Platformer Games
Twenty-three platformers, weighted towards precision and speed rather than exploration. This is where the Run series lives, along with a long line of stickman parkour games and a couple of genuine classics.
All 23 games run in a browser tab with nothing to install.
Precision platformers and runners
Browser platformers rarely try to be adventures. There is no map to uncover and usually no story. What you get instead is a single mechanic, a set of levels that examine it from every angle, and a difficulty curve that expects you to fail a lot. The whole genre here is built on repetition and small improvements.
That structure suits short sessions. A level takes twenty seconds when you finally clear it and four minutes of attempts before you do, so you can stop at any point without losing anything.
The Run series
Run 1, Run 3, Run 3 Space and Run 3 Freezenova are the anchor of this category. The idea is simple and unusually good: you are running through a tunnel in space, and when you run onto a wall, that wall becomes the floor. The whole level rotates around you.
Run 3 is the best of them. It adds branching routes, several playable characters with genuinely different movement, and an explore mode that turns the game into something closer to a map than a set of levels. If you play one platformer on this site, play Run 3.
Where to start
OvO is the strongest pure precision platformer here. It is fast, the controls are tight, and the levels are built around chaining moves rather than executing them one at a time. Vex 8 is the other obvious pick, with a longer campaign and a good spread of hazards.
Fancy Pants Adventures deserves particular attention. All three worlds are here, and the series is built entirely around momentum: running, sliding and wall-jumping feel better in these games than in almost anything else in the browser. They are also the most generous games on this page, which makes them a good choice if precision platformers usually put you off.
Stickman and parkour
Stickman Parkour, Speedrun Parkour, Spider Dude Parkour and Kawai Run 2 form a group of their own. They are all built on the same idea of chaining wall-runs and vaults without stopping, and they are all more forgiving than the precision platformers above. Good for a quick game, less rewarding to master.
Meat Boy sits at the opposite end. It is a browser version of one of the hardest platformers ever made, and it is exactly as unforgiving as its reputation suggests.