Cursor

The game

The pointer in this one is alive: a white arrow caret with two eyes, a tongue and a growing appetite, wandering a skeuomorphic 90s desktop of grey windows, pixel title bars and a taskbar. Drag it over window buttons, menu items, dialog buttons and desktop icons and it eats them — +10 points per morsel times its size, an EVOLVED bonus every three, and it gets physically bigger and redder-eyed with each mouthful. The one thing it must never taste is the SAVE button in the taskbar: when it gets hungry it eyes that button, the button starts pulsing, and its HP bar drains under the nibbles. Feed it everything else and keep SAVE alive to devour the whole OS.

How to play

• Click the title card (or press Enter / Space) to boot the desktop.
• Move the mouse — the caret-pet chases the pointer. Hover it over the window title-bar buttons, the File/Edit/Search/Help menus, the OK/Cancel/Help dialog buttons, the Refresh button and the four desktop icons to devour them.
• Click empty desktop to drop a crumb (three at a time) and herd the pet toward it — useful when it starts eyeing the wrong thing.
• Keep the pet off the SAVE button in the taskbar. When the warning "IT EYES THE SAVE BUTTON" appears, steer away; if SAVE's HP bar empties the run ends with SAVE DEVOURED and your progress is gone.
• Devour every widget with SAVE still alive for the OS DEVOURED ending (+500). Score also climbs with crumbs and evolution bonuses; size grows with every morsel and the eyes go red once it turns feral.
• P / Esc pauses; click the game-over card to reboot.