Hero Rescue

Search for Hero Rescue and every result shows the same picture: a knight in armour, a pool of lava, a cart of gold, a couple of goblins. Open this one and there is no knight anywhere. There is a balding man in a shirt holding a bunch of red flowers, a woman in a red dress on the other side of a glass wall, and between them a burglar in a striped jersey with a guard dog at his feet. The title screen still shows a king and a queen — the last trace of the game this was supposed to be.

The mechanic underneath is the one everybody recognises. Brass pins hold the walls, the floors and the bombs in place, and pulling one hands whatever it was holding to gravity. On level 1 there is a single pin and pulling it is the whole puzzle. By level 17 you have a three-by-three grid of rooms, half a dozen pins, two burglars, a dog, a bomb and a crossbow aimed across the bottom floor, and the order you choose is the difference between a wedding and a funeral. The physics are real — LayaAir's Box2D layer — and the characters walk a route through the rooms you open rather than play a fixed animation.

It was published on 24 August 2020 by Codo Studio, and the studio is part of the story. It has no website, and its entire GameMonetize catalogue is six browser games that read like a snapshot of what was going viral in 2020: a browser Pou, an Elastic Man, a Homescapes — the match-3 whose adverts made the pin puzzle famous in the first place — and three pull-the-pin games, of which this is one. Two honest notes before you start: there are no coins, no shop and no unlockables, just the words "YOU WIN!" and a Next button, and the whole thing is short-session by design.

Hero Rescue and Hero Rescue Puzzle are two different games from the same week

This is the question people arrive with, so here is the flat answer: they are two separate games by the same studio, one day apart. Codo Studio put Hero Rescue on GameMonetize on 24 August 2020 and Hero Rescue Puzzle on 25 August 2020. They share a mechanic and nothing else.

	Hero Rescue (this page)	Hero Rescue Puzzle
Published	24 August 2020	25 August 2020
Setting	Contemporary — a house, a street, a man in a shirt	Fantasy — a stone tower
Who you are saving	A woman, reached by a man carrying flowers	A knight, sent down to the treasure
What is in the way	Burglars, guard dogs, bombs, an arrow trap	Lava, water, goblins, treasure carts
The classic trap	Opening a wall before dealing with the burglar	Releasing lava before you release the water
Reward for a win	None — a "YOU WIN!" card and Next	Coins, roughly ten a level
Level structure	Thirty layouts, then they loop	A level grid you can jump back into
Ads	One before the first level	Between levels

If you want the knight and the lava, that is the other page. If you want the one where the correct move is dropping a bomb on a man in a striped jersey, you are already here.

Thirty rooms, and then it starts over

Every level is a grid of rooms, and the game carries a fixed table of thirty of them. What is in that table tells you exactly how long the game is.

• Level 1 is a one-by-two: two rooms, one pin. It exists to teach you the drag.
• Level 2 adds a room on top, three pins and the first burglar — the level that introduces bomb-before-wall.
• Level 13 is the odd one out: a single column five storeys tall, with no horizontal moves at all. It is the only shape of its kind in the table.
• The biggest levels are three-by-three, nine rooms, and four of them carry up to four extra pins on top of the walls.
• After the thirtieth, the layouts repeat. The counter keeps climbing, so you will see LEVEL 34 and LEVEL 58, but the grid underneath is the fourth and the twenty-eighth design coming round again.

Thirty genuine puzzles, and after that a scoreboard. That is a short game and there is no reason to pretend otherwise — but thirty hand-built layouts is more than most free browser copies of this genre bother with.

Why there are half a dozen games called Hero Rescue

There is a documented answer, and it is that the genre was reverse-engineered out of an advert.

