Calamari – Play Online for Free! | PokiCalamari is Nitrome's squid-powered platformer: run and jump through 100+ short levels dodging spikes, grabbing coins, and racing to catch trains.
Calamari – Play Online for Free! | Poki
Calamari is a side-scrolling platformer from Nitrome starring Squiddy, a squid who runs and jumps through more than a hundred short, self-contained levels. Each one is a tight obstacle course rather than a sprawling world — you’re through a level in well under a minute once you know the layout, which is what makes it so easy to just keep clicking through to the next one.
The obstacles do most of the work: spike balls rolling on set paths, blocks that crumble the instant you land on them, fire and water tiles that are lethal on contact, and coin blocks that burst open into a spray of collectibles when you bump them. A handful of levels swap the usual exit door for a train you need to reach instead. There’s also a slot-machine-style gamble block that risks the coins you’re carrying for a bigger payout, a short survival mode that just asks you to last as long as you can, and a local two-player mode with independent, remappable key sets for each player. Die enough times and you’ll notice the game-over screen doesn’t repeat itself — Nitrome wrote a rotating stock of squid and egg puns for every way you can go.
Controls
Calamari is keyboard-only. It’s an old Flash game running through a compatibility wrapper with no touch controls added, so it’s built for a desktop browser rather than a phone. Movement and jumping are mapped to the keyboard, with two independent key sets built in for local two-player games — both can be remapped or swapped from the in-game options if the defaults don’t suit you.
Tips that actually help
- Holding the jump key gets you noticeably more height than tapping it — that’s the difference between clearing a spike ball and hitting one.
- Fire and water tiles kill on contact rather than just slowing you down, so treat any level that has them as a routing puzzle first and a speed run second.
- The gamble block is a slot machine, not a guaranteed bonus — feed it coins when you can afford to lose them, not when a level’s exit is one hit away.