The World's Hardest Game is a Flash maze game by Stephen Critoph, who published as Snubby Land. It went up on AddictingGames.com on 15 December 2007, and by 2018 it had been played more than 75 million times, according to its Wikipedia entry. You steer a red square through 30 levels, collect every yellow coin and reach the green zone without touching a blue dot. There are no lives. The only penalty is a death counter that never goes back to zero.
What happens between clicking Play and level 1
What runs on this page is the original 2007 file, not a remake. Browsers stopped running Flash years ago, so the .swf plays through Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator. It opens on a black screen with one Begin button and a line from the author: "I guarantee you it is harder than any game you have ever played, or ever will play."
After Begin comes a splash animation and a dark intro, and on our test close to half a minute passed before the main menu showed up. That wait is the weakest part of the whole thing, and you sit through it again every time the page reloads.
The menu says Version 1.0 and has four buttons: Play Game, Leader Board, More Games and Snubby Land. Music is credited to Snayk and sound effects to Flashkit.com. Play Game shows a one-screen rules page, then level 1 opens with a card that reads "You don't know what you're getting into."
The rules, as the game itself explains them
The rules page is short. You're the red square. Blue circles send you back, yellow circles are coins, and the green beacon finishes the level once every coin is picked up. Some levels have extra green beacons in the middle, and those act as checkpoints. Your score is how many times you died, so lower is better, and the game only lets you submit it after all 30 levels.
During play the top bar shows Menu on the left, the level out of 30 in the middle and Deaths on the right. You move with the arrow keys. A hit plays a punch sound and puts the square back at the start or at the last checkpoint you reached, with one more death on the counter.
How the first levels teach you the timing
Level 1 has no coins at all. It's a corridor between two green zones with four blue dots bouncing side to side, and it only asks one thing: move behind a dot, not in front of it. The dots run on a fixed loop, and you go when the loop allows it, not when you feel ready. That idea carries the rest of the game.
Level 2 adds the first coin, sitting in the middle of a room lined with two rows of six dots, top and bottom. From there the levels get longer, the dots get faster and the coins move into places you have to leave a safe zone to reach. Our notes on all 30 levels go through the early routes one by one if a level stops you.
Level 13, level 30 and the walls in between
Level 13 is built around a gap that opens and closes almost at the same moment. If you wait to see it open, you're already late, and the route that works is a climb in short hops with the move started a beat early. The level 13 walkthrough has the full route and the three mistakes that cause most resets there.
Level 30 is the finale: slow single dots mixed with clusters of five, and four coins in the top left, top right, bottom right and center. It's less about one hard gap and more about not losing focus over a long route. The level 30 guide splits it into separate trips.
Can you play the 2007 version on a phone?
The original was made for a keyboard and has no touch controls of its own. On touch screens our page puts a four-button d-pad under the game that sends arrow-key presses into it. That makes the game playable on a phone, but it's a workaround and not controls designed for the game.
A separate iOS port came out in 2009, published by AddictingGames, with three difficulty settings (Hard, Harder and Impossible) and swipe or tilt controls. That port isn't what runs here.
Where to go after the original
The game was followed by several sequels. World's Hardest Game 2 is the one we'd play next: it has 50 levels instead of 30, a level select, and it remembers your level and death count in the browser, so a long run doesn't have to happen in one sitting.
Two things people ask about the original
How many levels are there?
Thirty. The game won't accept your death count as a score until you've finished all of them.
Does dying cost you anything?
No. There are no lives and no game over. Each hit sends you back to the start or the last checkpoint and adds one to the Deaths counter.