PLAY FELINE FREE
An open-source platformer starring a nimble cat, built in the open for the GBA Jam 2021 compo. Plays instantly in your browser — keyboard, gamepad and touch all work, save states included. No download, no install, no quarters.
▶ PLAY NOW — IN YOUR BROWSER +25 XPMACHINE NOTE — A cat traverses the world with the confidence of something that has never once read a changelog. Made for a jam celebrating hardware twenty years dead. The cat remains unimpressed.
CARTRIDGE: Feline — Jono Shields (foopod) — MIT (2021). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH GAME BOY ADVANCE CORE, WEBASSEMBLY). PART OF THE CABINET — 58 FREE RETRO GAMES AT STARESBACK.GG.
FROM THE BLOG: ARE EMULATORS LEGAL? THE HONEST GUIDE · WHAT IS HOMEBREW? · HOW BROWSER EMULATION WORKS
THE MACHINE’S VERDICT
A nimble cat, an open repo, and a jam deadline — exactly the kind of tidy GBA platformer the scene is good at.
Feline is Jono Shields (foopod)'s MIT-licensed platformer, built in the open for GBA Jam 2021 and starring a cat with more agility than ego. The GBA's annual gbadev jams have a habit of producing genuinely sharp work, and Feline fits that lineage: a focused, character-driven platformer made fast and given away freely, source and all.
The strengths are the jam strengths — it knows what it is and doesn't overreach. The limitation is the same coin's other face: this is a compo entry, scoped to a deadline, not a sprawling adventure, so don't arrive expecting a campaign. If you want a short, well-built platformer with an appealing mascot and zero friction to play, it delivers. That it's open-source is a quiet bonus for anyone curious how GBA games get made.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 7/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Feline is a platformer game built by Jono Shields (foopod) and released in 2021 under MIT — meaning the developer chose to make it free and redistributable, which is the only reason it can live on this shelf. An open-source platformer starring a nimble cat, built in the open for the GBA Jam 2021 compo. A cat traverses the world with the confidence of something that has never once read a changelog. Made for a jam celebrating hardware twenty years dead. The cat remains unimpressed. It runs on the Game Boy Advance, whose annual gbadev jams have produced some of the most polished homebrew on any platform. Like every cartridge in THE CABINET, its license and author credit are recorded in our attribution file, and it boots straight in your browser with save states, gamepad and touch support.
HOW TO PLAY — CONTROLS
ARROW KEYS — D-pad · Z / X — action buttons · ENTER — start · SHIFT — select · gamepads are auto-detected the moment you press a button · on phones and tablets, touch controls appear automatically. Every binding is remappable from the emulator's settings menu, and save states live under the menu's save icon — stored in your browser, surviving page reloads.
THE FINE PRINT, IN PLAIN ENGLISH
- Am I allowed to play Feline in the browser like this?
- Yes — and so are we. The author published Feline under a license that allows free redistribution, which is the standard this whole site is built on. Credit and license live in the attribution file.
- Will it run on a phone or tablet?
- Yes. The GBA core runs in any modern browser; touch controls appear on mobile and gamepads are detected the moment you press a button.
- How do I keep my progress?
- Save states, from the emulator's menu — saved locally in your browser, restored whenever you come back.
