Between mobile phones and handheld consoles from the Game Boy to the Nintendo Switch, most of us have played games on small screens. Heck, I’ve featured incredibly small games on this site before. But Lilli, by Eric V. Bailey, might be the tiniest damn game I’ve ever played. It’s 64 by 64 pixels big, and gosh, it’s frustrating.
The goal of Lilli is simple: get to the end of the level by leaping from platform to platform and avoiding enemies along the way. But the game’s tiny scale and keyboard-only controls make it really hard to do even the most basic of things. When I first started playing, it took me dozens of attempts to even jump from the first platform to the second. And, look, if I have to suffer like this, then you all do, too. You can play the game in your browser, so feel free to boot it up and see how you do.
Lilli is a silly bit of fun but also an interesting experiment. Many games give us grand, cinematic presentation and UI displays that provide the player as much information as possible. This game compacts all of that and, in doing so, provides a significant challenge. Let me know in the comments how fast you can complete it, or feel free to just swear a lot about that first fucking jump.