PLAY REBOUND FREE
A colorful Game Boy Color platformer from the 2021 GB Competition. Guide your bouncy hero through levels filled with timed obstacles and precision jumps, all rendered in the GBC's full color palette. Plays instantly in your browser — keyboard, gamepad, and touch supported. No download, no install, no quarters.
► PLAY NOW — IN YOUR BROWSER +25 XPMACHINE NOTE — Things bounce here, which the title already told you. It is the only platformer on this shelf with the confidence to name itself after its main mechanic instead of its protagonist. Clarity is underrated.
CARTRIDGE: Rebound — DevEd — MIT (2021). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH GAME BOY COLOR 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 bright, competent GBC platformer that names itself after its mechanic and delivers exactly that — no more, no less.
Rebound (DevEd, 2021, MIT) is a Game Boy Color platformer from the 2021 GB Competition, built around a bouncy protagonist, timed obstacles and escalating precision jumps, all rendered in the GBC's full palette. It has the confidence to name itself after its core verb rather than its hero, and the game mostly honors that clarity: the bouncing is the point, the levels exist to test it, and the color work makes good use of the hardware's sweet-spot architecture. It's a tidy, readable challenge platformer — the sort of focused entry competitions reliably produce. What it isn't is expansive. The scope is competition-sized, the idea pool is modest, and once the precision-jumping rhythm clicks there's not a lot of surprise left in the tank. Solid, cheerful, and worth a run for platforming fans and GBC homebrew browsers; a pleasant sprint rather than a journey.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 6/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Rebound is a platformer game built by DevEd 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. A colorful Game Boy Color platformer featuring a bouncy protagonist, timed obstacles, and escalating precision challenges across multiple vibrant levels. Things bounce here, which the title already told you. It is the only platformer on this shelf with the confidence to name itself after its main mechanic instead of its protagonist. Clarity is underrated. It is built for the Game Boy Color, the sweet spot of the handheld homebrew scene: friendly architecture, modern tooling, 32,768 colors. 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.
STRAIGHT ANSWERS
- Why is Rebound free — what's the catch?
- No catch: the developer chose to release it free. That's the homebrew tradition on the Game Boy Color, and the license that allows it is documented per-title in our attribution file. We add nothing — no ads in the game, no account wall.
- Does Rebound work on mobile devices?
- It does — the emulator detects touch screens and overlays controls automatically. Controllers work too, on every platform.
- Can I save mid-game?
- Yes — open the emulator menu and use save states. They persist in your browser, so you can close the tab and resume later.
