A clever social game quietly launched on Steam this month. Jono is the latest release from developer and publisher Part Time Monkey, which is actually original Angry Birds artist Tuomas Erikoinen's solo studio, and it's the first "massively singleplayer" game I've ever seen.

Jono is a pixel art 2D platformer with simple art and "deterministic physics," as Erikoinen puts it in a post-mortem Reddit post. The real hook lies outside the familiar gameplay of jumping over spikes and through portals: only one person can play Jono at a time, and only for one minute at a time, "then the next person in the queue takes over from exactly where you left off." Everyone else sits in a Twitch-like, in-game live stream overlay watching you play, waiting for their turn, or building levels for future players to complete.

"Cheer, advise, or complain in the chat. Spam emotes. Make the talking head say something stupid. Join the conga line," the game's Steam page reads.

"The game is the reason players come, and the chat is the reason they stay (I think)," Erikoinen says on Reddit. "They cheer when someone gets through a hard level, joke around, talk about off-topic stuff and so on."

The goal, Erikoinen says, is for players to collectively complete 1 million levels which are all totally unique. The Jono stream shows that they've currently cleared just over 87,600 levels, and died 114,200 times in the process. The top player has personally cleared over 7,500 levels.

Jono is free to download on Steam, where it's garnered 96% positive user reviews.

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