Directory Dash is a free, single-page browser game built as a satirical launch-week toy for founders who have ever submitted a product to a startup directory. There is no install and no account: you type your own startup's domain into the homepage, and it becomes a cube that has to run, jump, and dodge its way through 10 fictional startup directories to get listed.
The obstacles are all drawn straight from the real submission grind, just turned into a platformer: fake red spikes for outright rejections, one-star review stars, captcha blocks that are solid and landable, cookie and newsletter popups that block your path, falling category dropdowns, slow "pending review" zones that cut your speed, and speed portals that represent absurd "expedited review" upsells (priced deliberately far above any real SaaS plan, so nobody mistakes them for a real offer). Along the way you can also collect backlink tokens, because of course a directory game would gamify backlinks.
Controls are as simple as they get: one tap, click, or any key jumps, and holding it down keeps you jumping. It works the same way on desktop and mobile. The first few directories are gentle, with generous timing windows, but the back half of the run gets genuinely brutal, with three-to-five-frame jump windows. Every one of those sections has been solver-verified to be beatable, and simply holding the jump button down the whole time will not cheese your way through it.
Checkpoints are on by default, which is the forgiving way to play: each flag you pass acts as a save point, and dying just respawns you a couple of blocks earlier instead of sending you back to zero. Turning checkpoints off is the deliberate hard mode, and it restarts your run from scratch. Finishing with checkpoints on still counts, but the game marks it honestly on your result card as a checkpoint finish rather than pretending it was the full unassisted run. Clearing all ten directories with checkpoints off is treated as a small miracle and gets its own celebration screen.
Whether you finish, give up, or just walk away and leave the tab open overnight, every run produces a permanent, shareable result card with its own link, plus a spot on a live, public leaderboard of the Most Rejected Startups (ranked by domain), alongside separate boards for the best runs with and without checkpoints. Share buttons post directly to X and LinkedIn, with a plain "copy results" button as a fallback.
Directory Dash is made by Blastra, an AI tool that actually automates real product submissions to real startup directories. This game is the comic, nothing-at-stake version of the exact same process Blastra handles for real founders, and the page says so plainly: nothing here is a real directory, and nothing is actually submitted anywhere. It exists purely so that anyone who has lived through an actual launch week can laugh at a slightly exaggerated version of it, for free, in under two minutes.
