Passage

About the game

Passage is a very small and very strange game. The whole screen is a thin strip of pixels, one hundred pixels wide and only twelve tall, and in it a little figure starts at the left edge with a bit of time ahead of it, and the world begins to slide by. That is almost all the game tells you.

What you do with the five minutes is up to you. The place is a maze of walls and open ground, with treasure chests scattered in it. You can wander in every direction, up and down as well as right, and you will come across other people along the way. Some of what you find is worth points, some of it is worth more than points, and time is passing the whole time you are deciding. The figure on screen is not the same at the end as at the beginning, and neither is the strip.

It is an art game, a short piece made to be played once, thought about and maybe played again to see another path. Jason Rohrer made it in 2007 for an exhibition of games on tiny screens. It takes five minutes, so it is a good one to try.

Playing it here

Click Play now, click inside the game and press any key. The game is the same five-minute piece as the original: it starts on a title screen, and when your time is up it goes back to it. It has a little music, which starts with the game. Nothing is saved, because there is nothing to save.

The game was made for a 100 by 16 pixel image, and it is shown here as a wide strip that fills the width of the player. We changed three things for the browser: the game waits for the page between frames (the original ran in a window of its own), the keys that quit the game or toggled full screen do nothing, and it uses the SDL 2 library instead of SDL 1.2. The game itself is the original's.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

You can go up and down too. It looks like a game that only goes right, but the maze opens in every direction, and the interesting parts are often off the straight path.

Keep playing if it is not clear. If you are not sure what the point is, play all five minutes: they are the explanation.

It is not a challenge. There are no enemies to fight. How you spend the time is the game.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take? Five minutes, from the title screen to the end.

Can I save? There is nothing to save; every play is a new five minutes.

Does it work on a phone? It needs a keyboard.

Is it free? Yes. The author released it into the public domain, and the source code of this build, with our changes, is available from this page.

Credits and licence

Passage was made by Jason Rohrer: all the code, music, graphics, fonts and animation. He placed it in the public domain, which his page for the game states. The game uses the SDL library, here provided by Emscripten. The build served here is the Unix source release of the game, v4, compiled for the web; its source and our patch are hosted alongside the game.