Fork

Arcade · plays in your browser, no download

A sausage, a fork and a row of plates. Hold to wind the fork up, let go, and the sausage has to come down on the next plate flat — land it on its nose and it rolls straight off.

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Where it comes from

Flicking food through the air with one button is one of those small genres that keeps turning up near the top of the YouTube Playables list, usually as a score counter that never ends. Here the plates are a course with a beginning and an end instead, starting on the barbecue and finishing in a bread bun.

How to play

The sausage must land on the next plate — and land flat. Not flat, and it rolls off.
It always spins at the same speed, so how it lands depends only on how long it stays up. One power, two things to get right.
Brick walls are in the way and awnings are overhead: there is a corridor, and the shot has to go through it.
Dead flat is a SIZZLE, and it is worth more. Plates you skip over count too.
Three misses a level. Each one puts you back on the last plate you left, not back to the start.
The last one is the bun: get there and the level is yours.

What makes this one different

One bar has to do two jobs at once. It decides how far the sausage goes and, because the spin never changes speed, how long it stays up — which is the same thing as the angle it comes down at. Reach the plate with half a turn too many and it lands on its nose and rolls off, so the right shot is the one where both agree.

No level is handed out on trust. Each plate is put down where a shot that is known to work actually lands, and the walls and the awnings are only placed afterwards, where that shot does not pass. Then the test replays every level from the beginning, hunting for the power with the same hold-and-release a player has, and it refuses a jump whose window is a single notch of the bar.

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