The idea
Mom needs a few things from the shops. Your little runner, a boy or a girl you make yourself, sets off down the street with Mom's list. The child runs by themselves; you steer. Change lanes, jump, slide and flip past whatever is in the way, and pick up every item Mom asked for.
Every level is a short run of one and a half to three minutes through one of ten neighbourhoods: from Doorstep Lane right outside the front door to the magic night market of Moonpocket Market. Bring home enough and you earn stars; bring home everything and Mom is very proud.
Controls
Little Errand works with a keyboard, a gamepad, a touch screen or a mouse. Each key acts once per press, and a swipe counts the moment your finger passes a short distance, so the game feels quick on phones too.
Learning as you go
The first five levels teach one move at a time. Just before you need a new move, time slows right down and a little hand shows what to do. After you have done a move twice, only the hint stays. You can skip the tutorial at any time, and the controls are always under Settings › How to play.
Pace changes and the 3-2-1
You cannot speed up or slow down yourself; the errand sets the pace. Each level moves through a fixed pattern of Normal, Fast and, from level 11, Very fast stretches. Every level always plays the same pattern, so you can learn it.
A change never comes as a surprise. Six seconds before, the game says “Speed up!” or “Slow down” with a warning sound, and in the last three seconds big 3-2-1 numbers count down in the colour of the next pace. The street is marked with a coloured band, posts and flags where the new pace starts.
Later levels add hills (uphill slows you, downhill speeds you up) and forks where you choose a way. Every branch of a fork can be run.
Bumps and falls
Bumping into something is never the end of a run. The child takes a little tumble, gets back up and blinks for a moment, during which nothing can knock them over again. There are no lives and no game over. A fall only costs the time spent on the ground, which lowers your score a little.
Puddles and mud never make you fall. They just slow you down for a moment and make steering stiff. Puddles appear from level 7 and there are more of them on rainy days; mud appears from level 9.
Mom's list and stars
Could you get some bread and milk, sweetie?
Each level asks for one kind of item, two kinds on every other level from level 5, and three kinds on every tenth level, which Mom calls a special day. There are 29 kinds of shopping, three for each neighbourhood: bread, milk and butter on Doorstep Lane, fish, shrimp and seaweed on the pier, moonberries and starsugar at the night market, and many more.
Run through an item to pick it up. At a fork the items are all on one branch, so you can always collect everything.
Apple
Banana
Berries
Bread
Butter
Candles
Carrot
Cheese
Eggs
Fish
Flour
Ginger
Glowbeans
Herbs
Honey
Lettuce
Medicine
Milk
Moonberries
Noodles
Nuts
Ribbons
Rice
Seaweed
Shrimp
Starsugar
Sweets
Tea
Tomato
If you get no stars
Never mind, let's try again together!
If any one kind is below 70%, the run ends with “Not quite enough yet” and a Try again button, and Mom says “Never mind, let's try again together!”. One star is all it takes to open the next level, and your best result on every level is kept.
Score
Your score mixes two things: how much of the list you brought home and how fast you ran compared with the level's standard time. Bring everything and beat the standard time with a boost, and the score climbs above 10,000. Falls are not counted on their own, but the time they cost shows in the score. Each level and each map has its own online leaderboard.
The milk boost
Drink a carton of milk for a burst of speed: half as fast again for fifteen seconds. You choose when, and you can use up to three per level. A tick sounds in the last three seconds. You start with nine boosts in your bag, and more are in the shop. The boost is the only way to run faster than the planned pace, so it is the key to a high score.
50 maps in 10 neighbourhoods
The town has ten neighbourhoods, and each one is visited at five times of day: Breakfast Errand, Lunchtime Errand, Supper Errand, Drizzle Day and Festival Day. That makes 50 maps of 20 levels each. Every level has its own place name, light, weather and sounds.
Level 20 of every map is a finale that ends at the neighbourhood's own landmark, such as the Clock Tower, the Striped Lighthouse or the Moon Observatory, with a short tune at the finish. Every 25th level is one of Mom's special days: her birthday, Grandma's visit, a picnic or a rainy movie night, with a special finish and extra gems on the first clear.
Difficulty climbs slowly up to level 400 and then holds steady, so the later maps are about exploring and beating your own times.
Your runner
Make your own runner: choose a boy or a girl, a skin tone, a hair colour and a name. Then dye the shirt, overalls, shoes, hair and bag in eight colours each, add one of eight patterns such as stripes, stars or clouds, and pick a pattern colour. Ready-made outfits such as Sailor, Forest and Sky are in the shop.
Mom gives a gift on the first clear of every tenth level up to level 140: a new pattern or a new pattern colour.
Gems and tickets
You earn gems by finishing levels (more for more stars), from golden items, bonus gems and Mom's special days. Gems buy colours, patterns, outfits, boosts and tickets.
Each run uses one ticket, taken fifteen seconds into the run, so leaving straight away is free. Free tickets come back over time and stop at your ticket limit, which gems can raise.
Little Errand currently has no real-money purchases and no ads.
Racing a friend
Online you can race other runners on the same level with the same layout. Start a quick race and, if nobody joins within a few seconds, ghost runners recorded from other players' best runs fill the empty seats. Or make a room and share its code with a friend, who joins by typing it in.
Runners pass through each other, so nobody can block you. The winner is the best score, not the first to the finish, so collecting Mom's list still matters most. Opening the next level always needs your own star.
Saving and settings
Play as a guest, or sign in with Google or Apple to keep your progress safe; your progress is saved on our server. To move to a new device as a guest, use a transfer code made in the game; it works for 7 days. A guest account with no activity for 7 days is deleted automatically. The game needs the internet to play.
Settings let you change the music, sound effects and ambience volumes, the graphics quality, the text and button size, full screen and reduce motion, which turns off speed lines and camera shake. The game is in 29 languages and follows your device language.
