Press & creator kit

Best Before is a browser game about a vegetable holding the middle shelf of a fridge for thirty minutes. Junk food has organised. You have a spoon. Weapons fire themselves, so the only decision is what to take next and where to stand, which makes it playable one-handed on a school Chromebook and hard to put down on anything else. Runs are thirty minutes, seeds are shareable, and every run is a link that opens as a replay of the run somebody else just had. It is free, has no accounts, no ads, no chat and no purchases, and it loads in about a second.

Best Before is a browser survivors-like about a vegetable holding the middle shelf of a fridge until dawn. The junk food has organised: Gummy Bears in numbers, a Marshmallow that will not stop, a Frozen Pizza with an expiry date in the wrong century, and eventually The Hand, which arrives at thirty minutes and is not a boss so much as an ending. Weapons fire on their own. The player moves and chooses, and that is the whole input surface, which is why it works on a Chromebook at lunchtime and on a phone on a bus. Nine weapons evolve into nine recipes when paired with the right passive, and two pairs of recipes merge again into unions, so a run has a shape you can plan and a shape you can be handed. Coupons buy permanent Cookbook upgrades between runs. Four characters unlock by playing; four more do not unlock by playing, and finding out how is the point of them. Everything social in it works on links rather than accounts. Every finished run becomes a URL that unfurls as a generated card and opens as a deterministic replay, with a button to run the same seed yourself. There is one Daily Shelf a day, the same one for everyone, with a spoiler-free result block to paste. A challenge link hands somebody your exact shelf and your time to beat. There is no chat, no trading, no friends list and no field anywhere that accepts text a player wrote, which means there is nothing to moderate and nothing to be unkind with. It is free, has no advertising, no purchases and no third-party scripts, runs entirely on Cloudflare, and reaches interactive in about a second on hardware a school hands out.