Pingus

Lead a crowd of penguins safely to the exit: they walk wherever they walk, you hand out the jobs.

▶ Play Pingus free, in your browser, nothing to install

Penguins drop out of an entrance and walk straight ahead, turning at walls and falling off ledges and into water. You cannot steer them; you give single penguins a job: block the others, build a bridge, bash or mine or dig through the ground, climb, float down on an umbrella, jump, or blow up. Each level allows only so many of each, and a number of penguins has to reach the exit before the time runs out.

The story starts on Tutorial Island: walk the map from level to level, each finished one opens the next. The Levelsets menu holds the desert, factory, Halloween and Christmas sets, unlocked one level after another. Arrow keys or the right mouse button scroll the level, the small map shows all of it, fast forward and pause help with the timing, and armageddon blows up whoever is left.

This is a port of Pingus 0.7.6 (2011) from its C++ source: the penguins, their jobs, the traps and the levels tick for tick as the original computes them, its graphics, sounds and tracker music.

Screenshots

A level of the tutorial with its job buttons, counter and small map

Controls

Left mouse button	Menus: choose. In a level: give the penguin under the cursor the selected job; click a job on the left to select it
Right mouse button (held)	Scroll the level towards the pointer
Arrow keys	Scroll the level
1–9, 0	Select the 1st to 10th job
Tab, mouse wheel	Select the next or previous job
Space or F (held)	Fast forward
P	Pause
S	Single step (pauses)
A, or the armageddon button twice	Armageddon: every penguin becomes a bomber
Escape	Give up the level, leave a screen
Small map	Click or drag to look at another part of the level

The original

Pingus (1998) by Ingo Ruhnke and the Pingus contributors (programming, graphics, levels); music by Joseph Toscano, H. Matthew Smith and others; C++ with SDL (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X). This port follows 0.7.6 (2011), the last release, the same rules, levels, graphics and sounds, running natively in the browser. License: GPL-3.0-or-later (Licenses & source). Players: 1.

More free games

2048: Slide the tiles together until one of them is 2048.
A Dark Room: Wake up in the dark, build a fire, and walk out into a world that wants you dead.
Abuse: Run, jump and shoot through an underground prison overrun by mutants.
Ballerburg: Two castles, two kings, one mountain between them.
Biniax: Take the right pair before the field scrolls over you.
Bomberslop: Jelly bombs, soup splashes and four blobs of slop in a canteen.
Brogue: Retrieve the Amulet of Yendor from the 26th level of the Dungeons of Doom.
C-Dogs SDL: Top-down run-and-gun: missions, co-op and deathmatch for up to four players.
Chromium B.S.U.: A cargo ship, a fleet of robot fighters, and not one enemy may get past.
Colossal Cave Adventure: The first text adventure: explore a cave by typing.
Core War: Write programs that fight for a computer's memory.
Diamond Trust of London: Two diamond firms, six regions, one UN inspector.
FreeCol: Found colonies in the New World, trade with Europe and the natives, and win independence.
Frozen Bubble: Penguins shoot coloured bubbles: three of a kind fall, and the ceiling comes down.
GLtron: Four lightcycles, one grid, and a trail that kills you as surely as the wall.
GNU Chess: The GNU Project's chess program, at its own prompt.
GNU Go: The GNU Project's Go program, at its ASCII board.
Hunt the Wumpus: Hunt a monster through a cave of twenty rooms.
HyperRogue: A roguelike on the hyperbolic plane: collect treasure in a world that never comes back around.
Lincity: Build a city or a country, feed it and power it, then make it last or launch its people into space.
Liquid War: Command an army of liquid: flood the maze, swallow the other colours, run.
Maelstrom: Asteroids, alien fighters, and one very small ship.
Moria: Go down into the mines of Moria and face the Balrog.
NetHack: Descend into the Mazes of Menace and bring back the Amulet of Yendor.
Netrek: Four empires, sixteen ships, one galaxy: team space combat and planet conquest.
Passage: A whole life in five minutes.
Pinball Construction Set: Build your own pinball table, then play it.
PokerTH: Texas Hold'em against up to nine computer opponents, or against people online.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon: A traditional roguelike: descend 26 floors of a randomly made dungeon for the Amulet of Yendor.
Sopwith: A biplane, a row of targets, and a sky full of trouble.
Teeworlds: Small round tees with grappling hooks and big guns: fast online deathmatch and capture the flag.
The Powder Toy: A physics sandbox: draw powders, liquids, gases and electronics, then watch what happens.
Tux Racer: Race Tux down the mountain, collect herring and beat the clock.
Tux, of Math Command: Zap the falling comets by solving their math problems.
Typing Warriors: Type against players and bots, with an ELO rating for every keyboard layout.
Worms?: Teach your worm, then watch what it makes of it.
XPilot: Thrust, turn and shoot it out with other pilots in a space arena.