Part Time Monkey's Jono lets one person in the world play at a time, and wants a million levels cleared

The free platformer hands one shared character to each player in the queue for one minute. The developer says players had cleared over 10,000 rooms by 8 October.

AI-drafted from 3 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

There is only one Jono. Part Time Monkey's free platformer, released on Steam on 4 October, gives one shared character to the whole world. When your turn comes you control him for one minute, then the next person in the queue takes over from exactly where you stopped. Everyone else watches the current player live and talks in a global chat while they wait.

The goal, according to the store page, is one million levels. Dying only resets the current room, and "every room cleared by anyone is cleared for everyone, forever." The page ends on a question it does not answer: "What happens at the end..?"

Waiting is most of the game. The store page tells spectators to "cheer, advise, or complain in the chat", and the screenshots show exactly that, with players arguing over whether the current runner can make a jump. Steam files the game under Massively Multiplayer as well as Casual and Indie, which is a fair description of a platformer with one player and everyone else watching. The rooms themselves are short, flat-coloured screens of spikes and other hazards between two doors, built to be cleared or failed inside a minute.

How far it has got

The only progress figures so far come from the developer's own posts on Reddit. On 6 October, two days after launch, they wrote on r/IndieGaming that players had completed "close to 3000 levels". By 8 October the claim in a post on r/godot, where the developer called it "a free Godot game", was "over 10000 levels already, with 990000 to go".

The developer has been patching almost daily. The Steam page lists eight updates between 5 and 11 October, adding hats, emojis, leaderboards, new level types and traps, plus one fix "about the red spikes covering everything". Store screenshots show queues of up to 51 people and a one-minute timer counting down above the room number.

At the time of writing Jono had 39 Steam reviews, 37 of them positive, and Steam counted 8 people in the game on Monday morning.

Sources

• Jono on Steam (Steam)
• I just released Jono, a free game, where only 1 player can play at a time in the whole world (Reddit r/IndieGaming)
• I released Jono, a free Godot game, where only 1 player can play at a time in the whole world (Reddit r/godot)

Image: Part Time Monkey