Happy Wheels arrives on Steam without ads, and its creator notes that he does not like ads

If you were between ten and twenty years old between 2010 and 2015, you know the father in the wheelchair, the man on the bike, and the very particular sensation of finishing a level in two pieces.

Happy Wheels finally arrives on Steam. Without ads. And its creator writes it himself on the store page, with remarkable concision: I don't like ads.

What it is, for anybody who missed the era

A side-scrolling, physics-based, community-driven sandbox game.

You select an inadequately prepared racer and disregard severe consequences in your desperate pursuit of short-lived victory. That is the official description, and it captures the spirit better than any paragraph could.

The principle rests on three things: a physics engine that handles bodies in considerable detail, obstacles designed to destroy you, and an open level editor.

Five million levels

That is the figure that explains the game's longevity.

The community has created more than five million levels, and you can play all of them, as well as create and share your own.

The level browser sorts and ranks creations, with new levels submitted daily. And the Steam version adds a feature I like a great deal: a date selector, to dig through ancient, forgotten levels.

For a game whose culture was built on videos, being able to travel back to the levels of 2012 is a better archival feature than most official platforms offer.

What the Steam version adds

The list is short and well chosen.

No ads at all, which radically changes the experience compared with the browser version everybody knew.

The option to link your old Happy Wheels account to your Steam ID, with auto login across multiple devices. If you published levels ten years ago, they are still yours.

Controller support, added for the occasion.

And Steam achievements the creator himself describes as unsavoury.

What to know

The game launches today, by Jim Bonacci and published by Fancy Force, with no price displayed and no reviews as I write.

Two sincere warnings.

It is a violent game, and deliberately absurd in its violence. Your character's body comes apart in considerable detail. That has been the foundation of the game's humour for fifteen years, but it does not suit every room.

And it is a game from 2010. The physics belong to that era, and so does the presentation. You do not come for a modern game, you come for this one, exactly as it was, better served.

What I like most about this release is the absence of everything else. No season pass, no currency, no ads, no remaster damaging what worked. An editor, five million levels, and the same fall into the void.

Your worst memory of a trap level? We are exhuming traumas on the InsertCoins Discord.