Gulp: The Hole offline game

Brain-Games

Contains ads

About this game

You are a hole in the ground. Everything that fits, goes down.

You start out small - small enough that a litter bin is a meal and a park bench is a challenge. Swallow enough and you grow. Then the cars go down. Then the buses. Then the street lamps, the market stalls, the trees, and finally the tower blocks themselves, which fold into the ground and vanish. By the end of a round there is nothing left standing where a city used to be, and the only thing on screen is you.

NINE WORLDS, AND NOT ONE OF THEM IS A REPAINT

CITY - four lanes of traffic, a bus depot, a multi-storey car park, pedestrians who scatter when your shadow falls across the pavement.
SPACE - a moon base under an enormous blue Earth. Rovers, solar panels, astronauts who drift instead of running.
DINOSAURS - fern jungle and volcanic rock, with a tyrannosaur that does not run away from you. It has to be earned.
CASTLE - a medieval town either side of a river. A stone bridge people actually walk over, market stalls, soldiers on the walls.
SEA - the sea floor. A sunken galleon, coral, a giant octopus, and a whale and a manta ray that circle the wreck.
JUNGLE - vines, huts, dirt tracks, and animals that notice you coming and move off.
DESERT - pyramids, camels, scattered ruins and a sandstorm that rolls across the dunes.
HELL - pits of the damned, rivers of lava, demons with whips, and a black dragon that is the hardest thing in the game to swallow.
ASGARD - frozen lakes with things moving under the ice, a rainbow bridge, the world serpent, and Fenrir in chains.

FOUR WAYS TO PLAY

CLASSIC - two minutes on the clock and four rival holes in the same city. Everyone eats as fast as they can and the biggest hole at the whistle takes it. The city is finite, so a good player does not just eat: they take the dense streets first and leave the rivals the empty parkland.

SOLO - no rivals, two minutes, and the whole map to yourself. Clear more than half of it to win. Sounds easy. It is not.

BATTLE - no clock at all, six rival holes, and a hole that gets eaten does not come back. Big swallows small, so staying alive early matters more than eating fast. Last hole left on the map wins.

ENDLESS - no clock and nobody else. Eat until the level bar fills, spend the points you earned on upgrades, and move on to a fresh city. This is the mode for the evening when you do not want to be beaten by anything.

FIVE DIFFICULTY LEVELS

Classic runs from one star to five, and the stars are the rivals, not a score to chase. At one star three rival holes wander about and barely notice you. At five stars there are four of them, they are fast, and they go for the streets you were heading to. They were tuned by having the computer play the game itself, hundreds of rounds per star: at five stars a strong player loses three rounds out of four. If you win at five stars you earned it.

UP TO FOUR HOLES AT ONCE

Four holes share one city and each of them can eat the others. Size decides everything: a bigger hole swallows a smaller one whole. A hole that has just been eaten comes back after three seconds with a few seconds of shield, so the big one circling the respawn point cannot simply farm you - a rule that exists because without it the player who falls behind never gets back up.

NO INTERNET NEEDED

Every world and every mode works completely offline. On a plane, on the underground, in a tunnel, in a country where your data does not work. There is no account to create, no sign-in, no waiting for a server. Open it and it plays.

FREE

Free to play, all nine worlds, all four modes, all five difficulty levels. No level is locked behind a payment and no world costs extra.

HOW IT PLAYS

One thumb. Drag anywhere on the screen and the hole follows. There is nothing else to learn, and the whole first round teaches it to you without a tutorial. The camera pulls back as you grow, so a hole that started as a dot on a street corner ends up framing a whole district.

Part of Brain Games.