A mobile game for phones, made by a small independent team
A cheeky slab of a hero, a new challenge every day, and runs short enough to finish before your stop.
He is a rack of ribs with legs, an opinion and somewhere urgent to be. That is the whole pitch, and we have never found a reason to complicate it. You tap, he moves, something goes wrong in a funny way, and you try again because the next run is twelve seconds away.
The game around him is built for the gap in your day rather than the evening you do not have. A run is short on purpose. The controls are one thumb on purpose, so it works standing up, holding a coffee, or pretending to listen in a meeting. Nothing has to be read, nothing has to be learned, and nobody has to watch a tutorial about a sauce economy.
Underneath that there is more than you would guess from the first minute: levels that change what the rules are rather than just the wallpaper, a daily challenge everybody plays at the same time, rewards that actually change how Mr Ribs looks and moves, and a leaderboard where the names near the top are people who worked out something you have not yet.
Tap to jump, hold to slide, that is the manual. You will be playing properly inside ten seconds and you will not have read a word of instructions.
One fixed run, same for every player, resets every day. It is the same thirty seconds for you as for the person at the top of the board, which is what makes beating them mean anything.
New levels do not just repaint the kitchen. They add things that chase, floors that tilt, and at least one hazard we are still slightly sorry about.
Collect through play and Mr Ribs wears it: hats, sauces, smug little victory animations. No reward in this game is an invisible statistic.
Global boards and friend boards, both reset on a season so a good week is never locked out by somebody's old record from months ago.
Screens from the game and the character who refuses to sit still in any of them.
Four things live in the app. All of them open from the same home screen.
One run, same layout for every player, new one every day.
The main course: chapters that unlock as you clear them.
Everything Mr Ribs can wear, earn or wave about.
Global and friends-only boards that reset each season.
The game is free to play. Anything you can buy is cosmetic and never needed to finish a level or place on a board.
I open it in the queue at the shop and I have usually finished the daily by the time I am paying. That is exactly the amount of game I wanted.
My nephew showed me and now we send each other screenshots of the friends board. He is winning. I am working on it.
It never nags me. I play it when I feel like it, the hat I unlocked is still there when I come back a week later.
Most people have been burned by a free game at least once: the run that stops for an advert at the worst moment, the timer that asks you to come back in four hours, the thing you cannot finish unless you pay. We wrote Mr Ribs with a short list of rules against all of that.
That shapes the design more than it sounds like it would. If you cannot sell power, the levels have to be good enough that people play them anyway, and the rewards have to be the sort of thing you want because it looks ridiculous on a walking rack of ribs, not because it buys you a win.
The team behind him is small, which is why the character talks to you in menus and why there is a hazard in chapter three that somebody clearly built as a joke and then refused to remove. If you want to know what is coming next, or you are a creator, a partner or simply someone with strong feelings about barbecue, the form below reaches an actual person on the team.
Press, creators, playtest volunteers, partnership ideas or a question about the game — send it here and a human on the team reads it.
Thanks — it has landed with the team and someone will get in touch shortly. Mr Ribs says hello, probably while running away from something.