Vex 5 — Play Free Online

Vex 5 is a stickman parkour platformer from Amazing Adam, the developer behind the whole Vex series. You guide a small black figure through a run of hazard-filled stages, and almost everything in the way can kill you: spikes, saws, drops, rising water and moving platforms. The pace is quick but never frantic, and each stage is a short puzzle in timing and route-reading.

The appeal is the retry loop. When you die you restart a few seconds back at the last checkpoint, so a failed jump costs very little and you can keep experimenting until a tricky section clicks. That makes it a good fit for anyone who likes the precise, one-more-try rhythm of a jumping game such as Doodle Jump, but wants hand-built levels instead of an endless climb.

It runs in the browser with nothing to install, so you can open it and be in a stage within seconds.

How to play

Move with the arrow keys or WASD. The mouse is for menus: picking a stage and pressing buttons. On a phone or tablet the game uses taps and swipes for the same actions. Your character runs, jumps and can grab or push off surfaces in the standard parkour style of the series, so the basic job is to keep moving toward the exit without touching anything dangerous.

A typical stage asks you to read the screen first. Look at where the hazards sit, find the safe landing spots, then commit to a sequence of jumps. Touching a hazard sends you back to the nearest checkpoint, and you carry on from there.

Tips

• Pause at the edge of a new screen before you move. Most deaths come from running into a trap you could already see.
• Tap the direction keys in short bursts when landing on small platforms. Holding a direction through a landing is the usual reason you overshoot.
• When a section keeps killing you, break it into two jumps and treat each one separately instead of trying to chain the whole thing.
• Watch moving hazards through a full cycle before you enter their path. Their rhythm repeats, and entering on the right beat is easier than reacting.

Similar games on Doodle Jump

If you like the precision here, Ovo 2 and OvO game are the closest cousins on this site: both are minimalist platformers built around tight jumps and quick restarts. Fireboy and Watergirl swaps the solo run for puzzle-platforming with two characters, while Helix Jump is a simpler one-button game focused on dropping through gaps.

Vex 5 suits short sessions of a few minutes as well as longer runs when you want to push through a harder stage. A keyboard is the more comfortable way to play, though touch controls are available.