you crash while they are on, the shoes burst instead of you. A bump from the side is only a stumble, but it brings the Clockwork Warden, a brass automaton with a clock for a chest, to your heels; a second stumble before he drops back, or any head-on crash, ends the run. Magnets, double score and slow time float along the track in bubbles, and a swipe down in mid-air drops you to the ground into a roll.

Coins buy runners from the time machine at 2,000 each, and it never gives one you already have. There are fifteen, all in time goggles: four starters (a first visit gets one at random), five from the machine, three earned by feats — Ace, for visiting all six centuries in one run, is the one with a perk and starts with half the sneaker meter filled — Jack the pumpkin-head while Halloween lasts, from 1 October to 2 November 2026, and new runners arriving in November and December. Five-level upgrades make the sneakers, the magnet, double score and slow time last longer. Each day has three missions, a free gift every six hours and a daily run with the same starting century and rule for everyone, whose coins count double. The first run teaches the four swipes without a word: time slows down and a hand shows the move. It plays upright or sideways, in five languages, saves after every run, and nothing reaches the network.