Time your jumps and keep your nerve — run, leap and dodge through a side-scrolling course. Free, in your browser.
Platform games come down to timing and nerve: a run, a jump measured in pixels, and a landing that either holds or does not. The form rewards precision under pressure more directly than almost any other genre, because the feedback is instant and there is nothing to hide behind.
This shelf is still being built. Cliko does not have a true platformer live yet — and rather than pad the page, I would rather say so. If you want the closest thing available today, the reflex games on the arcade shelf scratch a similar itch.
When a platformer does land it will appear here and in New Launches.
The platformer is the one genre where the character's feel is the game. Everything else — levels, enemies, art — is a frame around a hundred milliseconds of jump. Space Panic gave the arcade climbable levels in 1980 but no jump at all. Donkey Kong added the jump in 1981, and the important detail is that it was committed: once airborne, the arc was decided. Super Mario Bros. broke that open in 1985 by making the jump variable — hold the button longer, rise higher — turning a fixed arc into a negotiation. Every platformer since sits somewhere on that line, and where it sits is the design.
The engineering that decides whether one feels good is unglamorous and invisible on screen. Physics has to run on a fixed timestep, or difficulty changes with the player's frame rate. Collision has to be resolved one axis at a time — move horizontally, resolve, then vertically, resolve — or the character snags on seams between tiles meant to be a flat floor. There has to be coyote time: a few frames of grace after a ledge in which the jump still fires, because people press slightly late and a game punishing that reads as broken. And input buffering, so a jump pressed just before landing fires on landing instead of being swallowed. Get all four right and it reads as tight. Get one wrong and it reads as floaty, and no art will argue anyone out of it.
The browser makes all of that harder. It has to hold frame rate on a mid-range phone throttling to save battery, and be playable with thumbs on glass. A physical d-pad has an edge your thumb finds without looking; a glass button does not, so a finger drifts off it mid-run and the missed jump feels like the game's fault. A puzzle game forgives a dropped frame; a platformer cannot, because the dropped frame lands where the timing was.
So, plainly, and I would rather state it than dress it up: Cliko does not have a true platformer live yet. This shelf is still being built. A platformer I would put my name on is a larger job than anything else here — physics, level generation, camera, parallax and touch controls all have to be correct at once, and any one being wrong is felt in the first ten seconds. That work is on the bench, unfinished. Filling the page with things that jump a bit would be the wrong answer to an empty shelf.
What I can point you at today is the timing-and-nerve itch one shelf over in arcade, the closest relative here. Radium Snake is nearest — a single wrong commitment ends the run, and the space your own body occupies keeps growing. Bomb Diffuser is pure reaction under an escalating clock, and Block Drop is timing against a steepening curve. If you would rather sit at a table, the card games are the deepest shelf here. When a real platformer lands it will appear here and on New Launches.