Short Life

Short Life is a platformer with a gimmick that changes how you play every level in it: your character is a collection of body parts, and the hazards are arranged to take them off you. It runs in the browser — no download, no account, no install.

The controls are the arrow keys, and the goal is the finish line. On paper that is a very ordinary game. In practice, the level design is a long list of things that maim — spinning blades, spikes, crushers, mines — and your character can survive losing an arm, a leg, or most of a head. Every level becomes an optimisation problem: you can finish it, or you can finish it intact.

The humour is the point. The deaths are exaggerated, the character never stops being absurd, and the game never asks you to take any of it seriously. It is the kind of design that makes failure funny instead of frustrating, which matters a lot in a game where failure is the default outcome for the first few attempts.

Levels are short and restarts are immediate, so the loop is: see the trap, die to the trap, learn the trap, move on. There is no progression system beyond getting further.

It is a landscape game with readable art, and the touch controls are workable on a phone even though the keyboard is the intended way to play.

On cool games spot this page is the index entry: cover, description, and search terms. The game itself is a licensed GameDistribution build that loads in an iframe on Play, so nothing is bundled into the site. It is filed under action, so it appears alongside the rest of the quick-session games in the catalog.

Press Play and find out.