Quick answers to the questions players ask most often.
No. PETRIS runs entirely in your web browser. There is no download, no installer, no account, and no extension to add. Open the page and the game is ready to play. The whole experience is around fifty kilobytes — smaller than most photos — so it loads in under a second even on slow connections.
Yes, completely. There are no in-app purchases, no premium tier, no ads inside the playfield, and no subscription. The site is supported by a small number of banner ad slots outside the game area. Your gameplay experience is identical whether you've ever clicked an ad or not.
Yes. The board scales to your screen size, and touch controls appear automatically below the playfield on mobile devices. You can also swipe across the playfield: left and right swipes move the piece, an upward swipe cycles the animal, and a downward swipe is a hard drop. The game has been tested on screens from 360 pixels wide up to large tablets.
Once the page has finished loading, the game itself does not require an internet connection — the whole thing is a single HTML file running locally in your browser. However, the page won't load if you have no connection at all on first visit, and refreshing while offline may not work depending on your browser's cache settings.
Because it would have landed directly next to a clashing animal. The game checks the four cells touching the landing square — above, below, left, and right. If any of those contain an animal that clashes with the piece you're placing, the piece is rejected, the cells flash red, and you lose a life. Diagonal neighbors don't count.
The clash rules: cats clash with dogs and with mice. Dogs and mice are friends. Walls are friends with everyone. Two of the same animal are always friends.
Two scoring events: a vertical pop happens when three of the same animal stack in a column (seventy points per cleared cell, so two hundred and ten points per pop). A row clear happens when a horizontal row fills completely (a flat two hundred points). When one triggers the other in a chain, each link multiplies the next event's score — that's where the big scores come from.
No. Three walls in a column will sit there indefinitely. Walls only score by filling out complete horizontal rows. They are tools, not scoring pieces.
The lives count drops level by level — five lives at level one, four at level two, three at level three, two at level four, and one life per level from level five onward. The falling speed also accelerates. From level five onward, every level becomes a one-mistake gauntlet.
Not a fixed one. The counter and speed keep scaling. In practice, the one-life constraint past level five caps most runs well before any artificial ceiling would matter.
The game does not save mid-run progress, but your highest score is saved between sessions. The save is stored in your browser's local storage, so it persists across page reloads and across days, but only on the same browser and device.
No. There is no account system and no cloud save. Your high score on your phone is separate from your high score on your laptop. This is a deliberate choice — there is no account, so there is also no login, no password, and nothing about you stored on any server.
Clear the local storage for petrisgame.com in your browser. The exact menu varies by browser, but it's usually under Settings → Privacy → Site Data or Cookies. Clearing all browsing data will also reset it.
Most likely your browser cleared local storage. This happens when you use private/incognito mode, when you've manually cleared site data, when your browser auto-evicts data from sites you haven't visited recently, or after a browser reinstall. There's nothing the game can do about this without an account system.
Yes. There is no audio cue you need to react to. Every important state change — clashes, pops, clears, combos, score popups, lives lost — is communicated visually.
Yes. The four pieces are distinguishable by silhouette as well as by color. Dogs have floppy ears, cats have triangular ears with whiskers, mice have round ears and a long tail, and walls have a brick pattern. You can play the game with the colors muted and still identify everything correctly.
No. There is no rapid flashing, no screen shake, no strobing background. The clash flash is a single brief red pulse on the affected cells, not a full-screen effect.
Any modern browser updated in the last few years should work — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera, and their mobile equivalents. The game uses the standard HTML5 Canvas and a small amount of vanilla JavaScript. There are no exotic dependencies.
Not at the moment. The game is a personal project. If that changes, this page will be updated.
The game isn't packaged for embedding right now. If you have a specific use case in mind, you're welcome to get in touch.
Send a short note via the contact page with the browser you were using, what you were doing when the bug happened, and what you expected to see instead. Screenshots help a lot.
The About page covers the design philosophy and how the game was built. The How to Play page is the complete mechanical reference. The Strategy guide covers high-level play.
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