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Google's home page features a Google Doodle Olympics game right now, and it's definitely worth taking five minutes out of your day to check it out.
When you head to Google's homepage, a lot of the time its logo will have been tweaked to fit a certain theme. To celebrate a particular holiday or reflect something happening in the world. Unsurprisingly, when you head to Google today, its logo has been changed to celebrate the start of the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
However, don't head to Google if you're about to search for something important and an addictive game unexpectedly blocking your path will disrupt your day. That will have happened to a lot of people already today. Google's logo hasn't just been transformed into an interactive image. It's a fully-fledged Olympics RPG with a cat as its star. It even includes cutscenes.
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The game is called Doodle Champion Island Games and unlike other games Google has featured on its homepage, this is going to take more than a couple of minutes to playthrough. It even has an autosave feature, allowing you to go ahead and search for whatever it was you came to Google for and then revisit the game's island, and its adorable cat protagonist, whenever you next have a few minutes to spare.
The cat's name is Lucky by the way, and you can use Lucky to traverse the island competing in Olympic sports, unlocking secret areas, and even completing side quests. The seven sports available to play are table tennis, rugby, synchronized swimming, archery, climbing, marathon running, and skateboarding. There's also an achievements room and an array of references to Japanese culture and folklore throughout. Plus, you can play the whole thing with nothing more than your arrow keys and space bar.
It's unclear how long Doodle Champion Island Games will be sticking around. Google tends to change its logo's theme from one day to the next. It would be a shame if something that has clearly had so much work poured into it was only available for 24 hours. At the very least we're hoping it sticks around for the duration of the Olympics so as many people as possible can enjoy it. The games certainly have a strong video game theme already, with a number of iconic tracks for various games featured during today's opening ceremony.