A small diversion

Chonk

A cat eats his way up a food chain. Nine lanes of traffic run across the board and everything in them is either smaller than him, in which case it is lunch, or bigger, in which case it wears red spikes and costs a life. He is weighed in kilograms — from a 350g kitten to the 900kg at which he cannot hold himself together, and when he reaches that he goes supernova and leaves a black hole exactly where he was standing. The hole is hungry, and it never stops eating.

Score0
Weight350 g
Eaten0
Lives9
Toward critical massNothing to fear yet

Chonk

Eat your way up the food chain. Anything without red spikes is lunch; anything with them costs a life. Get to 900kg and see what happens.

Moving. Drag him, or use the arrow keys — both work, and he answers immediately. He turns to face the way he is going, and a full-grown cat is slower than a kitten, but only by about a third. Eating. Anything at all without red spikes is safe to swallow, and everything is worth its weight: a crumb is 20g and a cow is 260kg, so the last stretch to critical mass is about finding something enormous rather than eating another hundred mice. Red spikes cost you a life, whether they belong to a wasp or to a goose that is simply too big — and a hazard becomes edible once you are 30% bigger than it, at which point the ring comes off. Power‑ups ride the lanes like everything else, glow, and are always safe: a heart, a shield that takes the next hit, longer whiskers, catnip that makes nothing dangerous for five seconds, cream, and yarn that drops the whole board to a third speed. Critical mass. Past 92% the meter goes red and says so; at 900kg he collapses, and what is left is a black hole. The hole pulls everything, including you, and every mouthful it swallows makes it a little wider. Crossing its edge ends the run. After a collapse the board stops dead and points at him — click or press a key when you have found him.