Tropes

You know these. Collect 100 coins. The ice level. The escort mission. The floor is lava. Each one plays straight for about thirty seconds, and then it breaks.

The coins unionize. The lava falls in love with you. You win a fight and the game cuts to the slime's house, where his wife and kids are not happy to see him. The final boss takes a phone call mid-fight, gets fired, picks up his last paycheck, says sorry for being a jerk and walks out.

Over a dozen tropes, over fifty twists. Every trope has three or four ways to break. Some are picked at random each run. Some only happen if you do something first, like standing still on the ice or letting the lava catch you twice. The TWISTS screen keeps what you have found and hints at the rest.

A run is a short tutorial, six tropes and a final boss built out of whatever the run picked up. Six to nine minutes. Every trope you clear leaves a mutation that rides along into the next one.

The daily cartridge is the same run for everybody that day, with a board for the fastest clean win. Fewer deaths breaks a tie. Random cartridges are just yours. Beat it once and the full cartridge opens: all fifteen tropes and the boss.

Controls

- Move: arrow keys or A / D

- Jump: Space, Z, X or K

- Pause: P or Esc. Mute: M

- Phone: on-screen left, right and jump

- Gamepads work

Free in the browser, on a phone or a desk. No ads, no account, nothing to install.

OPTIONS has switches for screen flashes and screen shake. Flashes are capped at two a second either way. Assist mode gives you endless lives; assisted runs stay off the daily board.

How AI was used. The code was written with Claude. The sprites, the font and the music are drawn and synthesized by that same code, and Claude wrote most of the lines. The idea is mine, and so are some of the twists: the fired boss, the slime's home life, the door that slams you.

One HTML file. Runs offline once it loads, except the daily board.

Comments are on. Tell me which twist got you first.

TROPES v3