Boxscape

Drag a wooden frame around the screen to keep a bouncing ball inside it. The ball never slows down, the frame never stops splintering, and the forest keeps dropping things worth catching on the way past. The only question is how long you can hold on. THREE RULES, ONE THUMB • Press and hold anywhere and the whole frame follows your thumb. It keeps the offset it had when you touched down, so it never jumps under your finger. • Points come from what the ball catches. The wood keeps the ball in play so there is time to catch things; it does not pay you for the bounce. • Let it out and it is over. The ball only has to find one opening. THE FRAME IS RUNNING OUT Every side starts a quarter open, and the gaps widen the whole way through a run until 98% of each side is gone and the four corners are all that is left. The corners never decay, so there is always something to bounce off. How fast that happens is not a menu setting: the game keeps a rating for how well you play and serves the collapse to match it, from three minutes for a player finding their feet down to ninety seconds for one at the top. A golden orb drifts through now and then and grows some of your wood back. You cannot touch it yourself. Only the ball can, which means steering the whole frame to put the ball on a collision course, usually with a wide-open side pointed somewhere you would rather it was not. THINGS WORTH STEERING INTO • Nuts and cones fall from the top, +1 each. • Leaves and seeds cross on the wind in gusts of four to ten, +2 each. • Berries swell where they stand: +1 the moment they sprout, +5 once ripe. Nothing is ever taken off you. A nut that lands or a leaf that blows past costs you the catch and nothing else. CATCH THE SAME THING TWICE Take the same item twice in a row and a streak starts: the multiplier doubles with every one that follows, up to 32x, and a chime marks it running. Break the run with something else and it goes back to one. Late in a game, when the frame is mostly holes, a long chain is worth more than the minute of survival it cost you. SIX PLACES TO LOSE IN Hand-painted backdrops — old-growth forest, autumn woods, moonlit pines, a snowbound cabin, a desert canyon and a crystal cave — each with its own set of things falling through it, and each one drawn for the place it belongs to. Playing at all earns the levels that open the later ones. 118 TROPHIES AND THREE BOARDS Trophies arrive mid-run on a card that flies past without stopping the game. Awards is what you hold, one card each; the Gallery is the whole catalogue, with the ones you have not won dimmed rather than hidden, so you can see what the game wants from you. Three global boards rank the longest run, the biggest haul and the fullest shelf. NO ACCOUNT, NO ADS, NO TRACKING There is nothing to log into and nothing to sign up for. The game gives you a made-up name for the leaderboards — nobody asks for yours — and everything else, from your trophies to the backdrop you picked, stays on your phone.