Slimy Guys

Eight slimes, three courses, and only one of them gets through the last one

Single player
arcade
action

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About Slimy Guys

An obstacle race against seven computer slimes across three short courses, in the knockabout tradition of televised wipeout shows. Spinning bars sweep the track, hammers swing across it, pistons shove from the sides and whole sections of floor drop away. Being hit does not end your run — you are knocked flat, you lose most of a second getting up, and everybody else carries on.

The three rounds cut the field down in stages. Spin Street takes the first six through, Push Party takes four, and Tumble Tiles takes one. Each course has checkpoints, so falling off the edge costs position rather than the race. You also have a dive, which is a movement tool and a weapon at once: a diving slime that lands on a running one puts it down.

What is different about this version

The elimination-show format this borrows from is built for a room full of people. This is one person racing seven computer slimes, and it is built around that: the difficulty setting changes how fast they run, how early they see an obstacle and how much clearance they leave, rather than adding more of them. The dive is the piece that rarely survives into imitations. It is a real lunge with a slide on the end, it drops your profile low enough to pass under a spinner arm, and it knocks over any running slime you land on. The courses are deliberately short — none is more than about a hundred and fifty metres — because the interest is in the obstacle cycles, not in endurance.

How to play Slimy Guys

Run down the course towards the finish line.
Jump over low hazards and gaps.
Dive for a flat forward lunge that also ducks you under anything sweeping at body height.
Take a hit and you go down. Get up and carry on; nothing else happens.
Fall off the edge and you restart from the last checkpoint you passed.
Finish inside the qualifying places — six in the first round, four in the second.
Win the third course outright to take the whole thing.

Controls

Desktop	WASD to run, Space to jump, Shift to dive.
Phone or tablet	Drag on the left for a floating stick; Jump and Dive buttons sit on the right.
Players	One player. Any other characters on screen are run by the game.

Strategy

Speed here is mostly a matter of not being knocked down. The stun lasts most of a second and getting up takes another quarter, so one clean hit costs you roughly a second — enough to drop two or three places in a field of eight. The quickest line is almost never the shortest one; it is the one where the spinner arm has just gone past.

Spinners and hammers run on fixed cycles at fixed speeds, so they are readable. Watch one full rotation before committing and the gap is obvious. The pistons in Push Party are nastier because they push rather than knock, and that course has a long hole in the floor between the eighty-eight and hundred-and-three metre marks that you cross on three moving platforms. Missing one of those is a checkpoint reset rather than a knockdown, which is a much larger loss.

Use the dive on purpose rather than as a faster run. It gets you under a sweeping bar, it covers slightly more ground than a jump, and it is your only way of interfering with another racer. But it ends in a short slide you cannot steer out of, so diving into a crowd near an edge tends to finish with you in the crowd and then off the edge.

Mistakes that cost you the game

Stopping after a knockdown. You lose about a second; the racers who panic lose far more.
Jumping at a spinner. You cannot change direction in the air and the arm is wider than your jump.
Diving near an edge. The slide carries you further than you expect and you cannot steer during it.
Taking the inside line out of habit. On courses this narrow the inside is where the bumpers are.
Racing the final as though position matters throughout. Only the finish line does.

Tips

Watch one full sweep before you commit. Every spinner runs at a constant speed.
Knee height, jump. Shoulder height, dive.
The moving-platform sections are the biggest time gaps in the game. Arrive on the first platform, not near it.
On easy the computer slimes run at roughly four fifths of the pace you can manage, so qualifying is nearly automatic. Normal is where it starts being a race.
A dive landed on a running slime puts them down, which in the one-qualifier final is worth a detour.
Sixth place and first place both go through the opening round, so save the risks for later.

Questions about Slimy Guys

Can friends play this with me on one device?

No. The other seven slimes are computer-controlled and there is no second set of controls.

What happens when I fall off?

You reappear at the last checkpoint you passed, having lost the ground between there and where you fell.

How many rounds are there?

Three — Spin Street, Push Party and Tumble Tiles — cutting eight racers to six, then four, then one.

Does it cost anything?

No. Slimy Guys is free to play, runs in your browser, and needs no download, install or account.

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