The cursor will change and turn red when you're close enough to dash into an enemy, but I think I've had a few times where I should've hit and I didn't. I'll look into it.
Viewing post in Rising Smoke jam comments
Oh, the whole thing about the game is your dash goes less distance the more you dash, then resets when you dash into a monster. So if you have dashed a bunch of times you have to be right next to the enemy for the cursor to go red.
The cursor is based off the range of the distance of your current dash