Mirror Laser

Overview

Mirror Laser is a set of twenty optical routing puzzles. Each circuit has a fixed emitter, mirrors, sensors and solid baffles on a nine-by-eight grid. Your job is to rotate the available optics until a test beam reaches every matching sensor. Mirrors switch between slash and backslash orientations, sending a ray through a right-angle turn. Later circuits add prisms that split white light into red and blue paths, so tracing one route is no longer enough.

The first eight puzzles use a single white sensor. The remaining twelve require red and blue sensors to light together. Circuits have distinct fixed layouts rather than a shuffled board that changes after every attempt. Some optics sit outside the useful route, so deciding which parts matter is part of the puzzle. Each level has an independently verified minimum-rotation par and a budget that allows six additional rotations before overload.

How to Play

Choose Open the Lab. Click or tap a mirror or prism to select and rotate it. Keyboard players can move the selection with the arrow keys and press Space to rotate the selected optic. The Rotate button performs the same action on the highlighted cell. Clicking an empty cell only moves the selection; it does not move a mirror into that space.

Press F or choose Fire to test the current circuit. White, red and blue lines show the simulated routes, and matching sensors fill when reached. An unsuccessful test does not consume a move. Rotations do count, including turns that restore a previous orientation. Walls block light, and a ray stops when it reaches a sensor even if its color is wrong.

At a prism's zero-degree setting, red continues in the incoming white beam's direction and blue turns clockwise. Each rotation turns both exits a quarter turn relative to that incoming direction. A ray that is already red or blue passes through a prism straight rather than splitting again. Watch the test result instead of treating the triangle as a colored mirror.

Once every target is lit in a single test, choose Next or press N. Retry or T restores the current unsolved circuit, including its original optic settings and move count. An overload also offers a current-level retry. R or Restart all begins from circuit one with a fresh score. P pauses; the puzzles have no real-time countdown.

Tips & Strategy

Trace from the emitter one turn at a time. Check whether a mirror receives the beam horizontally or vertically before changing it, because the same slash sends different incoming directions to different exits. A mirror that is not touched by the current beam may belong to a later branch or may simply be unnecessary. Free Fire tests help distinguish those cases without using extra rotations.

In dual-color levels, find the prism before planning both sensors. The white beam must reach it first. Then follow the red and blue branches separately, checking that neither hits the other color's sensor on the way. Lighting only red now and only blue later does not solve the circuit: the target display is recomputed from the current single test, with no credit carried from an earlier attempt.

Use the displayed par as a rotation goal, not as a timer. A grade A uses no more than par, grade B allows two extra rotations, and grade C covers a completed circuit within the remaining budget. Repeatedly toggling an optic back and forth can therefore reduce a grade or overload the board even when the final orientation is correct. If an experiment has become expensive, Retry is clearer than trying to undo every earlier turn by hand.

Pause to inspect a route whenever you need to. The important decisions are where the light travels and how many physical rotations you spend, not how fast you click. Continue only after reading the solved circuit's grade; solved levels cannot be fired repeatedly to add more score.

What Makes It Distinct

Single-beam reflection grows into simultaneous two-color routing, while exact par values give efficient solutions a concrete goal. Free tests make the light paths visible, fixed layouts make retries useful, and a full run ends after twenty circuits with a score based on the grades you actually earned.