Plonky

Plonky is a platformer that refuses to give you a clean jump. The hero has a loose, floppy body that keeps shifting its weight, so a hop that looks simple can end in a slip off the edge, an awkward roll or a face-first landing on a spike. It is hard to control on purpose, and once you accept that, the challenge becomes reading how the body is going to move rather than expecting it to obey.

More than sixty levels are packed with saws, spikes, crushers and moving surfaces. Because every impact is calculated in real time, no two failed attempts play out quite the same, and each crash teaches you something: how fast a blade swings, how far the body bounces off a wall, where the safe footing really sits on a moving platform. Retrying is immediate, which suits a game where most of the learning comes from falling over.

Jumping is only part of it. Many levels are small mechanical puzzles. You shove heavy stone blocks into place to make a step, drag wooden crates across spike pits to build a walkway, ride wheeled carts over gaps, pull levers to lift gates, and use ropes and counterweights to cross pits too wide to jump. Working out which object goes where is the first problem; getting the wobbly hero to actually carry out the plan is the second.

The controls stay minimal: move left and right, jump, and climb down. Plonky runs on desktop computers as well as phones and tablets, where the same actions sit on on-screen buttons, so a level can be picked up anywhere and finished in a few minutes.