LemonArcade
Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning was made in two weeks. Micah McGonigal, working alone as Basically Games, built it for the Meta Game Jam hosted on itch.io in March 2018, a contest that asked entrants to make games about games. He took the look of 1990s edutainment titles such as Sonic's Schoolhouse, with clip-art characters and flat green corridors, and used it as the shell for a survival horror game. It placed second out of 104 entries, then went viral on YouTube within weeks and turned a jam project into a franchise. The build on this page is the free Classic version, which is the one the internet fell for.
The premise is that your friend left seven notebooks in the school and you have to collect them. Each notebook opens a maths quiz of three questions, and Baldi, a bald teacher holding a ruler, cheers every right answer. The second notebook's third question is deliberately unreadable, so you will get it wrong, and that is the point: every wrong answer makes Baldi angrier and faster. He then hunts you through the halls, and you track his distance by the sound of the ruler slapping his palm, which speeds up as he closes in. Once all seven notebooks are collected the exits open, but three of the four slam shut as you reach them, and the school turns red as Baldi sprints for the finale.
The rest of the staff make the loop mean. The Principal of the Thing gives you detention for running in the halls or entering the faculty room, which loses time you cannot afford. Playtime stops you for a five-jump skipping session that leaves you stationary while Baldi approaches. It's a Bully blocks corridors and takes an item as toll. Gotta Sweep, a talking broom, barges you down hallways at random, and Arts and Crafters, a sock puppet, will teleport you straight back to Baldi if you stare at it after the last notebook. Later Classic updates added 1st Prize, a shoving robot, and Cloudy Copter.
Items are what make the game beatable. A BSODA can pushes Baldi back down a hall, a Zesty Bar refills the stamina you burn while sprinting, the Quarter buys either from vending machines, Principal's Keys open locked doors, Safety Scissors cut Playtime's rope, the Alarm Clock lures Baldi to wherever it rings, WD-NoSquee silences a door so opening it does not give away your position, and the Baldi Anti Hearing and Disorienting Tape jams his hearing. That last one matters because Baldi navigates by sound: every door you open is a noise he can follow.
The formula spawned a lot more. A Kickstarter in mid-2018 funded Baldi's Basics Plus, a larger, randomised version that entered Steam early access in June 2020, and a Classic Remastered edition arrived in 2022 with the same content and extra modes. This Classic build stays the purest form: one fixed school layout, one set of items, and the knowledge that Baldi's speed only ever goes up.
It runs free in the browser on LemonArcade with no download or account. It is a first-person keyboard and mouse game, so it is meant for desktop, and it will ask the browser to lock the cursor for looking around. A winning run takes ten to fifteen minutes, but expect many that end in under three, and expect the jumpscare, which is loud and immediate.