Beacons drops you into the seat of a small night glider skimming low over a dark wireframe plain. Ahead of you a line of unlit beacon towers stretches into the fog, and every tower sits in the middle of a range ring painted on the ground. Your glider casts a shadow straight down, and the moment that shadow slides inside a ring you are close enough to fire the lamp and light the tower. Leave the ring with the tower still dark and one of your lamps goes out with it. Lose them all and the flight is over.
Tap anywhere to light the beacon whose ring you are in. Firing as soon as you enter is the safe play and it holds your chain, but it only pays a little. Each ring also has a bright bank line drawn across your route, and the stretch beyond it is the edge band. Hold your nerve until you cross that line and the light pays more than double and grows your chain multiplier, all the way to four times. Wait one beat too long, though, and you slide out of the ring with nothing. Firing when no ring is under you fizzles and burns one of your three flares, which refill slowly; fire with none left and a lamp burns out, so mashing does not work. Every ten clean lights restore a lost lamp.
Past fifty points, or after twenty-odd seconds in the air, the sky turns violet and crackling magenta storm cells start settling over parts of the rings. Firing inside a storm burns out a lamp. Sometimes the storm sits on the entry and the edge is clean, sometimes it covers the edge and the only safe light is an early one, and sometimes it splits the ring in half. You stop asking how late you dare to wait and start reading which stretch of the ring is safe. Chill, Normal and Hard change your speed and ring size, and Hard gives you a single lamp, so there one dark beacon ends the flight.