A party room cut out of paper: apricot walls, bunting across the top, terracotta tiles below. One balloon is still up, and the floor would very much like it not to be. Tap anywhere to bat it back up. The cream skirting board is the line, and touching it ends the run.
Any tap, anywhere, bats the balloon back up — but only on the way down, so the number on screen is a count of real keep-ups and not of how fast you can tap. Where you tap steers it: dead underneath kills its drift, off to one side pushes it the other way.
Gravity creeps up and the balloon shrinks. At ten keep-ups a draught from the window starts nudging it sideways. At twenty-five a ceiling fan blade begins swinging across the room, and a hit costs you height rather than the run. At forty-five a second balloon joins, and both have to stay up.
Play it now, free, in your browser
No ads. Not a banner, not a pop-up, not a “watch a video to carry on”. Your run is never interrupted. No download, no account, nothing to install, and once you have opened it once with a connection it plays with no connection at all — on a plane, in a lift, anywhere with no signal.
It runs in any modern browser on a phone, a tablet or a desktop. On a keyboard, Space bats and the left and right arrows bat and steer.
Questions, ideas, or something not working? Write to fawaz_ahmed@live.com.
The same balloon, the same tap, a rooftop at golden hour with kites drifting past. There the line you must not touch is the parapet.
A stick figure doodled in the margin of your exercise book runs for it, over erasers and stacks of books.