Ninety-nine seconds, two fighters, one sheet of white paper. Play it on one keyboard with someone next to you, online against a friend with a room code, or on your own against the computer.
PLAYThis one needs a keyboard. There are no touch controls, so a phone cannot run it — not even against the computer. Every other game here works with a finger; this one does not, and we would rather say so than let you find out after picking a fighter.
Seven settings, from 轻松 to 屌炸天. All of them play with the keyboard, which is meant literally rather than as a figure of speech: the script presses the same ten keys the second player presses, one frame before the game reads them, so the six-frame input buffer, the rising edges, the mana and the guard lock all apply to it exactly as they apply to you. It does not read your inputs, and it does not have more health than what you picked for it.
What separates the seven is not damage and not health — those make a fight longer rather than harder, and you would notice. It is how late it sees what you did, how often it reconsiders, how often it is simply wrong, how much it blocks, how much of that it turns away outright instead, whether it knows the end of your move is its turn, whether it keeps to the range its own attacks reach, whether it notices a thrown thing at all, and whether it saves the ultimate for something. The reaction delay is a real delay: it reads the fight out of a ring of past frames, so on 轻松 it is answering what you were doing half a second ago, and changing your mind halfway through beats it.
屌炸天 is meant to beat you. It reads the frame that is on screen, with no delay at all, and it parries: a guard raised in the last three frames before a hit turns the hit away completely, through an ultimate as readily as through a jab, and leaves you stunned where you stand. Every attack you throw at it becomes its turn. It is superhuman and that is the point of it being last on the list — but everything it reads is drawn where you can see it too, and it is still pressing the same ten keys.
There are two ways in. Random puts you against whoever else is waiting. Create room gives you a four-letter code — send it to a friend, they type it in, and you are in the same match. Nothing to sign up for and nothing installed on either end.
It uses rollback, which is the netcode fighting games use for a reason: it never waits for the other machine. Your character moves on the frame you press the button no matter how far away the other player is, and the game quietly corrects their position when their input actually arrives. What you feel is your own inputs landing instantly; what you occasionally see is the other fighter shifting a few pixels.
It tries to connect the two computers directly. If the network will not allow that — school wifi often will not — it falls back to passing the inputs through our server, which is slower but still a game. The corner of the screen tells you which one you got and what the delay is.
A round is ninety-nine seconds long. Whoever is still standing wins it, and if the clock runs out first the one with more health takes it — dead level is a draw and nobody scores. First to two rounds takes the match.
Everything on screen is hand-drawn: the fighters are animated frame by frame, the ground is one pencil line across a white page, and the interface is chalk handwriting. There is no colour in it except the health bars, because on paper a red bar is the one thing you want to find instantly.
Three places to fight — a drawn horizon, a blank sheet of paper, and a theatre with red curtains and a wooden stage — and which one you get is decided when the match starts.
It has sound now, for two fighters. 拉屎鸽子 and 鱼夜杀人狂 were given voices by a friend of the artist: their moves, three different ways of being hurt each, and for the fish the sound of its slashes landing and of it swimming under the paper. Nobody else has been recorded yet. The ♪ switch under the fullscreen button in the top corner turns all of it off, and remembers that you did.
| 拉屎鸽子 Shit Pigeon | 1000 health, quick, and happiest at a distance. Pecks in a three-hit string, and everything else it does it does to the floor in front of you — level shots, a fan of three from above, and a slick trail it leaves behind while sliding. |
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| 大锅 The Pot | 1250 health, the slowest thing here and the one that gets least far off the ground. Throws its own lid as a boomerang that hits going out and coming back, coughs up chilli, cheese or ice at random, and its ultimate swallows you whole and cooks you — the single hardest hit in the game, and untouchable while it works. |
| 鱼夜杀人狂 Night Fish | 750 health, the fastest and the most fragile. A three-hit slash string, a tongue that hooks you and drags you in, and a teleport slash you can hold — let go early for a quick one, hold it a second and a half for more than twice the damage. The only one drawn in colour. |
| 傻狗 Dumb Dog | 950 health. Does the least damage of anyone and makes up for it by never letting you move properly: slows, a stun, and two buried traps at a time that put you on the floor. Its arc of piss is held rather than pressed — keep the key down and it keeps coming, until you let go, run out of mana or get hit. It can bite while walking, which nobody else can. |
| 电鳗妄人 Mad Man | 900 health, and an eel lying across a pair of human legs. It does not chase you — it decides where you are allowed to stand. A live wire along the ground, a crawl underneath one, a wheel it rides upward that cannot be touched most of the way, and a ring of arcs that keeps electrocuting whatever is inside it. Its ultimate is a three-second storm of real lightning at random places, each strike warned a fifth of a second before it lands — which means it can be walked out of. |
| 火轮 Hot Wheel | 1050 health, and the fastest thing here by a long way — nearly three times the pot. Both meters fill quicker than anyone else's and almost nothing it throws is worth much: its jab is eight, held down for as long as you keep the button. What it is built around is the ultimate, and the roll along the ground that crosses the whole stage. |
| 爱哭鼠 Cry Baby | 850 health, the smallest mana pool here, and the weakest thing on the list right up until it is not. It carries a pistol: a quick round that costs almost nothing, and a heavier one that comes apart into a spread. Both kick it backwards when it fires, which is the price of outranging everybody and also the only way it gets off a wall without paying for a roll. It throws walnuts as well — one lobbed over the top of you, and one it carries forward and comes down on head first. Below a third of its health it turns red, and from then on everything it does lands for half again and it moves a quarter faster. Finish it. Do not leave it on a sliver. |
| P1 | A D to move, W jump, S drop, F light, G heavy, H skill, T ultimate, R guard, E roll |
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| P2 | Arrow keys, 1 light, 2 heavy, 3 skill, 0 ultimate, / guard, . roll |
| Guard | Held, not pressed. A fifth of the damage, but you cannot move or attack behind it, and it stops neither a throw nor an ultimate. Raise it in the last three frames before a hit and you parry instead: nothing lands, and whoever swung is left standing there. |
| Roll | Ten mana. Fourteen frames, and the first seven of them cannot be touched — which is how you get out of the things a guard does not stop. |
| Skills | Hold a direction and press skill — each direction is a different move, and no direction is a fifth one. |
| In a round | Esc goes back — to the fighters, or to the difficulty list if you were playing the computer. R starts the match again, and only once it is over: it used to listen on every frame, and since R is also P1's guard key, putting your hands up restarted the match. |
All of it can be rebound from the home screen, including a preset for two people sharing a laptop, and the bindings are remembered in your own browser. Mana refills at three a second and only starts two seconds after you last spent any, so skills are a resource rather than a button. The ultimate meter is the exception to starting again: it carries from one round of a best-of-three into the next, so saving it is worth something.