Game progress is temporarily stored via the various yellow rhombus checkpoints in each level which allows the ball to respawn at the location of the last collected rhombus (turning into a red downwards arrow once collected and disappearing after the next one is collected) once it loses a life, until all lives are lost which ends the game. Touching an enemy will burst the red ball and a life will be lost, these can be regained or increased by collecting light blue balls with the same colour as the background up to a maximum of five.

Enemies come in the form of static yellow coloured spikes (called 'candles') as well as spiky blue moving objects (commonly referred to as 'spiders' by the game fanbase) which move along a designated path either left-right, top-bottom or diagonally at various speeds. To pass each level the red ball must go through all hoops in that level thus opening the grey door to the next level, having three lives initially as indicated by the three red balls at the bottom of the screen above the remaining number of hoops required to go through in that level (one removed each time one is passed through) and the 8-digit score on the right. It came pre-loaded on many Nokia mobile phones and is considered one of the most well-known Nokia mobile games along with Snake.

In the original Bounce game the player controls a red ball using the four arrow keys on the Nokia mobile phone through many levels in a 2D side-scrolling game world.

Games like red ball bounce