N++ just hit its tenth anniversary on Steam, and to celebrate, the developers slashed the price to $3.74—a 75% discount that lasts until October 23rd. If you’re the type of person who enjoys screaming at your monitor while perfecting pixel-perfect jumps, this might be the best four bucks you spend this year.
What Makes N++ Worth Your Lunch Money
N++ is a precision platformer in the same sadistic lineage as Super Meat Boy and Celeste. You play as a tiny ninja who needs to collect all the gold in each level while avoiding mines, lasers, turrets, and physics that want you dead. One mistake sends you back to the start. No checkpoints. No second chances. Just you, your momentum, and the crushing realization that you’ve died on the same jump seventeen times in a row.
What separates N++ from other rage-inducing platformers is the momentum system. When you fall from a height and hit a slope at the right angle, your vertical speed converts into horizontal velocity, launching you across gaps or up walls. It’s physics-based platforming that rewards understanding how movement works rather than just memorizing patterns. When you nail a perfect run—converting a long fall into a speed boost that carries you through three obstacles and up to the exit—it feels incredible.
The developers describe it as “platforming at its most intense,” which is accurate if you define “intense” as “repeatedly dying to robots while questioning your life choices.” The game features hand-crafted levels, not procedurally generated nonsense, meaning each death teaches you something rather than feeling random.
From Browser Game to Steam Anniversary
N++ has been around since way before its 2015 Steam release. The original N was a free Flash browser game that became cult famous in the early 2000s for being simple, elegant, and mercilessly difficult. N+ hit Xbox 360 and PSP. Then N++ launched on PlayStation in 2015 before arriving on Steam, where it’s maintained a 95% positive review rating through a decade of players simultaneously loving and hating it.
The TEN++ update celebrating the anniversary adds new content, though the core appeal remains unchanged: hundreds of levels of ninja platforming where success depends on mastering momentum physics and accepting that you will die. A lot. The game doesn’t hold your hand or apologize for its difficulty—it just presents challenges and trusts you to figure them out.
Why People Keep Playing After Ten Years
The 95% positive rating on Steam tells you something survived a decade of players with refined tastes and shorter attention spans. What keeps N++ relevant isn’t flashy graphics or narrative depth—it’s pure mechanical satisfaction. The controls are responsive, the physics are consistent, and when you fail, you know it’s because you messed up, not because the game cheated.
There’s also the speedrunning appeal. Every level has a timer, and shaving milliseconds off your best time by optimizing movement becomes addictive once you’ve beaten it the “normal” way. The minimalist aesthetic means nothing distracts from the gameplay—just clean lines, geometric shapes, and the occasional explosion when you trigger a mine.
The game throws “inadvertently homicidal enemy robots” at you, which is a polite way of saying “things that will murder you.” Turrets track your movement. Mines detonate. Lasers sweep predictable patterns. None of them are trying to kill you personally—they’re just doing their robot jobs—but you’ll die to them hundreds of times anyway.
$3.74 Until October 23rd
The sale ends October 23rd, after which N++ returns to its regular $14.99 price. At full price, it’s still reasonable considering the content volume, but $3.74 is impulse-buy territory. That’s less than a fancy coffee, and it’ll keep you busy significantly longer (assuming you don’t rage-quit permanently after the first hour).
Whether you grab it depends on your tolerance for difficult games. If “precision platformer” makes you excited, this is an obvious purchase. If you bounced off Celeste or Super Meat Boy, N++ won’t convert you—it’s exactly as demanding as those games, just with different physics systems. But if you’re curious about what makes people obsessively replay the same level fifty times to perfect one sequence of jumps, four bucks is a cheap education.
The tenth anniversary timing makes this more than just another Steam sale. The developers spent twelve years between the 2004 browser game and the 2015 Steam version perfecting the platforming, and another ten years supporting it with updates. That’s dedication to a single gameplay concept executed as close to perfectly as possible.
For $3.74, you’re getting hundreds of hand-crafted levels, momentum-based movement that rewards mastery, and the satisfaction of finally beating that one impossible-seeming stage after your fiftieth attempt. Plus the screaming. There will definitely be screaming.