Canabalt

You ran 104m before just barely stumbling out of the first hallway.

I'm not sure where I first encountered the endless runner genre, or one of its champions, Canabalt. It may have been when I had an iPod Touch and wanted something to do on it, or maybe it was the talk of the town on some Internet forum - have you played this Flash game, maybe.

Once you're aware of it and give it a few minutes of your time, you tend not to forget it, even with a weird name. Canabalt. The one with the rooftops, yeah, I know it.

Stretch your legs, because we're about to go for quite the run.

Fun Times

Today's Canabalt offerings - and maybe the originals, I can't think that far back - have multiple modes all based around the core gameplay of "Run. Run forever."

You may not know of the menu, but if you've only played Canabalt for a minute you'll know of that grey 2D cityscape, a mostly empty office, and a figure hurtling through the window and crashing out onto the rooftops below, and they don't stop running.

Boxes may hinder your progress by dropping your speed, but everything else is window dressing and worldbuilding. Something is happening to this city, something you need to run from, and fast.

Luckily, Canabalt takes care of the running for you. It's the timely jumping - over boxes, off roofs, through windows - that you've got to worry about. Controller or keyboard, a quick jab of a button for a bunny hop, a long press for a herculean long jump.

There's only one goal, and one piece of backing music to get you into the zone. You're going to run out of steam and/or into a wall, but the restarts are swift, the music doesn't skip a beat and the city resets and you're flying through an office window once more.

The landscape is procedurally generated, so don't bother trying to remember what's coming up next. It also comes at you so quickly that you can't really look at an obstacle, then back to your runner to time a jump. Before long, you'll just be seeing something, somewhere on the screen, and reacting as best you can, and the better you are, the faster and more challenging it all becomes.

There aren't a lot of things to change about Canabalt's gameplay, but if you're looking for another challenge, you can try some alternative modes. One removes the buildings so that you are relying on flocks of pigeons to guide you to a safe place to run. Another periodically drops warheads onto the rooftops, and one touch will end your run in an instant, turning you 'into a fine mist'.

I don't know what I was doing in this one. That building is crumbling, so the platform will sink lower and lower down the screen before disappearing entirely. Hopefully, you'll have left it by then, hurling yourself through the air towards the next rooftop. Where it is in this image, I don't know.

Other alternative modes clog the rooftops up with boxes, but the one I hate the most is the option to play with lots of windows because it means precise jumps into office blocks, as well as out of them.

It is incredibly easy to miss a window on this mode; a single pixel too high and you're done for. I suppose it'll serve as great practice for timing your jumps, though, should you want to master Canabalt.

With little more to say, I can finish by telling you that this Steam release, and probably many other ports, has a 3D graphics option, not for those of you who want to wear your red/blue glasses, but for those that want the graphics to pop out, just a little.

It doesn't look bad, but to me, it isn't quite Canabalt. Yeah, it uses the same minimal colour palette and shows me the same city on the brink of utter collapse, but it's lost a little charm compared to the 2D graphics.

Maybe it's just me, though. It's an option for those that want it.

Final Word

Canabalt is one of those time sinks where it is so easy to say "Just one more go, I get it now." because it is as simple as pressing one button, again and again. When you fail at doing that, you hit retry and are back in before you know it.

I've not played it religiously in search of high scores, but I did find myself trying to beat my old records, some of which were hardly records at all. It's all set up to be so easy. Here's your goal, go get it. Sure, I've got five, ten, fifteen minutes to kill.

You don't get much with endless runners, but in the right environment, they absolutely shine. Simple, straightforward, and with a style of its own, Canabalt is worth any amount of time you give it, on whatever platform you find it on.

Fun Facts

The Experimental Gameplay Project challenged developers to make a game for the theme "Bare Minimum", and Canabalt was born.

Canabalt, developed by Adam Saltsman, first released in 2009.

Version played: PC, 2015.

Others, unknown.