What it is. Press a button, aim, and you are somewhere else — no arc, no travel, no in-between frames the world can react to. Distance becomes a menu of destinations, not a journey.

Player fantasy / why it’s fun. You are un-cornerable. The hit that should have landed passes through empty air; the wall that should have stopped you is now behind you. Teleport sells mastery-of-space — the reward is being where the danger isn’t, exactly when it counts. See pattern-mastery-and-flow.

The verb

Aim at a target point, commit, appear there. The whole decision is where — and, because motion is instant, when. Unlike mechanic-dash (a fast slide that still crosses ground and can be intercepted mid-travel), a blink skips the crossing entirely. That single property rewrites every relationship it touches: collision, line of sight, and enemy [[system-telegraphs|telegraphs]].

How it feels / why it’s fun

• Deletion of travel time turns a chase into a puzzle: the question is never “can I get there” but “which there”.
• Zero i-frame ambiguity. A dash dodge is a timing read; a blink is a position read. Different skill, different fantasy — Tracer’s blink in Overwatch vs. a Souls roll.
• The relocation is a promise the world must honor. If the destination is legal, you are safe there. That guarantee is the whole thrill — and the whole balancing problem.

Tuning levers

Defaults assume a combat repositioning blink. For a puzzle blink, kill the cooldown, make range and LoS the only constraints, and lean on level geometry — see genre-grid-puzzle.

Slots into

• Genres: genre-immersive-sim (Dishonored’s Blink is the archetype), genre-precision-platformer, genre-grid-puzzle, genre-bullet-hell, genre-metroidvania (a gated traversal verb), genre-tactics (per-turn reposition).
• Anchors: anchor-dishonored (short-range Blink as the spine of movement + stealth), anchor-portal (relocation as pure puzzle logic), anchor-hades (Athena/Zeus dashes read as blinks), anchor-into-the-breach (teleport as a tactical verb with full information).

Twist seams

• Blink but you leave a decoy where you were (mechanic-swap): a body double stands at your origin and eats the next hit or draws aggro. Now the blink is deception, not just escape — the enemy commits to a target that isn’t you. Composes with mechanic-clone and system-enemy-ai; the AI must be legible enough that baiting it feels earned, not random. See pattern-risk-reward.
• Teleport but only to where a thrown marker lands (constraint): you can’t blink freely — you first place a target (a thrown dagger, a tossed orb), then recall to it. Two-step commitment turns instant motion into a plan: throw now, cash it later. This is the throw-marker-then-recall energy at the core of many grid puzzles. Composes with mechanic-throw and genre-puzzle-platformer.
• Blink but it swaps you with the thing you target (mechanic-swap): aim at a crate, a guard, a projectile — and trade places. Repositioning becomes rearranging the board, not just yourself. Pairs with mechanic-possess and system-hazards-and-environment.

How instant motion changes telegraph math

This is the lever most designs botch. A [[system-telegraphs|telegraph]] is a contract: “danger will land here in N frames, move.” Teleport breaks the contract two ways —

• It shrinks the reaction window to near-zero on the player’s side. If a blink is instant + off-cooldown, the player can ignore telegraph timing and only read telegraph position. Windup-heavy bosses become trivial. Fix: give attacks that track the player at resolution, or hazards that fill an area rather than a point, so relocating still leaves a decision.
• It lets the player dodge the un-dodgeable, which is fun once. Repeatedly, it flattens the encounter. Gate it: cooldown ≥ the enemy’s telegraph period so you spend a blink and then must read the next attack honestly. See system-encounter-design and system-boss-design.

Design the enemy roster around the blink, not despite it — see system-counter-systems. An enemy that punishes the landing spot (a mine, a delayed AoE where you’ll appear) restores tension.

How it wires to Hayao

• The move is a state edit, not a physics event. Validate the destination (in range, unoccupied, legal surface / LoS satisfied), then set position in one step — no interpolated frames the sim can react to. Route any randomness (scatter, miss-chance) through the deterministic RNG so replays and the solver agree; see the invariants in process-composition.
• In turn-based/puzzle use, teleport is just a Move in a pure rules module — the destination-legality check is a pure predicate, and every level stays machine-proven winnable. Study the logic/view split in examples/sokoban/ before wiring puzzle blinks.
• For the feel (the vanish/appear pop, dust at origin + destination, a beat of hitstop), that’s cosmetic view work — pull the recipe from a particles / tween lab under sandboxes/, and keep every effect node out of world.hash(). Choreograph the two endpoints so the eye tracks the jump; see pattern-juice-choreography and the frontmatter’s verify-with.

Fails when…

• It’s instant AND cheap AND unconstrained — the “un-cornerable” fantasy becomes “the game plays itself”. No cost, no read, no tension. See antipattern-boring-optimal.
• The destination rules are opaque. If the player can’t predict where a blink is legal, every cast is a coin flip. This is antipattern-input-lie — the aim showed a spot, the game refused it silently. Always render the valid destination before commit.
• Enemies were tuned as if teleport didn’t exist, so telegraph-heavy attacks whiff and bosses trivialize. See antipattern-fake-choice — the “dodge” was never a choice.
• It’s a get-out-of-jail button with no window, so there’s no counterplay and PvP/boss fights stall. Add a tell, a cast time, or a punishable landing.
• It exists only to skip level geometry the designer forgot to gate — traversal collapses and the genre-metroidvania map loses its locks.

See also

• Movement kin: mechanic-dash, mechanic-portal (the destination persists — a placed thing, not a personal verb), mechanic-grapple, mechanic-double-jump.
• Combat framing: system-telegraphs, system-counter-systems, system-combat-model, mechanic-dodge-roll.
• Design process: process-the-twist (mine more “teleport but Y” seams), pattern-risk-reward, pattern-readability.