Chitinous Crooks

Chitinous Crooks doesn't pretend to be more than what it is: a game built in seven days for the 2015 7-Day Roguelike Challenge, and it wears the format's usual limits openly. Ten floors become seven, items and experience levels are gone entirely, and in their place is a single mechanic — each time you reach a new floor, Levi the sea-god deals you three or four random "blessings" from a shared deck, and you get to spend up to three of them before the level resets your hand. It's Slay the Spire's card logic wearing a classic @-on-a-grid roguelike's clothes, four years before Slay the Spire existed, and it's a smart enough hook to carry a short dungeon crawl on its own.

A dungeon built to be finished in one sitting, not lived in

Reading js/entities.js and js/blessings.js tells you exactly how much game is actually here: five enemy templates (a shell-blocking lobsterknight, a plain hatchling, two sideways-only crabfolk mercenaries, and a slow toxic-trailing snail) and twelve distinct blessings, shared across all seven procedurally generated floors. js/builder.js regenerates the dungeon layout fresh each level rather than hand-authoring it, which is the right call for the timeframe but also means there's no set-piece floor waiting for you near the jewel on level seven — every level looks and plays like every other one, just with your health topped up and a new hand of blessings. That is a real ceiling on how long this holds attention; a single clear or death loop runs well under twenty minutes, and the enemy and blessing pools are small enough that a second run starts to feel like the first one by around the third floor.

The part that actually earns this a place on the shelf

None of that would matter for this review if the touch implementation weren't unusually good, and it is. js/game.js wires two separate input paths into the identical handleInput call the keyboard uses: a Hammer.Swipe recognizer on the game canvas for movement (swipe in any of four directions to walk, or to attack whatever's standing in that direction), and a full row of on-screen buttons — a four-way pad, a wait button, help toggles, and nine numbered ability buttons — that appears when you tap "Show Touch Controls." This was tested directly rather than assumed from the source: swiping left into an adjacent crabfolk killed it in two swipes exactly as the Attack: 2 stat implies it should, tapping a numbered button spent a favor point and consumed that blessing (confirmed by the favor counter dropping and the blessing list refreshing), and the Blessings and Enemies help overlays opened and closed correctly by tap. Nothing needed a mouse event to work, and — unlike Emoji Minesweeper's iOS-only hold-to-flag or HTML5 Asteroids' d-pad that never appears on a phone — there is no navigator.platform or user-agent branch anywhere in this code silently switching the touch layer off for whichever device loads it. The single gap is the "look around" command, which has a keyboard binding (;) but no equivalent button; it's a convenience feature for checking a monster's name at a distance, not something the game requires to be won, so it doesn't undercut the rest of the work.

Should you play it

If you already have a phone-friendly roguelike you like, Chitinous Crooks isn't going to replace it — the content is thin and the presentation is a plain monochrome ASCII grid with no music or sound at all. But as a free ten-minute diversion with a genuinely thoughtful control scheme behind it, it's an easy recommendation, and it's a useful reference point for what "actually playable with thumbs" is supposed to look like on this shelf. The repository carries no LICENSE file of its own — only a bundled icon font's separate license — so this is hosted with Matt Walsh credited by name, a link back to his repository, and a standing same-day takedown offer, rather than under any license he actually granted.