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Tap the arrow's side as fast as you can — unless it turns red, and then don't move at all.
An arrow flashes in the middle. Tap the half of the screen it points to as fast as you can: the left half for a left arrow, the right half for a right arrow. Arrow keys work too. On about one trial in three the arrow turns red a moment after it appears — that is the stop signal, and on those trials you must not tap at all. A wrong side, a tap after the deadline, a missed arrow or a tap on a red trial each costs one of your three lives. As you climb, the response deadline shortens and the red appears later, so the window that satisfies both closes for good. Your score is the number of trials you get right.
This is a race between two processes in your head, and you can only tune one of them. The arrow starts a go response; the red starts a stop response that needs roughly a fifth of a second to arrive. If your finger is already committed before the stop lands, nothing can call it back — the tap is gone before you consciously see the red. That is why mashing scores near nothing here, no matter how fast your reflexes are.
The fix is not to react more slowly but to react on a delay you choose. Pick a beat — a fraction of a second between seeing the arrow and moving — and keep it identical on every trial. Consistency is worth more than speed: a steady 480 milliseconds beats a jittery average of 400, because the deadline punishes your slowest trials while the stop signal punishes your fastest ones. Your run ends at the tails of your distribution, not at its middle.
Resist the two habits that grow out of a mistake. After you fail to hold, the instinct is to slow way down, and you will start missing the deadline. After you time out, the instinct is to jump, and the next red trial takes a life. Both overcorrections cost more than the original error, so make yourself return to the same beat instead.
The deadline bar is your metronome. Watch how much of it is left when you commit and aim for the same fraction each trial, rather than trying to feel the milliseconds. Late in a run there is genuinely no delay that satisfies both demands, and every player ends there — the score is how far you pushed the point where the two curves cross.