What kind of game "Nom-Nado: Hungry Tornado" is: food sizes, combos and how to level a town in 90 seconds

There is an old arcade formula: you are small and hungry, everything around you is big, and eating is the only way to survive. Here it is built into a tornado over a town that is generated from scratch every run — and it works exactly as hypnotically as it did in 2004.

What this game is

Nom-Nado: Hungry Tornado is an arcade about a hungry vortex. Ninety seconds, one town, one rule: the funnel only takes what is smaller than it. You start as a pathetic dust devil that cannot lift a picket fence, and by the end you have to reach EF5 and carry office towers away.

How to play: briefly

1. Food comes in six sizes, and size is the only thing that matters: fence, shrub, mailbox, hydrant, hay bale, boulder and park bench are edible from the first second and worth 10.

2. Everything above that is gated by power: trees and streetlights want 6, sedans and garden sheds 14, family homes and barns 30, the corner store 60, and an office tower 105 — 1500 points a piece.

3. Cows are their own category: 500 points and +3 power, and they come loose at EF1. The report lists them as "cows abducted", not eaten.

4. Combo: every item eaten within 2.2 seconds adds 0.08 to the score multiplier, up to x3. Spin hungrily over an empty lot and it drops to nothing.

5. The EF thresholds are 10, 24, 48, 90 and 150 power, and every new level hands back 10 seconds on the timer. Growing is literally your time.

6. The town is freshly generated every run: a 36-by-36 street grid, downtown in the core, a farmland ring outside, all of it from a random seed.

7. The weather follows the storm: the sky darkens with your EF rating, lightning starts at EF4, and the thunder arrives a quarter second later, like in real life.

Controls

Controls:

• WASD or arrows — steer the funnel
• or hold and drag the mouse: the direction is read from where you pressed
• on a phone any point on the screen works — the joystick appears under your finger
• Enter or Space — start and go again, M — sound

A few tips for the road

• Do not start in the middle: downtown is all towers, and the first thirty seconds would be nothing but "too big... for now". Clear the suburbs on snacks, then come back for the houses.
• Keep the pace rather than the average size: fifteen fences in a row at x3 pay better than one house eaten alone.
• Do not hunt a cow on EF0 — hunt it on EF1: below power 6 it will not fit, and 500 points is not worth the seconds you spend circling it.
• Each EF level gives 10 seconds: it is cheaper to jump to the next size class right away than to finish off food that has stopped growing you.
• Watch the demo on the game page: the tornado plays itself there, and you can see the order in which it climbs from EF0 to EF5.

Ninety seconds go by faster than your first picket fence. Nom-Nado: Hungry Tornado