Relic Runway

The opening two minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark have been rebuilt as a video game more times than anyone has counted: a man in a hat takes something gold out of a temple, the temple objects, and he runs. Relic Runway does not pretend otherwise. Your starting character is Jim Tomson, described in his own unlock screen as a "professor of archeology, adventurer, and very cool guy". The first location is a set of Inca ruins. The thing chasing you is a stone golem, and it is faster than you.

What separates it from the hundred other temple runners is what happens between the runs. Every idol you grab gets smashed open on the menu screen, and inside are character cards and relic fragments. Complete a whole set of eight relics and a location opens — the Great Wall of China, then the Golden Sands of Egypt, pyramids included. Collect enough cards and you unlock a runner, at a price that climbs steeply: 10 cards for Lucy Hunt, 250 for Blackbeard, 500 for an alien relic hunter from the M35 galaxy.

Underneath that is an economy with real numbers in it: seven upgrades, six paid levels each, a total bill of 379,000 coins to finish the lot. Gemioli released the game on 31 August 2019 and was still patching the code in September 2025 — six years of updates for a browser game nobody had to keep alive. It sits at 8.4 out of 10 on Y8 across 2.49 million plays and 90% from 242 votes on Snokido. And it is not a Unity build, whatever some portals claim: the whole thing is one 833 KB JavaScript file on a hand-written WebGL renderer, which is why it starts in seconds on hardware that chokes on everything else in the genre.

The archaeologist who steals a relic and runs was invented in 1981

Raiders of the Lost Ark opens in Peru in 1936. Professor Henry "Indiana" Jones reaches a hidden antechamber, swaps a small golden statue for a bag of sand, guesses the weight wrong, and spends the next ninety seconds outrunning darts, a collapsing floor and a rolling stone ball. The statue has a name: the Chachapoyan Fertility Idol. The Chachapoya were real — a culture of northern Peru, active from roughly 800 to 1400 AD, absorbed by the Inca.

Thirty years later Imangi Studios — the husband-and-wife team of Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckyanova — turned that ninety seconds into a loop that never ends. Temple Run shipped on iOS on 4 August 2011: you have stolen a golden idol, demonic monkeys want it back, and the run only stops when you make a mistake. In case anyone missed the reference, one of its unlockable characters is Montana Smith, "the second greatest explorer ever". By June 2014 the series had passed a billion downloads.

Relic Runway is the third link. It takes the premise back to Peru — Inca ruins, not the vaguely Aztec temple of Temple Run — and then does something its models never bothered with: it gets the mythology right. The Supay Mask is named for the god of the Inca underworld. Rainbow Inti is the sun god the Sapa Inca claimed descent from. Wiracocha Face is the creator deity. And one of the three characters you cannot buy with coins is Atahualpa, labelled "Great Ruler of Inca Empire" — a real man, the last Sapa Inca to rule independently, executed by Pizarro's men at Cajamarca on 26 July 1533. The Chinese and Egyptian sets get the same treatment, down to the kaginawa grappling hook and the ba figurine that stays in the tomb with a pharaoh's soul. It is a runner with footnotes.

The game quietly tunes its difficulty to you

Relic Runway keeps two hidden numbers on every player. The first is a rolling average of how far you run — not your best distance, your typical one, updated after every attempt with 30% weight on the run you just finished. The second is a difficulty threshold that starts at 400,000 distance units and never drops below 10,000.

After each run the game compares the two. Beat your own average and the threshold drops by 10,000. Fall short and it rises by 10,000. Then, during the next run, the chance that the next stretch of track is the harder variant is 90% × (distance so far ÷ your threshold). Early on you get gentle track; as you approach your personal threshold, hard segments become almost certain.

So the game never feels unfair and never feels safe. A first-timer gets an easy opening stretch because their threshold is enormous; someone ten hours in gets thrown at the difficult chunks almost immediately. Two people describing the same game will honestly disagree about how hard it is, and both will be right. It also explains the "one more go" pull: the run does not get harder because time passed, it gets harder because you got further than usual — exactly the moment you least want to stop.

Where 379,000 coins go: the seven upgrades

Each upgrade has a free starting level and six you pay for. Prices are fixed, not random.

