The Squared
Why We Picked The Squared
The Squared is closer to a toy than a game, which is the correct shape for the audience. There is no wrong way to finish the screen. Sound often carries most of the feedback, which helps a child who cannot read the labels yet. It has 4,736 plays, and most of them are probably shorter than the adult expected. By the numbers: 249 of 500 on the arcade shelf, and 4.7 out of 5 from 97 ratings.
How to Play
Three rules cover almost everything this game asks of you:
- The layout assumes a phone, so the buttons sit where thumbs already are.
- There is no losing here, only a screen that has not been finished yet.
- End the session on a finished screen rather than mid-task, and keep it short.
Editor’s Note
It is a toy as much as a game, and it does not pretend to be more. One screen per sitting is the natural unit, and nothing is lost by stopping.
Written by the UGFJD editorial team for this page. The publisher’s own description follows below, unedited.
Publisher Description
Supplied by the game’s publisher; reproduced as-is.
A little cube with big ambitions and a screen full of obstacles: that is the whole setup, and it works. The Squared is a side-scrolling arcade game where you guide a cute square hero through an endless procession of hazards, and the only thing standing between you and a new high score is timing.
Your cube moves with the scrolling world, and your job is to jump or dodge past whatever the level throws at it. Gaps, blocks, and barriers arrive one after another, and a single touch ends the run. The controls are minimal by design, which means every failure is clearly your own fault and every extra meter survived feels genuinely earned. There is no finish line, just an ever-rising score that dares you to do better on the next attempt.
Difficulty ramps the longer you survive. Early stretches give you generous spacing between obstacles so you can settle into a rhythm, but the pace steadily quickens and the patterns grow denser, forcing faster reads and tighter jumps. Because each run is varied, memorizing a fixed route never quite works; what carries you deep into a high score is pattern recognition and calm hands rather than rote practice.
The most useful skill is learning to jump early rather than late. New players wait until the obstacle is right in front of the cube and then panic, but the safe window is almost always wider than it looks, and acting a beat sooner gives you room to correct. It also pays to keep your eyes slightly ahead of the cube instead of on it, reading the next two hazards instead of the current one, the same trick that helps in any endless runner.
The Squared is made for players who love one-more-try score chasers in the tradition of the great arcade runners, quick to restart and quietly competitive against your own best run. It is cute on the surface, ruthless underneath, and exactly the kind of game that eats a lunch break one failed jump at a time.
