As I begin this article, my second monitor shows a black stick figure named “sugarman” jumping through a tan-ish room littered with red spikes. Sugarman dies several times, falling into pits of spikes while a one-minute timer ticks down on the top of the screen. When the clock hits 0, the name above the stick figure changes: “waget0812” is up; they die five times in under a minute and are replaced with “janosaurus2,” who is the same stick figure wearing a hat. And so it goes, with a queue of stick figures, some in hats, lined up at the bottom of the screen waiting to play. I am 101st in line.
This is Jono, one of the strangest platforming experiences I’ve come across, yet simultaneously very familiar to anyone who’s looked at people playing games on Twitch for more than a minute or two. Jono is a game which only one person, one person in the entire world, can play at a time. When you open it up, you’re presented with a view of their game, and the option to join the queue to play. Each person plays for one minute, or five deaths, whichever comes first, before control is handed off to the next person in line.
As a platformer, Jono is pretty basic: you’re a little guy who can jump and double jump, and that’s about it. Your goal is usually to get to a door located somewhere else on the screen. There are hazards, mostly red spikes that kill you and which sometimes appear out of nowhere, a little sprinkling of Kaizo. And I’ve seen some other tricks, like portals that can warp you around a room, ice floors, upside-down rooms, and collectible keys you have to grab to unlock doors. Once a room is completed, it’s done for good. You’ll always respawn at the start of whatever room you’ve been in. There are, allegedly, one million rooms in total. As I write this, the community is on room 104,680.
I know what you’re thinking: one million levels, generative AI? I was worried, too. But it seems like we’re okay. There’s no AI disclosure on the Steam page, and when asked about it on Reddit, the creator said it’s a combination of procedurally generated levels “following preset patterns,” as well as player-created levels that have been reviewed and scheduled by the developer. All the really difficult player-made levels are relegated to a secondary mode: the Meat Grinder, for which the only requirement is that the creator beat the level once, Mario Maker-style.
The fun of Jono is almost entirely dependent upon the community. There’s a chat window that lets everyone talk to one another while they watch the game; stat trackers that let you see players’ total rooms completed, number of deaths, and so on; and emojis you can spam to cheer on (or heckle) the current player. Every time you finish three rooms, you get a chest, which can be opened to obtain little cosmetics: hats that your stick figure will wear when its your turn, unique tombstones to mark where you die, and so forth. And there are odd minigames to help pass the time: there’s a game of “Don’t press the button” constantly going on, and sometimes a little monkey pops up at the corners of the screen and you can rush to be the first to catch it with your mouse.
All of this turns what would otherwise be a sort-of-whatever platformer into quite the riot! It’s nice to have Jono going in my second monitor, to passively watch, engaging a little more as my turn approaches, and then spend one tense minute failing miserably because I unluckily came up in line during a very difficult room. Chat cheers for me anyway, sending messages of encouragement. This is not a game I would ever sit and play actively for hours, yet it has remained open on my desktop for hours, occasionally distracting me as I watch a particularly tricky level get solved or as my blood pressure rises knowing my turn is coming shortly.
In a way, I feel a little guilty writing about Jono today. It’s entirely free-to-play (there’s no monetization at all anywhere) and available now on Steam, which means if enough of you are interested, the queue to play will become obnoxiously long and I won’t get as many attempts to hurl myself at some spikes. Right now, the queue seems to like hovering in the low hundreds during peak hours, and given that a lot of people end up dropping out mid-queue and many other players die five times before they even finish their full minute, I’ve ended up playing for one glorious minute, about once an hour. I will never be the star of Jono, sure. But my own deaths are built upon by those after me. We’ll all beat that millionth level of Jono one of these days, together.