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Go Home Tanuki

Get a drunk tanuki home, at least for tonight.

2016 · with Kent Salcedo, Sarah Kurisu and Corina

See it live →View on GitHub →

Artist statement

A lot of office workers know this ritual: work late, go drinking with your coworkers, get home somehow, and do it again tomorrow. Go Home Tanuki is based on the long hours that are common in Japanese office jobs, and its worker is a tanuki, the raccoon dog from Japanese folklore.

You fly him home through the night past clouds and rocks. Sake makes him drunker, and the drunker he gets, the higher you score, so the game pays you for the part of the night that wrecks him. Get him drunk enough and the night starts coming at you faster.

He never gets home. A run ends when he hits a cloud or a rock, and the title screen puts him back at the bar, slumped over while his phone rings to tell him to come home.

Play it

Click the game to start, then click or press the spacebar to fly. It starts muted here; the buttons in the corner turn sound on and go full screen. Open it full screen →

Go Home Tanuki: a loading card listing Tanuki's daily ritual (work, drink, go home), the title screen of a sleepy tanuki slumped over a bar with a phone saying come home, then the tanuki flying through the night past clouds and sake bottles

How it's made

JavaScript · Phaser · Arcade physics · Vite

We made it over one weekend in Phaser. In 2025 I moved it to a modern build so it still runs in a browser, and in November 2026 I tuned it again: it fits any screen, plays on phones, keeps your high score and goes full screen.

SAKE small +1, large +3 DRUNKNESS starts at 5 EVERY 3 S sober up by 1 at 10 FASTER lamps 10× faster, clouds faster, for the rest of the run HIT A CLOUD OR ROCK the only way a run ends score = drunkness × seconds + meters × 10 + sake streak × combo × 5 combo: +1 for every 3 sake in a row, up to 5 resets after 5 s without sake
SAKE small +1, large +3 EVERY 3 S sober up by 1 DRUNKNESS starts at 5 at 10 FASTER lamps 10× faster, clouds faster, for the rest of the run HIT A CLOUD OR ROCK the only way a run ends score = drunkness × seconds + meters × 10 + streak × combo × 5 combo: +1 for every 3 sake in a row, up to 5; resets after 5 s without sake

Lineage

See it live →Get the code on GitHub →

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