A Guide to Playing Flash Games in 2025

[SylverReZ]

Gaming Heaven has now added the ability to upload and play Flash games straight from your computer. Whether you wish to re-live your nostalgia from it, or want to play something you haven't heard of before, we've got it. Not many people have any idea on how they can achieve this, so I have put together a shortened beginners guide for how to play Flash games in the modern era due to Adobe abandoning Flash Player after 5-years as of writing.

Modern Browsers (recommended)​

By December, 31st 2020, Adobe has ended support for the Flash Player plug-in for all current browsers due to vulnerable security risks associated with it (as well as all applications that support Flash). But thanks to the on-going team at the Ruffle project, it is now possible to play Flash files again with the use of the Ruffle plug-in/extension, which can be installed to the browser of your choice - Firefox, Edge or Chrome.

1. Install the Ruffle extension for your browser (Firefox / Edge / Chrome).
2. In the top-bar of the Gaming Heaven website, navigate to "Resources," then under the "Categories" tab, select 'Flash Games'.
3. Click on the Flash game from the list you wish to play; on the game page, click the 'SWF URL' link to load the Flash game into another tab.

Standalone (Windows)​

1. Download the Flash Player standalone application (here).
2. In the top-bar of the Gaming Heaven website, navigate to "Resources," then under the "Categories" tab, select 'Flash Games'.
3. Click on the Flash game from the list you wish to play; on the game page, click the 'SWF URL' link to download the (.SWF) file to your hard disk.
4. To play Flash games, drag-and-drop the (.SWF) file onto the standalone executable, or launch the Flash Player standalone application and then drag-and-drop the file to the main projector window.

If you consider about inserting the game into the standalone Flash Player program, perform the following steps:

1. Drag-and-drop the (.SWF) file into the projector main window.
2. Navigate to 'File,' and select the "Create Flash Projector" item from the drop-down list.
3. Save it with the desired name that you choose, for example the game's title (be careful not to overwrite the main Flash Player executable).
4. Because it is contained within the projector you have generated, it will now automatically launch into your game each time you start your created projector EXE.

 

[SylverReZ]

@ciro64 I would appreciate pinning this to the top of the forum page, I think it would truly benefit some people.

 

[ciro64]

Thanks a lot for writing this SylverRez! Gives me encouragement to keep going with stuff here c:

Flash games hosted here should be working out of the box with modern browsers, as I configured the template page to embed ruffle automatically with them. If they aren't, something is wrong :O (and they usually are when I'm doing maintenance)

I might add some quality of life stuff later, such as changing the player size, fullscreen or maybe even gamepad controls. It seems the Ruffle API is quite fully fledged.

But it's awesome having this guide. The more options and flexibility we have, the better!