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9 games released in 2009 and reviewed here, best first.
9 reviews
A one-button endless runner built in five days for a "Bare Minimum" game jam in August 2009, given away free with no portal exclusivity, and now sitting in MoMA's permanent design collection as the game that invented the endless-runner genre — while remaining, on its own terms, about ten minutes of content that never asks anything new of you after the first run.
7.5 / 10
A six-day art-game experiment about quitting your job, one act of quiet refusal at a time — five minutes long, endlessly written about since, and still one of the cleanest arguments Flash ever produced for treating games as a critical medium rather than a toy.
7.5 / 10
A free 2009 Newgrounds puzzle platformer where you solve rooms by recording and replaying your own past movements, wrapped around a hermit's confession that turns the clone mechanic into the point of the story rather than a gimmick bolted onto it.
7.5 / 10
John Cooney's 2009 one-room platformer spends thirty stages breaking its own single layout — reversing the controls, killing the lights, handing movement to the mouse — and it is still turning up on "best Flash games" lists in 2026 for exactly that trick, even though the trick itself only works once.
7.5 / 10
A trebuchet-artillery destruction toy that Armor Games sponsored into a 2009 Flash hit and that keeps getting called "the game Angry Birds copied" — a claim that gets more complicated once you notice Crush the Castle licensed its own core idea from an earlier, smaller Flash game with the developer's blessing.
7 / 10
A cannon-launch upgrade toy from Newgrounds in 2009 that turned "how far can this turtle fly" into an escalating arsenal of guns, jetpacks and nukes — and got there almost entirely on the strength of a turtle that visibly, audibly hates every second of it.
7 / 10
A solo developer's Kongregate exclusive that Wikipedia's own history of the incremental genre credits as an early pioneer, years before Cookie Clicker made the format famous — by refusing to let "idle" mean passive, then burying that good idea under seven parallel levelling systems, a card game its own players don't trust, and a clicking minigame people call painful rather than tedious.
6.5 / 10
A penguin, a ramp, and six upgrade categories — Light Bringer Games' 2009 launcher turned a Max Games sponsorship into one of the decade's most-replicated Flash loops, then hit its own ceiling in under a week of contemporary reviews.
6.5 / 10
A free 2009 bullet-hell shmup from the Kongregate developer known only as PolymerRabbit — three episodes, thirty bosses and five customisable ships stacked on top of a genuinely clever "scrape the bullet stream for score" mechanic that the game itself never bothers to explain, wrapped in a bullet-vs-powerup colour clash players were still complaining about a decade and a half later.
6 / 10