an introduction to the “sweet endless runner”

before devsisters created cookie run: ovenbreak or even the popular cookie run: kingdom, there was LINE cookie run (or kakao cookie run, both of these hosted on messaging platforms), and even before that, there was “ovenbreak” and “ovenbreak 2”. it would be the 26th of september, 2016, that cookie run: ovenbreak would be launched and now, nearly a decade later, the cookie run IP is still going strong. some may say…. it’s still running (though this has kind of a negative connotation that may or may not be true, depending on who you ask)

i would find ovenbreak a few months after its release, and at the time it was finding a treasure of a mobile game. what made ovenbreak stand out was its multiplayer experience and attention to detail. taking a look at the best mobile games of 2016 and 2017, it’s easy to see why. many of these would be singleplayer, or if they had a multiplayer aspect, it wasn’t the core gameplay. some notables would be pokemon go, super mario run, tomb of the mask, and the one i miss the most, dandy dungeon: legend of brave yamada

originally i was going to say “high quality” instead of “attention to detail,” but by 2016 there were already a lot of mobile games that looked good. it may have something to do with its cartoony style, which wasn’t as popular back then (now it’s all you see), and the abundance of characters and worlds the game offered

the gameplay

back then, the game centered around trophy races. you’d start off in land 1 and “race” (it’s moreso about points than distance) against other newbies. the higher you’d place on the leaderboard, the more trophies you’d get, and by getting enough trophies you’d move on to the next land, where you’d do the whole thing over again

alongside unlocking new characters through gacha (which, surprisingly, isn’t the main way of getting them anymore) and getting first places, what made progressing fun was seeing the next land you’d unlock. each land had its own theme, music, and annoyances. my favorite land was the 5th, a pumpkin-themed one, and the one i hated going through the most was land 6

once you got to the last land, appropriately named “Land’s End,” things got real. every time you wanted to race, you’d have to queue up and wait, something that didn’t happen in previous lands. you wouldn’t even need the usual 10 players to start, so sometimes you’d end up in a 4 player lobby, which was kind of a major ouch if you ended up being the guy in 4th place (never happened to me though)

maybe you’re wondering what the incentive is to keep playing after you’ve reached the end, besides an insane need to play competitively. devsisters planned for this, and in august 2017, a new gamemode would be added: breakout mode