Wakebreaker

Wakebreaker is kind of… a roguelite Balloon Fight “Balloon Trip mode” in a boat, or a bit Jetpack Joyride. Each randomly generated run, you dodge obstacles and try to make it as far as you can. You steer with the crank and pick up money that lets you buy permanent upgrades in between runs. Most of the upgrades appear as random drops in the water, like a shield that protects you from a crash, or a shrink power that makes your boat and thus hitbox smaller for a limited time. Every so often in the run, there’s a big jump that rewards big points, and you’ll need to hit a certain score threshold on each difficulty level to unlock the next difficulty, which has bigger risks and greater rewards.

Like Jetpack Joyride, there’s a lot of skill involved, since memorizing the obstacle layout is not an option because the rocks appear in new locations each run. But also like Jetpack Joyride, upgrading your abilities in between runs is a good way to give yourself a fighting chance to make it just a little bit farther this time. The boat feels like a boat as you’re swerving through the water, and you’ll be able to do some pretty impressive dodging once you get a handle on the floatiness of the physics. Even on the lowest difficulty, though, it will take some persistence to get to the point where you feel like you’re any good at this game at all. Like many other score attack games on the system, it’s tough! But each ride starts out slowly and gives you a chance to build up some shields before it really starts throwing tons and tons of rocks at you at higher and higher speeds.

Maxing out your boat’s abilities unlocks a secret mode, and you’re looking at hours of playtime to get there. Each run does start very similarly, though, and although there are additional non-rock obstacles as you get farther into the run – like bigger boats, birds, and whirlpools – if you don’t like the sort of progression in these kinds of games, you’ll have a hard time sticking with it. However, there’s a reason that games like these, with short runs and upgrades and ramping up difficulty, have stayed popular for so long: they’re addictive and fun. It’s a real “one more run” type of game, and it keeps getting tougher as you keep getting better. The only downside, really, is that there are no online leaderboards, as it’s just on Itch and not a Catalog release. Maybe someday. Until then, it’s just you vs. the river, and the river is not going to take it easy on you.

(Released August 26, 2026, on Itch. Copy provided by developer.)