Upside Run

Upside Run is a gravity flip runner you play free in your browser. Your courier sprints along a space-station corridor on their own, and the only thing you control is gravity: one tap and they fall up to the ceiling, another and they drop back to the floor. It is a one-button gravity switch game in the spirit of the classic gravity runners, with a flat, bold look of gold floors, cyan ceilings, red spikes and mint gems under a ringed planet, and no download or sign-up.

Every couple of seconds the surface under your feet runs out. A gap in the floor means you need to be on the ceiling when it passes; a strip of spikes means the same; a zigzag opens the floor and the ceiling one after the other, so you must flip at just the right moment to land past the hole; a hazard-striped wall stops you dead if you meet it, and in the open sections you hop between floating ledges and short islands with quick half flips. A flip is a committed half-second arc: tap too early and you fall into the gap you were dodging, too late and you run off the edge into the void. Taps are never lost: press a moment before you land and the flip fires the instant your feet touch down.

Behind you hovers the Warden, a stout violet robot with one yellow eye and a grabbing claw. Whenever a wall holds you back you fall behind the camera, its siren starts flashing and the claw reaches for you; run clear and you sprint back to your place. Fall out of the corridor, touch the spikes or let the Warden catch you and the run is over. The course is generated in pieces that are always passable, and it gets faster every five seconds and denser every sector: plain gaps first, then spikes and walls, ledges, islands and spiked ledges that decide your route before you enter.

Your score is the distance you run in meters plus the gems you collect. Gems line the safe route and mark the middle of the perfect flip, every run gets the same number of them for the distance, and collecting them without missing one builds a streak: ten in a row doubles every gem, twenty-five triples it. You play Endless: no clock, just a run that goes until you fall, so it is a pure test of how long you can keep it up, and with a decent run lasting one to three minutes it is one of our quick games. A 90-second sprint on the same course is one of the games The Daily can deal you. Your best run goes on the all-time and weekly leaderboards, and top runs are verified by replaying your inputs on our servers.

Upside Run plays on every device. On a phone, tap anywhere on the screen to flip; held upright, the corridor sits in the middle with big numbers above and below it, and held sideways it fills the screen. On a computer, click or press Space, Enter or the arrow keys, and press P to pause. It sits with our other endless runner games, one-button games, gravity games and reaction games in the arcade games section, and you can find it among both the mobile games and the PC games.