Yes, you can play the Friday Night Funkin demo on a Chromebook right now

I’m going to come clean right off the bat, here: I had no idea Friday Night Funkin existed before this morning. As a routine thing around our office, I was checking in on Google Trends to see what the internet was interested in this fine 4th day of May, 2021. To my surprise, one of the breakout topics relating to Chromebooks and Chrome OS was a game called Friday Night Funkin and, of course, I set out to figure out what exactly that is.

Those sentences up there may be showing my age a bit, but after some digging around I learned a few things about this quirky little game and what is being planned. First and foremost, the game (or, more specifically, the full game) isn’t actually available yet. It is a Kickstarter project that has FAR exceeded its initial goal of $60,000 – raising a whopping $1.7 million dollars – and is set to end funding in just two weeks. It is unclear from the Kickstarter page when we should expect the actual launch of the game, but I’d imagine it’ll be a bit.

In the meantime, the creators of the game posted a playable demo over on Newgrounds and you can play it in your browser right now. Hit that link and you can begin experiencing the odd-yet-satisfying gameplay of Friday Night Funkin for yourself. It is important to know this is just a demo and the developers won’t make the web version into what the full version of the game will eventually become. Instead, this playable web game gives people like me (and probably like you) a really good, quick experience of what the game will generally be like when it releases. There’s plenty of content already here to enjoy yourself for a bit, so it’s a fantastic way to experience a game prior to release without the need to install or download anything.

According to the Kickstarter page, the game will ship on Steam, iOS and Android out of the gate, so that means it should work on a Chromebook when it does release if this sort of rhythm game is your jam. The game works great in the browser with keyboard input already, so I’m very hopeful that the Android version takes Chromebooks into consideration and keeps the keyboard support intact for Chrome OS.

When it does launch, we’ll be ready to try it out and let you know how it goes, for sure. Again, the web version you can play right now is a basic look at gameplay. The developers have a long list of what the base game will include when it launches, and the additions are numerous. Expect things like more songs, a story mode, additional gameplay mechanics outside of the 4-button setup you currenlty get, cutscenes, local 2-player, playable characters, online leaderboards, a better interface, great mod support, and more.

For now, you can enjoy a bit of Friday Night Funkin over at Newgrounds and keep a keen eye on the Kickstarter page for updates. It looks like the funding has happened swiftly, starting on April 18th, 2021, so there is much work still to be done. The first goal is to get the mobile version of the game out, but according to the FAQ, they want to implement a few of the longer-range goals into the mobile app before shipping it. When that does happen, we’ll be sure to get our hands on a copy of it and let you know how it goes on whatever Chromebook is on our desk at the time.