Controls:
Arrow keys: Move / climb poles / duck
Z: Jump
X: Pogo stick on / off
C: Fire the raygun
Space: Status screen / inventory
Enter: Accept
ESC: Back / cancel (menus, save-slot prompts)
Explore Mars, recover the parts Keen needs for his ship, and get back home.
Ride the pogo stick to reach ledges and hidden areas a normal jump cannot clear, and hold the jump for a higher bounce.
The pogo is harder to steer than walking, so let it settle into a rhythm instead of fighting every bounce.
Raygun charges are limited. Save them for the Vorticon grunts that block a doorway.
Harmless creatures such as Yorps can be jumped over or walked around instead of shot.
Open the status screen to check your charges, keycards, and the ship parts you still need.
Tip: Bump into tiles that look like decoration. Secrets, keycards, and ship parts are often hidden behind a wall that seems solid!
Eight-year-old Billy Blaze puts on a football helmet, calls himself Commander Keen, and leaves Earth in a ship he built from soup cans and a dishwasher. Chocolate Keen is a careful reimplementation of id Software's 1990 DOS classic, the first Vorticon episode, Marooned on Mars.
Mars is not empty. Yorps bounce, Garg patrols, and Vorticon grunts treat a child with a raygun as a serious problem. The pogo stick is the real spaceship. Ordinary jumps clear a crate. A charged bounce clears a cliff, a hidden ledge, a secret you only find because you refused to walk.
The raygun is finite. Charges live in the walls and in the things that want you dead. You do not spray. You save the shot for the grunt in the doorway, then pogo past the rest like a rumor. Keys, cards, and the ship parts that get you home are tucked behind tiles that look like decoration until you bump them.
id built this after the Hovertank and Catacomb experiments, right before Wolfenstein made them famous for corridors. The joke still works: the galaxy is in danger and the competent adult in the room is a kid who bounce-walks. Tom Hall wrote the Saturday-morning plot. John Carmack and John Romero made the tiles scroll like a cartoon that could hurt you.
This version keeps the old timing, the old secrets, and the old habit of dying because you pogoed one tile too far. Status screen when you need to count shots. Save slots when Mars starts repeating itself. The planet does not get kinder. You just get better at arriving on the exact pixel.
