Imagine Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero without music. You're just pressing the arrow keys at your computer as they whirl past you faster and faster. You start whispering to yourself, you start tapping your foot, your fingers start making hook-knuckled shapes on your keypad. It's too late. We have lost you.
Arrow Hero (play free here) is an incredibly simple, free browser game from Jérémy Graziani, and we're posting it here because it's the kind of game that even your friends who don't normally like games are going to feel alternately compelled and rejected by this week.
Color-coded arrows corresponding to the ones on your keyboard whirl past and you have to press the right arrow at the right time. Eventually you are mesmerized, synesthetic, responding automatically to hue as much as shape. The orbiting arrows go faster and faster. How long can you manage overwhelm? The experience is both awesome and irksome, fun and fricative, that precious little psychic median from whence the only onward course is always just again.
I found out about Arrow Hero because my friend Sophie Weiner posted about it in Fast Company, and she said it was really hard. I can get, like, two thousand points on it without even really trying, so maybe she's exaggerating, but you try it.
