Mochi Catch

About Mochi Catch

Mochi Catch is a cozy one-finger catching game. A candy dispenser machine sits at the top of a tall, softly scrolling chute and spills treats down toward you. At the bottom, a round mochi holds a big woven basket and slides it along a checkered picnic blanket. Drag anywhere on the screen and the basket follows your finger's x-position left and right; on desktop the mouse or the arrow keys steer it just the same. That single slide is the entire game - there is no second button.

Catch a candy treat - a mochi ball, a dango skewer, or a little star sweet - and it counts toward the level's quota. From level six, golden treats appear with their own separate required count; they fall faster and drift, so they take a bit more reading. The one thing to avoid is the toast-bomb, a grumpy burnt slice that arrives from level four: catch it and you lose one of your three hearts with a soft puff. Letting a bomb fall past the basket onto the blanket is completely harmless - dodging is always better than grabbing.

There are 20 hand-tuned levels that cycle through five pastel palettes, and each one bends the same slide in a new way. Toast-bombs arrive at level four, golden quotas at level six, drifting wind-swayed treats at level eight, splitters that break in two mid-fall at level twelve, a roaming dispenser at level fourteen, periodic gusts that curve everything at level sixteen, and a dusk fog that dims the upper chute at level eighteen - always leaving a clear reaction band just above the basket. Level twenty combines the whole cast at once.

Clear all twenty and Endless mode opens: generated chutes that start at the final level's difficulty and keep ramping - bigger quotas, more golden treats, faster falls, denser spawns - with every mechanic active from the very first endless level. The layout is seeded by the level number, so every chute differs. There is no timer, no score, and no way to run out of treats, since the machine pours forever. Finishing any level always lights up all three stars - the celebration is for clearing the chute, not for speed.

How to play Mochi Catch

1. Watch the candy machine at the top of the chute - treats spill out and start falling toward you.
2. Drag your finger or mouse left and right: the basket at the bottom follows your x-position along the blanket.
3. Line the basket up under a falling treat so it drops right into the cup - that fills your quota.
4. Slide away from the grumpy toast-bombs; catching one costs a heart, but letting it hit the ground is harmless.
5. From level six, chase the golden treats too - they have their own count shown in a second chip up top.
6. Read the drifting, splitting, and wind-blown treats a beat early and slide to meet where they'll land.
7. Fill the whole quota (and the golden count when asked) before your three hearts run out to clear the level.

Controls

Tips & strategy

• Aim where a treat will land, not where it is now - the basket only has to be there at the last moment, so glide, don't jerk.
• Bombs are pure loss to catch and free to ignore. When a bomb and a treat fall together, always give up the treat and dodge the bomb.
• Golden treats fall faster and drift, so start moving toward one earlier than you would for an ordinary candy.
• When a splitter breaks in two, don't chase both - pick the half already closest to the basket and let the other go.
• In the wind, a gust curves everything the same direction. Lead your slide into the wind and the treats will drift onto the basket.
• In the fog levels, treats fade in partway down but always well above the basket - trust the reaction band and react when they appear.
• Missing an ordinary treat costs nothing, so on a roaming-dispenser level camp the middle and let the columns come to you.
• The basket is generous and soft - a treat anywhere over the cup counts, so you rarely need to be pixel-perfect, just close.

Game features

• One-finger catching: slide the basket left and right - drag, mouse, or arrow keys - to catch everything the machine spills.
• A tall pastel chute that parallax-scrolls upward past striped candy walls to sell a place far bigger than the screen.
• Three kinds of candy to catch - mochi balls, dango skewers, and little star sweets - plus faster, drifting golden treats with their own quota.
• A grumpy toast-bomb whose scowling, glossy face is the whole instruction: the one thing you slide away from, harmless if it hits the ground.
• A cast of wordless mechanics: drifters that sway on the wind, a splitter that breaks in two mid-fall, a roaming dispenser, curving gusts, and a dusk fog.
• 20 hand-tuned levels that add one mechanic at a time - bombs at 4, golden at 6, drift at 8, splitters at 12, roaming at 14, gusts at 16, fog at 18.
• Endless mode past level 20: generated chutes with every mechanic on from the first one, ramping bigger, faster, and denser the further you go.
• Three hearts and a soft-fail retry card - only a caught bomb costs a heart, and the machine pours treats forever so a quota can never become impossible.
• Synthesized sound throughout: the sparkle of a catch, a golden chime, a low toast-bomb thud, a splitter's snap, and the whoosh of a gust.
• Three stars for clearing any level, saved with your unlocked chutes in your browser - the celebration is for finishing, not for speed.

One Basket, One Line, No Second Button

There is a particular kind of arcade game that a four-year-old and a grandparent can pick up in the same second, and it always comes down to a single continuous motion. Mochi Catch is built entirely on one: you slide a big soft basket left and right along the bottom of the screen, and treats rain down from a candy machine perched at the very top of a tall pastel chute. That's the whole game. There is no jump, no tap-to-fire, no second control to fumble for. Your finger is the basket, and the only question the game ever asks is where the basket should be a moment from now.

What keeps that one motion interesting is the cast of characters falling into it, each of which teaches its own rule without a word of text. The candy treats - mochi balls, dango skewers, little star sweets - simply drop, and catching them fills the quota. The golden treats fall faster and drift, and they carry their own separate count, so a level can quietly ask you to keep two tallies at once. And then there is the toast-bomb: a grumpy, glossy slice of burnt bread whose scowling face is the entire instruction. You learn in a single catch that the bomb is the one thing you slide away from, and that letting it thud harmlessly onto the picnic blanket is not a failure but the correct play.

The later chute widens the demand on that same slide. Drifter treats sway on an unseen breeze so you have to read a curving path rather than a straight drop. A splitter breaks in two halfway down, forcing a snap decision about which half to chase. The dispenser itself starts roaming so the spawn column keeps moving, gusts of wind curve everything mid-air, and at dusk a soft fog settles over the upper chute so treats fade into view only partway down - never fully blind, always leaving a reaction band above the basket, but enough that you commit a beat later than you'd like. Every one of these is a new way to bend the exact same left-right motion you learned in level one.

Nothing here is timed and nothing is scored. You get three hearts, a bomb costs one, and running out simply shows a retry card that rebuilds the level exactly as it was. Because treats keep pouring from the machine forever, a quota can never become impossible - miss ten in a row and the eleventh is already on its way. Clear all twenty hand-tuned levels and an endless chute opens, every mechanic switched on from its very first level and ramping upward from there. It is a game with a single verb, stretched across dusk and wind and splitting candy without ever needing a second one.