Ralph 4

About the game

Ralph 4 is a single-screen maze game built around one rule: touch nothing. Each level is a small room full of walls, traps and creatures sliding back and forth or spinning in circles. Somewhere in the room there is a gem. Pick it up and the exit opens; walk into the exit and the next room loads.

There is no health bar and no lives counter. Touching an enemy or a trap sends you back to the start of the room, and a counter at the top of the screen keeps track of how many times that has happened. A clock runs from the first room to the last, so the real challenge is finishing all twenty-three rooms with as few deaths and as little time as you can.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the NES: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in jsnes, an NES emulator written in JavaScript. Click Play now and press Enter on the title screen.

F2 saves the current state of the game in this browser and F4 brings it back. A gamepad also works.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Gem first, exit second. The exit stays shut until the gem is in your hands, so walking to it early only wastes time.

Watch the pattern before moving. Every enemy follows a fixed path: some bounce between walls, some turn at corners, some circle a point. A second spent watching usually shows a safe gap.

Deaths are cheap, time is not. Dying only costs you the room you are in. The clock is what keeps going, so a quick retry often beats a slow, careful walk.

Credits and licence

Ralph 4 is by Pubby, with some code by Damian Yerrick. The code is released under the MIT licence. Music and sound effects © 2016 MovieMovies1, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), without changes. The author does not publish a ready-made ROM, so the one served here was compiled, unchanged, from the project's source code. The full licence text is linked from this page.