LemonArcade
OvO is a precision platformer by Dedra Games, a small French studio known online under the handle skymen75, and it has quietly become one of the most played platformers on the web since it appeared in October 2019. The look is deliberately bare: a black stick figure with a round white head, white geometry, no music cues telling you how to feel. Everything the game has to say is in the movement. It started life as an HTML5 game on Cool Math Games and Armor Games and has since spread to every major portal, picked up a mobile app on Google Play, and spun off two siblings, OvO Classic and OvO Dimensions.
The control set is small and the interactions between its parts are the whole design. You run with the arrow keys or WASD, jump with space, slide by pressing down while running, and wall-jump by pressing into a wall and jumping. Pressing down in mid-air is a smash: a fast downward slam that breaks through the translucent platforms scattered across the levels. The trick that turns those five moves into a skill ceiling is that they chain. Jumping the instant you land from a smash or the instant a slide ends launches you higher than a normal jump, and a well-timed dive straight into the flag ends a level faster than running to it.
The levels are short, often a single screen or two, and each one ends at a flag. Spikes, moving platforms, crumbling blocks and sequences of wall jumps are the building blocks, arranged so that the intended route is obvious and the fast route is not. The current version holds more than 70 levels, and roughly a third of them were designed by players during community events rather than by the studio, which is why the difficulty curve has small spikes where someone clearly wanted to show off. Once you have finished the main set, Hardcore mode replays it with tighter margins.
There is a light economy around all of this. Coins are tucked into risky corners of each level, and collecting them or completing challenges unlocks skins for the stick figure, none of which change how it moves. An achievement list and a per-level timer push the game towards its real endgame, which is speedrunning: the layout of every level rewards finding a chain of slide-jumps and smash-jumps that skips the safe path, and the glitchless any-percent record for the whole game sits under six minutes. Casual players never see that side; it is there for the ones who come back.
Who it suits. Anyone who liked the movement in Super Meat Boy or Celeste but wants something they can open in a tab and put down in five minutes. It is a game where the first fifteen levels teach you the moves and the next fifty test whether you can combine them under pressure, and the honest difficulty rating is high by the end. OvO Classic is the original level set kept as a separate game, and OvO Dimensions reworks the concept with a different visual style; this page is the main line.
It runs free in the browser on LemonArcade with no download or account. The keyboard is the right way to play, because slide-jump timing on a touchscreen is much harder, but on-screen controls are there for phones and tablets and the early levels are fine with them. Progress, coins and unlocked skins are saved in the browser, so stay on one device. A session can be two minutes or an hour, and the R key restarts a level instantly, which you will use a lot.