Pixel Breach

A bug got loose on this very page, and it keeps switching the game. A short film tells how: it breaks out of the Webmaster’s jar and dives into the website, and the Webmaster hands our stickman his own pink headband. Then it starts right here: our stickman, pink headband and all, chases it across these lines of text (mind the web crawler), and the page is where most of the chase happens. Nine times a round the bug turns it into another kind of website, each with its own trick: a shop where every Add to cart button launches him up, search results where it hides as a word until you press Ctrl+F, a feed that keeps scrolling, an encyclopedia whose blue links are portals, a 404 whose words drop out under his feet, a group chat where every new message pushes the rest up, a news page it zooms in and out, the page’s own code full of errors that zap him, and a black page whose rules it rewrites while you chase it (the floor is lava, gravity is zero, words are ice). In between it switches to a game: a rooftop run past pop-ups and rolling cookies, a show-jumping course on a stick horse (win it, and from then on he rides it on the websites), an army of stickmen that grows at every gate until it mows down the bug’s horde, and a pixel fortress to break with a ball and a plank. In the next round: a tower climb, a witch’s cabin in the Woodforest, where he steals her broom while she stirs her soup and flies it after the bug, a bug hunt inside a browser and a pit he stacks his way out of. Then a motorbike ride over 404 pits into the sunset, the bug’s whole family in space and a race down a neon highway. At the end of each round the bug builds itself a giant body out of everything it ate off the pages, and he takes it apart. It is all one world, and it never stops: from one page he leaps straight onto the next, and from the page straight back into the game. Then it all starts again, faster.

The bug trolls you all the way: gravity switches off, the moon takes over, the floor runs away. In the fortress his patience is short, and when it runs out he throws the plank. His superpower fits a web studio: Ctrl+Z. Instead of losing a life he goes three seconds back (press Ctrl+Z yourself, or tap ↶ on a phone), and the pixels he collects charge it up again. Your best score stays on this device.