On a Roll

A cat has decided the day needs ruining, and the toilet roll is how he intends to do it. Somewhere down the paper is one square carrying the symbol you were shown, and the job is to unspool the roll and stop dead on that square before you go tearing past it. Hold to spin, tap to build speed, hold again to stop — and mind what else is buried in the paper, because a skull ends the run outright however many lives you have left.

The symbol. The one you are hunting sits in the corner of the play area and changes every level. The control. Press and hold and the roll spins, building speed the longer you hold it; let go and it coasts down on its own. A quick tap adds speed too, so mashing gets it moving fast — and pressing and holding while it is already moving is the brake. Tap to go faster, hold to stop; that never changes, so the brake still works in the middle of a mash. Landing. The gold box is the same size at every level, but the paper squares shrink as you go — level one is a true square more than three times the height of the box, and by the late levels it is barely taller than it. The square has to cover the box completely. Overshooting does not stop the roll dead: it keeps coasting, about three times faster than an ordinary landing, and the miss lands when it finally settles. What is in the paper. Everything has to be stopped on to count — running over it does nothing. A clock is a few seconds back and a pink heart is a life; a cracked heart costs a life, a broken clock costs seven seconds, a mushroom sets him tripping for six seconds, and the silver “?” is a coin flip between twelve seconds and two lives. A skull ends the run on the spot. Scoring. A hundred points a level multiplied by how deep you are, plus five for every second still on the clock, so a fast clear is worth far more than a cautious one.