Bean Tower

The pitch

About Bean Tower: Run, Jump and Combo Your Way to the Sky Bean Tower is an endless arcade climber. Run, jump and bounce off the walls to climb as high as you can before the scrolling tower leaves you behind. Speed is everything: the faster you run, the higher you jump, and chaining big jumps into combos earns huge points. Every 100 floors the tower adds a new twist, so each climb gets wilder the higher you go. Tower Twists Floor 100: slippery ice Floor 200: windows that can throw you out of the tower Floor 300: crumbling floors Floor 400: moving platforms Floor 500: conveyor belts Floor 600: springs and boost pads Floor 700: blinking platforms Floor 800: wind gusts Floor 900: icicles and snowballs Floor 1000: sticky goo walls and bumpers Floor 1100: low gravity Game Modes Tower: a new twist every 100 floors. Classic: the pure original rules. Daily Tower: the same tower for everyone today, with a daily twist. Ghost Race: race the ghost of your best run. Mutators: pick 1 of 3 rule-changing cards every 100 floors. Sprint 250: reach floor 250 as fast as you can. Hardcore: no power-ups, and one hit ends the run. Gauntlet: every twist by floor 100, for 1.5× score. Practice: start from any checkpoint you've reached. Characters Bean: the all-rounder. Imp (Fireproof): smashes icicles and snowballs. Bot (Magnet): pulls in nearby coins. Frog (Big Hops): jumps 5% higher. Penguin (Ice Skater): ice feels like a normal floor. Cat (Nine Lives): starts every run with a shield. Boo (Featherweight): floatier jumps. Golden Bean (Midas): coins are worth 25% more. Power-ups Shield, Double Jump, Slow Clock, Rocket and Combo Freeze. Unlocks Earn coins and diamonds, level up, complete daily and weekly missions, fill your sticker album and chase achievements. Spend them on characters, 5 tower themes (Frost Tower, Ember Keep, Neon Spire, Candy Castle, Jungle Temple), 9 hats, 9 trails, 6 landing effects, 5 music styles and upgrades, then climb the leaderboard.

Controls & how it runs

How to Play Bean Tower: Climb, Combo, Survive Climb as high as you can. Soon after you start, the tower begins to scroll up, and every 30 seconds it speeds up (HURRY UP!). Fall off the bottom of the screen and the run ends. Run before you jump: the faster you run, the higher you jump. Walls bounce you back at full speed, so use them to turn without slowing down. Combos: jump two or more floors at a time, again and again within 3 seconds. The longer the combo, the bigger the bonus. Grab coins, diamonds and power-up bubbles on the way, and spend them in the shop between runs. Controls Keyboard: Left/Right arrows or A/D to run; Space, Up or W to jump; Esc or P to pause. Touch: hold the arrow buttons at the bottom left to run (or anywhere on the left half of the screen); tap the jump button or anywhere on the right half to jump. Gamepad: d-pad or left stick to run; A or d-pad up to jump; Start to pause.

Getting a run going takes exactly one press: Press start, up top, and the game boots inside this page — nothing downloads in the background and no form wants your details before the first jump. The cabinet is drawn for a flexible screen and listens to mouse, keyboard or touch, whichever the game prefers. It reshapes itself for tall and wide screens alike, so phone, tablet and desktop all get the full picture. Given a fullscreen button, use it — scores look better at full size, that's just science.

Pro tips for arcade cabinets

• Treat your first run as a scouting mission. Arcade cabinets hide their cruelty in the second minute, not the first — learn where the difficulty spikes before you start chasing numbers.
• Small scores compound. Grab the easy pickups on every pass instead of gambling the whole run on one heroic line; heroes respawn, banked points don't evaporate.
• Watch the edges of the screen. In classic arcade design the next problem almost always enters from somewhere you weren't looking — build the habit of scanning the borders.

Bean Tower — quick-fire questions

Does Bean Tower cost anything to play?

Not a token. The cabinet is free from the first run to the five-hundredth — no wallet, no sign-up, no toll booth hiding three levels in. The adverts around the page are what keep the floor's lights on.

What sort of game is Bean Tower?

It stands on our Arcade row — that's the family it plays most like. The pitch above is the publisher's own rundown of what it throws at you and what it hands back.

Can I play Bean Tower on my phone?

Happily, yes. It runs inside the browser on phones and tablets the same way it does on a computer. It reshapes itself for tall and wide screens alike, so phone, tablet and desktop all get the full picture.

Do I need to install anything first?

Nothing whatsoever. Bean Tower is an HTML5 game: hit the start button and it boots on this page, and shutting the tab sweeps the cabinet clean behind you.

Before you wander off

Personal best banked, or still chasing it? Either way the full Arcade row is powered on and waiting — The main floor: 415 cabinets of pure arcade stock — the quick, the loud and the gloriously unfair. If it beeps, flashes and dares you to beat a number, it lives on this row.