Meteor Dodge is a survival game with one rule: don't get hit. You pilot a glowing orb confined to the lower portion of the screen while meteors of varying size tumble down from above, falling faster and spawning more frequently the longer you last. A single impact ends the run instantly unless you're currently carrying a shield charge, in which case the shield absorbs the hit for you and the meteors keep coming. There's no level structure and no fixed end point — difficulty ramps continuously over roughly a minute and a quarter until it plateaus at its hardest setting, and the run simply continues until you make a mistake.
On mobile, drag anywhere on the screen and the orb eases smoothly toward your fingertip rather than snapping directly to it, which gives you a little more control when threading a tight gap. On desktop, the arrow keys or WASD give you full four-way movement — up and down matter here as much as left and right, since the playfield has real vertical depth rather than being a single lane. Press P or Escape at any time to pause the run, and the speaker icon mutes the sound effects that mark near misses, pickups, and impacts. Keyboard input takes priority over a drag in progress, so switching between the two mid-run works cleanly if you want to.
You score steadily just for staying alive, gaining points continuously the longer the run goes on and faster still as the difficulty ramps up. But squeezing past a meteor at close range — closer than a comfortable margin, without actually touching it — pays a direct bonus on top of that, and also triggers a brief slow-motion effect that makes the moment of the graze feel deliberate rather than accidental. Hiding in the open middle of the playfield and avoiding every meteor by a wide margin is therefore the lowest-scoring way to play; the real points come from threading the tightest gaps you can survive. Every tenth near miss is called out on screen, which gives you a running sense of how aggressively you're playing as the meteor storm thickens around you.
Two kinds of pickups drift down through the storm alongside the meteors. Yellow gem pickups are worth a flat point bonus the moment you collect them, giving you a reason to detour slightly even when it isn't strictly necessary for survival. Teal shield pickups are more valuable strategically: each one grants a shield charge that absorbs exactly one meteor impact that would otherwise end your run, and charges stack up to three at once, so a well-stocked shield can turn what would have been a game-ending mistake into a brief, safe recovery. Picking up a shield when you're already carrying one is never wasted as long as you're below the cap, so it's almost always worth collecting on the way past.
Because meteors spawn across the top of the screen and drift slightly sideways as they fall, it usually pays to keep your orb roughly centered rather than camped against one edge — a central position leaves you room to react in either direction when a new meteor appears. Watch for the larger meteors specifically; they're less common but demand more clearance, so treat every big rock as a near-miss opportunity rather than something to avoid by a wide margin. Early in a run, when meteors are sparse, it's worth practicing tight passes deliberately to build up your near-miss count while the risk is low, since the same gaps get far less forgiving once the difficulty has ramped up. If you're carrying shields, don't hoard them defensively — using one to survive an aggressive graze is exactly what they're there for, and running the storm with a full shield stack you never spend leaves points on the table.
Meteor Dodge is built around continuous, precise movement rather than discrete taps, so both control schemes are tuned for smoothness rather than snappy digital input. On a touchscreen, the eased drag-follow means your orb won't jerk around from small hand tremors, which makes fine positioning during a dense cluster of meteors more forgiving than a direct one-to-one touch mapping would be. On a keyboard, four-way movement at a fixed speed rewards planning your line through an upcoming cluster a moment before you need it, since there's no acceleration curve to fight. Your score, survival time, and near-miss count are recorded every run, and your personal best score is saved locally so each session gives you a clear target to beat.