Somewhere between "we're sorry to see you go" and the fourth retention offer, everyone has had the same thought: cancelling this subscription should not be this hard. It's not your imagination, and it's not incompetence. The maze is the product.
We're ZenVisionGames, an independent studio in South Africa making small, free browser games. Our first game, Cancel My Subscription, is a love letter to that exact misery: a satirical game where the only goal is to escape ZenFlix+, a fictional streaming service that simply refuses to let you go. The full game is planned as 50 levels. As of this week, 17 of them are live — free, in your browser, no download, no account, no mercy.
This is devlog #1: why cancelling things is so hard in real life, what the game does about it, and what's inside the levels you can play right now.
Why is cancelling a subscription so hard?
The short answer: because making it hard works. Every extra screen between you and the cancel button convinces a measurable percentage of people to give up, and at subscription scale, "measurable percentage" means real money. The tricks even have a name — in 2010, UX researcher Harry Brignull started cataloguing dark patterns (now often called deceptive design patterns): interface choices built to make you do things you didn't mean to do.
A few classics you will recognise from your own cancellation attempts:
- The roach motel. Signing up takes one tap. Leaving takes a support ticket, a phone call, and a small piece of your soul.
- Confirmshaming. The decline button says something like "No thanks, I hate saving money."
- Misdirection. A huge glowing KEEP MY BENEFITS button, and somewhere beneath it, a grey whisper of a cancel link.
- Forced continuity. The free trial quietly becomes a paid plan, and the reminder email somehow never arrives.
- Nagging. Are you sure? Really sure? What if we gave you 80% off? What about now?
Regulators in the US, UK, and EU have all taken shots at subscription traps in recent years, and "click-to-cancel" rules keep being proposed, passed, and fought over. In the meantime, the flows haven't exactly gotten friendlier. We could have written an angry essay about all this. Instead, we built a satire you can click.
So we made it a game
Cancel My Subscription drops you into the account page of ZenFlix+ with one job: cancel. Every level is one screen of the cancellation flow, and every screen is a real dark pattern pushed about ten percent past parody — which, we've learned, is a worryingly short distance. Three rules guide every level we build: it must be beatable (frustration is the joke, not the outcome), it must be fair (no random failure, ever), and it must work on a phone just as well as on a desktop.
Play the game this post is about — free, in your browser, no sign-up.
Play Cancel My SubscriptionLevels 1–10: the polite phase
The first ten levels are the "normal" cancellation flow — the stuff every real service puts you through, tuned to be just annoying enough to be funny. You hunt down the cancel button hiding in a cheerful membership page. You confirm that you really, truly want to leave. You type the word CANCEL "for your security". You sit through a cancellation hearing to justify your reasons, acknowledge the cancellation terms, and untick the pre-ticked marketing checkboxes that grew back when you weren't looking.
Then it escalates, politely: a "quick security check" to prove you're not a robot, a signature you must reproduce to confirm your identity, a receipt ID buried in your billing history, and finally the assembly of a complete cancellation packet — every verified document, compiled for "final processing". Ten levels in, you have done more paperwork than most people do to buy a car. ZenFlix+ is very proud of you.
Levels 11–17: the form starts getting weird
This is the batch we've shipped over the last few weeks, and it's where the game stops imitating real cancellation flows and starts dreaming about what they'd do if they could get away with it:
- Level 11 — Verify the packet weight. Your cancellation packet must weigh exactly 1,000.000 grams. You balance it using an assortment of office counterweights, to the milligram.
- Level 12 — Reject the retention offers. Three escalating waves of discounts, bundles, and heartfelt pleas. Accept a single one and the cancellation is off.
- Level 13 — Complete the approved reason. Reconstruct a 40-character, corporate-approved cancellation reason before the retention department finishes sketching your replacement on their whiteboard.
- Level 14 — Revise your cancellation reason. Tone review. "Too expensive" is far too blunt; the form suggests something with more synergy in it.
- Level 15 — Choose a cancellation date. Calculate the correct date from a renewal memo, physically tear the desk calendar to that page, then stamp and file the result. Bureaucracy as a physical activity.
- Level 16 — The Cancellation Slot Machine. Corporate policy requires the reels to land on CANCEL, CANCEL, CANCEL. You time all three yourself.
- Level 17 — Cancellation Pachinko. A real physics simulation. Time a moving launcher and drop your cancellation request through a pin board, hoping it lands in the CANCEL department and not in "Upgrade".
Level 17 was the most fun to build — it runs on a proper 2D physics engine, so the ball bounces differently every attempt. It's also, we admit, the first level where the metaphor escaped the building entirely. No real streaming service makes you play pachinko to cancel. Yet.
The road to 50 levels
The plan from here is where things get properly interactive. The next batches bring three suspiciously similar plan names to untangle, discounts that must be declined without accidentally accepting them, and buttons that start fighting back — moving, cloning, and swapping places mid-click. After that come stacked requirements (keep the slider steady while typing the confirmation phrase while the support bot asks one last question), and finally a ten-level gauntlet that ends, if you survive it, with an official Cancellation Certificate.
We ship levels in small batches every few weeks, tuning each one until it's funny-frustrating rather than frustrating-frustrating. The homepage always shows the current state of the game, and each batch will get a devlog like this one.
The next batch is now in development. Read Devlog #2: when the buttons started fighting back for a detailed look at the subscription dark patterns and design decisions behind Levels 18–23.
Play it, break it, tell us about it
Cancel My Subscription is free to play right now — 17 levels, in your browser, on any device, no download and no sign-up. If you find a bug, get stuck, or have an idea for a cancellation torture we haven't thought of, we genuinely want to hear it. The best level ideas so far have come from people describing real cancellation flows that we initially refused to believe were real.
Quick questions
Is Cancel My Subscription free to play?
Yes — completely free. Nothing to download or install, no account, no paywall. Open the game page and play.
How many levels does it have?
The full game is planned as 50 levels. As of July 2026, the first 17 are live, and new batches ship every few weeks.
What are dark patterns?
Interface tricks designed to make you do things you didn't mean to do — like staying subscribed to something you tried to cancel. The term was coined by UX researcher Harry Brignull in 2010.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes. Every level is built to work in mobile, tablet, and desktop browsers.