A maze cut out of card, and four ghosts who want you gone
Every wall here is a strip of paper laid on the sheet, which is why they cast a shadow to one side. The dots are punched holes. When you clear one it doesn’t vanish so much as get picked up, and the whole board slowly empties out from wherever you started.
There are 165 of them and four bigger ones in the corners. Those are the pellets that turn the tables for a few seconds.
how it actually plays
You hold a direction rather than tapping it. Steering happens at junctions, so pressing left halfway down a corridor queues the turn and it fires the moment a left is available. That queue is the whole skill of the game once the ghosts get quick.
the four of them
Chaser
Heads straight for you the whole time. Predictable, and the reason you never stand still.
Cutter
Aims four squares ahead of where you’re going. Turn early and it commits to empty corridor.
Drifter
Picks a direction at junctions without much thought. Impossible to read, which is its own problem.
Corner
Patrols the bottom left and only chases when you come close. Ignore it until you can’t.
the pellets
Eat a corner pellet and all four go pale and turn around. You get about six seconds to catch them, and each one caught is worth double the last, so the run of four is the biggest single haul on the board. They come back from the middle after a short wait.
clearing the sheet
Take every dot and the board is recut with the ghosts moving faster. Nothing else changes. There’s no fruit, no bonus level, no cut scene, just the same maze getting harder to survive in until you run out of the three lives across the top.
if the ghosts are too quick
There’s a button for that. It drops their speed permanently for the session and leaves your scoring alone, which is the setting to use if you’re playing this on a phone and steering with the pad in the corner.
the other games on paper
This sits alongside a handful that run properly rather than just looking the part. google snake game is the closest relative, with the same grid movement and a longer body to trip over.
For something with a firing button, space invaders google drops a formation down the screen at you and google block breaker gives you a paddle and twenty word-labelled bricks to knock apart.
And if you’d rather be the one swarming, zerg rush flips it round and sends a small army at the page while you click them off.