Games like Level Devil: troll platformers in the browser

What a troll platformer is

A troll platformer looks like an easy platform game and then cheats. The floor you are walking on disappears, spikes rise out of flat ground, a door slides away as you reach it, a block falls from a ceiling that had no block in it. Level Devil, by Unept, made the formula famous: short single-screen levels, a stick figure, an exit door, and a surprise in every room. It works because the punishment is tiny. You respawn at once, the level is ten seconds long, and the second time through you know where the trap is. The game is not asking for reflexes. It is asking you to remember a joke.

The idea is older than it looks. Syobon Action, the 2007 fan game usually called Cat Mario, put invisible blocks and falling clouds into a Mario level. I Wanna Be the Guy turned apples that fall upwards into a genre. Trap Adventure 2 made the same gag work on phones. What Level Devil added was pace and polish: no loading, no lives, no menu between deaths, and traps that are funny rather than cruel.

Trustfall, a troll platformer built for TabSpawn

Trustfall is this site's take on the idea, free and playable in a browser tab with nothing to install. You walk a small green spawnling to a door through 36 levels in six worlds, and the level lies in a new way each time: the floor is a promise it does not keep, the door runs, gravity flips, the lights go out, lava rises, and in the last world the game shows a fake Level Complete card and a fake pause screen while the traps keep moving.

Three things make it easier to laugh at than to rage at. Respawns are instant. A faint ghost replays your last attempt, so you can see the step that killed you, and a marker stays at the spot. And an imp hovers by the door with a comment for every death, which is less annoying than it sounds because it is usually right. Fewer deaths earn more stars and points, and the campaign total goes to a public Top 10. Every level was checked by a solver that plays it with the traps live, so none of them is impossible, only unfair in a way you can learn.

Trustfall 2: when the rules lie instead of the floor

Once you expect the floor to vanish, a vanishing floor stops being a joke. Trustfall 2 moves the lie somewhere else: into the rules every game has taught you. A key locks the door it should open. Coins make you too heavy to jump. A button marked DO NOT PRESS is telling the truth in one world and bluffing in the next. The loading bar is the bridge, the deaths counter falls out of the corner of the screen, and one world remembers what you did on the attempt before and uses it against you, or lets you climb on it.

It has 40 levels in eight worlds, the same instant respawns and ghost replays, and an imp that lies about half of what it says and gives itself away when it does. A death album collects every different way you have died, so the game rewards not dying and dying in new ways at once, and the last level asks one question whose answer picks the ending.

How to get better at troll platformers

• Assume the obvious path is the trap. If the door is three steps away and nothing has happened, something is about to.
• Hop, don't jump. A short tap clears most gaps and keeps you under the block that is about to appear.
• Walk slowly into new ground. Many traps trigger on a line you cross; slow steps let you see them before you are committed.
• Use the ghost. In Trustfall the replay of your last life shows exactly where you were when the floor went, which is usually earlier than you think.
• Trust messages less than floors. A card that says Level Complete while you are still standing in the level is part of the level.
• When a level says it has no traps, it might be telling the truth. Paranoia is also a trap.

Other TabSpawn games for a short break

If you want the same quick-death, quick-retry rhythm without the lying, Stackrise is a one-tap stacker where a run lasts a minute, Outline is a puzzle with three drops of room for error per level, and Bowfall is a ragdoll archer campaign where the enemies are honest about wanting you dead.

Questions