Play Worthy: Caveman Pong

What I love about Flappy Bird – the runaway, accidental hit from earlier this year that ruined its creator’s life and spawned a bajillion copycats on mobile game markets – is the simplicity of its addictive challenge. If Tetris is the digital equivalent to Chess, then Flappy Bird is ball and a cup. As someone with very little patience for mobile games and a short attention span, Flappy Bird fills a niche in my life, and needless to say, I’m a fan.

But ball and a cup gets a bit repetitive after ten months or so, and I’ve been on the lookout for something similarly mindless and addictive to play on my phone that doesn’t try to squeeze out my pockets every chance it gets. Lo and behold, a new game from Tokamak Interactive, called Caveman Pong. It’s not just a flash-in-the-pan Flappy Bird imitator – though it borrows the minimalist design mantra of Flappy Bird – it builds its own quirky style.

Every round begins with the simple directive: “Block the pong. Tap to jump.” And it never gets more complex than that. You are a caveman with a pong ball, who throws the ball at a tower. As the ball returns, he has to jump at just the right time to stop it from flying past him. Don’t ask why there are pyramids in the background, or how there’s a tower when mankind hasn’t even invented fire yet. Just throw the ball and don’t let it bounce past you. Sounds simple and easy right?

Simple? Yes. Easy? No.

But like Flappy Bird, Caveman Pong is always fair. If you fail, it’s almost always because you did something wrong, not that the game messed up. Even though it follows a simple and minimalist approach, the game changes things up just enough to keep the challenge flexible and varied. These variables come in the form of different colored bugs that interact with the pong in different ways. If the ball lands on a brown bug, it changes directions. Red bugs speed it up and green ones slow it down. The bugs keep the game from getting stale in such a way that Flappy Bird often did.

"I'm hooked, and I can do better."

So as soon as you think you’re in a zone, Caveman Pong throws another variable at you that dismantles your mindless rhythm and forces you to pay attention to the trajectory of the ball, rather than the timing of your thumb. My current high score is 19 21 26 44!, but I know I can do better and I won’t stop trying until I do. Every time I get close to passing it, my hand starts to shake, my eyes dart back and forth and I come out of that zone. So when that pong passes by my caveman, and he looks at me with that disappointed stare, I feel shame, knowing that it was nobody’s fault but my own.

I’m hooked, and I can do better. That’s a sign of excellent game design.

Check out Caveman Pong and let me know what you think of it. It’s free on the iOS App Store and Android Marketplace. And yes, there are ads, but if you click the button to get rid of the ads, the game doesn't prompt you to pay anything. It simply removes the ads permanently.