The pin puzzle was marketing fiction first. Zdenko Mago traced it for Communication Today in 2020: the earliest known appearance is a video called "How to loot?", posted to the Facebook page of the RPG Hero Wars around May 2019. Hero Wars is an idle auto-battler. It did not contain that puzzle. The puzzle existed to be clicked on. What happened next explains the name collisions:

• 16 January 2020 — the Berlin studio Popcore released Pull the Pin, the first game built on the mechanic and named after it.
• A month later — Moscow's Kometa.Games released Rescue Knight, wrapping the idea in the visual style of the Hero Wars adverts and adding a fake IQ score at the end of each level.
• Under three weeks after that — Hanoi's Super Game Studios released a Hero Rescue that copied Rescue Knight closely enough for the knight to keep the same scar across his eye, with the goal switched to rescuing a princess.
• End of March 2020 — a studio called Mini-Dev put out its own Hero Rescue and a Save the Girl; both vanished from Google Play shortly afterwards.
• May and June 2020 — Lion Studios released Pull Him Out and Supersonic released Love Pins. Pull Him Out advertised itself as the real game from all those adverts.
• By 9 August 2020 — searching "pull the pin" on Google Play returned 250 results, 106 of them showing the mechanic in the app icon.

Codo Studio's two browser versions landed two weeks after that count was taken. Mago's conclusion is that the adverts created enough demand to establish a new independent puzzle sub-genre — a polite way of saying a fake game became a real one because enough people tried to play the advert.

The joke is in the tail. The video ad served in front of this game, on the first load of our session, was a Hero Wars creative captioned "TRY TO GET THE LOOT", showing a knight and a column of pins. The advert that started the genre still runs on top of the games descended from it.

Playing Hero Rescue unblocked at school

Hero Rescue is a single HTML5 page — no plugin, no installer, no account, no download — which is why it turns up on the sites students share with each other and why "hero rescue unblocked" gets typed into school Chromebooks all day.

The build here is the standard one, running inside this page, and it saves progress in the browser: close the tab in a hurry, come back later, press Start and you are on the level you left. Two notes for a school machine. The one video ad appears before level 1 and is skippable after a few seconds, and the TIP button spends another video — so on a slow connection it is faster to think than to ask for the hint.

More pull-the-pin puzzles here

Codo Studio only made six browser games and two more of them are here: Hero Rescue Puzzle, the fantasy sibling from the following day, and Pull Him Out Online, which sends a hunter down a shaft after buried gold.

The rest of the family is worth a look for how differently one idea can be dressed. Pull The Pin is the stripped-back, purely geometric version with no story at all, Love Pins is the romance branch closest to the cast in this game, and Save The Girl trades pins for a fork in the road. All of them, and a good deal more logic, sit in the puzzle category.

1. Read the room before you touch a pin. Find the man, find the woman, then find everything that can kill him. The puzzle is not "which pin", it is "in what order".
2. Kill the threat first. A bomb suspended above a burglar is not decoration. Drop it before you open any wall, because the moment a wall goes the man starts walking.
3. Then open the path. Wall and floor pins are the last ones you touch. Once the corridor between the two of them is clear, they find each other on their own.
4. Drag, do not tap. The pin has to move about ten pixels under your pointer before the game registers a pull. Grab it, flick it, let go.
5. Restart without guilt. The circular arrow at the top right resets the level instantly. No lives, no timer: a wrong order costs you ten seconds.

Four things the game never tells you:

• The animated hand only appears on levels 1 and 2. Those two run in a guided mode that points at the pin to pull. From level 3 the hand is gone for good, which is why level 3 feels like a jump.
• TIP costs you a video. The film-icon button plays a rewarded ad and marks the correct pin — and while that hint is active the game locks you to it. Every other pin rattles in place and plays a dull thud instead of coming out.
• Height beats cleverness. When two pins look equally plausible, pull the higher one. Everything here falls, so the upper pin changes the board while the lower one usually just opens a door you were not ready to open.
• Dogs are not burglars. A burglar stands still and waits. A dog moves, so a floor you open to drop something on it may simply let it into the room you were protecting.