Cloud Ladder
About Cloud Ladder
Cloud Ladder is a climb with no jump button. Your kite bounces off every rung it touches, all on its own, so the only thing you ever do is steer left and right. That sounds thin until the rungs start sliding and crumbling under you and you realise you have been reading two hops ahead without noticing. Height is score, at ten points a unit, and the column wraps, so leaving one side of the screen brings you straight back in on the other.
How to play
Drag the stick at the bottom of the screen, or hold the left and right arrow keys, to steer the kite in the air. Landing on a rung throws you back up automatically.
Rules of Cloud Ladder
- Mint rungs are solid, blue rungs slide from side to side, and rust rungs crumble away after a single bounce.
- An amber arrow on a rung is an updraft. It launches you at 1.8 times the normal bounce speed, which carries you more than three times as high.
- Crumbling rungs only start appearing above a height of 25 and sliding ones above 45.
- Two crumbling rungs never spawn back to back, so a broken one is never the only route up.
- The gap between rungs runs from 3.5 to 5.5 units and a plain bounce clears about 7.4, so nothing above you is out of reach.
- Fall below the bottom of the screen and the run ends. There are no lives and no continues.
- Your score is your height times ten, and the best one is kept between visits.
Controls
- Drag the on-screen stick left and right
- The left and right arrow keys, or a gamepad stick
- There is no jump input, because the bounce is automatic
What makes it worth playing
- Two medals to collect, one for riding an updraft and one for a score of a thousand.
- The wrap edge is drawn as a glowing seam with a dark wall beyond it, so crossing reads as a move rather than a glitch.
- Options for volume, screen shake and clearing your best score.
- The difficulty keeps climbing until a height of 210, where crumbling rungs make up about a fifth of what spawns.
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-09-14.
Tips from playing it
- Look above the kite, never at it. You are choosing the next rung, not landing on this one.
- Use the wrap. When the only rung is far to your left, going right off the edge is the shorter trip.
- Treat a rust rung as a stepping stone and commit to the next one before you land on it.
- An updraft is worth chasing sideways for. At 1.8 times the bounce speed it covers more than three normal hops, and updrafts get rarer the higher you go.
Why this game is here, and what we changed
The thing doing the bouncing is a coral kite. A rounded diamond that tilts into whichever way you are steering, with three shrinking dots of ribbon hanging behind it, on a plum dusk sky. The rungs took colours that say what they do before you land on them, mint for solid, blue for sliding, rust for crumbling, amber for an updraft. What we deliberately kept is the gap range. Nothing above you is ever further than a plain bounce can reach, so a fall is always a steering mistake and never a dead end.
More on how we pick and fix these: how we make our own editions of classic games and how we test a game.
- Category
- Arcade
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Portrait
- Players
- Single climber, single kite, and a saved best to beat.
- Difficulty
- Gaps top out at five and a half units against a bounce that clears about seven and a half, so every rung above you is reachable and every miss belongs to you.
- Typical session
- One to four minutes a run.
- Last tested by us
- 2026-09-14
