Grow

Arcade · plays in your browser, no download

You run and never stop. Green gates add runners to the column behind you, red ones take them away — and a wall only lets through a column tall enough.

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Where it comes from

The runner that grows, which took over the phones around 2021: a line of games where you pick up numbers while you run and the number is your own body. The oldest version of the idea is a parade — the more of you there are, the more you can carry through — and the newest is a crowd that has to be tall enough to clear a wall.

How to play

You run by yourself and never stop. All you choose is which of the two gates to go through.
Touch the top or bottom half of the screen to move up or down a lane. On a keyboard, the up and down arrows.
A green gate adds to your height, a red one takes away. The number on it says how much.
Walls block the way. Taller than the wall and you smash straight through it; shorter and the run ends there.
Every course is checked before it is handed out: taking the better gate every time always gets you tall enough for every wall.
More stars means less room for mistakes, not more speed. At five the wall is exactly as tall as a perfect run, so one wrong gate is enough to stop you.

What makes this one different

You run forward on your own and you never stop. The only choice is which gate to take: a green one adds to the column of runners behind you, a red one takes away. Walls ahead are a certain height, and a column shorter than the wall is a column that ends there — so the sums are not points, they are whether you are still running.

The runners are not a number drawn on screen: they are a column you can count, and each wall carries the height it will let through. That is deliberate — you should be able to see, a second before the wall, whether you make it. The five tracks are laid out by hand and each one is winnable without luck: the prova measures it.

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