Upgrade	What it does	Level 0 → 6	Total cost
Magnet	How long coins fly to you	12s → 30s	18,750
Shield	How long you run as a ghost	12s → 30s	18,750
Multiplier	How long the score x2 lasts	12s → 30s	43,500
Glove	How long coins count double	12s → 30s	43,500
Diamond	Coins per diamond picked up	10 → 40	73,250
Luck	Coins from smashing obstacles	x1 → x4	73,250
ATV	How long the quad bike lasts	20s → 50s	108,000

The cheap pair is not a trap. Magnet and Shield cost a quarter of what Luck and Diamond do and matter more early, because the limiting resource here is coins, not survival time.

Twenty-three runners, and the three you cannot buy

Twelve come from character cards, which drop out of idols: Lucy Hunt at 10 cards, Seeker 10 at 20, Agent Skinner at 30, the zombie Dremor at 50, the orc Trog at 70, the stranded astronaut James Cooper at 100, the elf Anielle at 150, the raptor Rapty at 200, Edward Teach — Blackbeard himself — at 250, the ballerina Katrin at 350 and the alien Stich at 500.

Three cannot be bought at any price. Atahualpa needs the complete Chief Relics set, Yakimoto the complete Ninja Equipment, Amenhotep the complete Pharaoh's Gifts. Since each relic piece needs two to eight fragments and new pieces only appear on a timer, these are the long game.

The other eight arrive with the calendar: Salma, Julius Carlyle and Jacky from Halloween pumpkins; Piper Spark, Dancy and Santa from Christmas presents; Bite Bunny from Easter eggs; and, improbably, George Washington from Independence Day ballot boxes.

Playing Relic Runway unblocked at school

There is no download, no installer, no plugin, no login and no launcher. Relic Runway is one HTML page and one JavaScript file talking to WebGL, which is why it runs on the sort of managed Chromebook that refuses everything else. Press play at the top of this page and it starts here.

One honest note: the game is genuinely touch-capable — it ships a web app manifest with portrait screenshots and "tap to break" prompts — but the build embedded here is the 800×600 desktop one, so keyboard is the intended way to play it.

More games by Gemioli

Gemioli has been shipping 3D WebGL games since 2014, and the family resemblance shows after two of them. Skate Hooligans is the closest relative — the same runner skeleton with skateboards, coins and unlockable locations. Yeti Sensation swaps the temple for snow, sly snowmen and traps. The two Top Shootout games go the other way, into a fixed-camera shooting gallery in a Wild West saloon and on a pirate ship.

If it is the temple specifically that you came for, Temple Run is the game Relic Runway is answering, and Skate Hooligans is the same studio's answer to the city runner. Or browse the whole arcade category.

1. Start running. There is no "go" key. The professor accelerates on his own and does not stop until something kills him.
2. Lean, do not steer. Left and right slide you across the path. Hold the key to stay out on the edge; release it and the runner drifts back to the middle on his own. That auto-centring is the thing most new players fight against.
3. Take the corners. At a crossroads the same two keys turn you a full 90 degrees. Miss the turn and you run into the wall.
4. Jump and slide. Up clears snakes, turtles and gaps. Down slides you under beams and spikes. Rope descents and wall climbs happen automatically.
5. Spend everything between runs. Break your idols, upgrade the stone ones to gold and the gold ones to diamond for a bigger payout, claim your finished tasks, and buy the next upgrade level.

Four things the game does not tell you:

• Buy the Magnet first, the Shield second. They are the two cheapest tracks — 18,750 coins each to max, against 43,500 for the score multiplier and 108,000 for the ATV. The Magnet is also the one that funds the other six.
• Every completed task raises your score multiplier permanently. Three tasks gets you to x2, seven to x3, twelve to x4. Tasks like "let the golem get right behind you" are worth going out of your way for, because the multiplier never resets.
• Reviving costs 500 coins times your current multiplier. So the better you get, the more expensive a second life becomes. There is a video option instead.
• The hour-long boosters from idols are the real jackpot. The Gold Cup adds +5 to your score multiplier, the Philosopher's Stone turns every stone idol on the path to gold, the Jeweler Dice triple your coins from diamonds, the King Crown adds 10 seconds to every bonus, the Can of Gasoline makes ATV rides free. Each lasts 60 minutes of real time, so break your idols when you are about to play, not when you are about to close the tab.