Wheelie Life

A game about a single motorcycle trick held for as long as possible. Getting the front wheel up is easy; keeping it within the narrow band of angles that is neither dropping back down nor tipping over backwards is the entire content, and it is considerably harder than it looks. The balance is continuous rather than binary, which is what makes it a skill. Throttle raises the nose and easing off lowers it, and because the bike has real inertia a correction applied when the angle already looks wrong arrives too late — so the technique is a constant stream of tiny adjustments made before anything appears to need them. It is the same feedback problem as balancing a broom on your hand, translated accurately. Distance travelled on the back wheel is the score, and there is nothing else to do. The road is mostly flat with gentle variation, which is the correct choice: every bump is a disturbance to the balance rather than an obstacle, so terrain is the difficulty rather than scenery. Runs last under a minute at first and noticeably longer once the feedback loop clicks, which is a satisfying kind of progress. It plays with two inputs on a keyboard or two halves of a touchscreen, runs on anything, and is one of those games where the tenth attempt is visibly better than the first.