CSS Clicker

Every so often a web toy shows up making a claim daring enough that it demands to be checked rather than taken on faith, and "an entire incremental game with no JavaScript at all" is exactly that kind of claim. CSS Clicker's own in-game FAQ dares the player to turn scripting off and see for themselves, which is a confident thing to say about a game that has to increment a growing number every time the player clicks. Reading the source rather than just believing the pitch: it holds up. The single <script string anywhere in the file sits inside an HTML comment as a joke aimed at anyone who searches for it, and the actual counter mechanism is a genuinely clever piece of CSS engineering — nested chains of invisible radio buttons, each layer named for a digit's place value, stacked exactly on top of each other so that whichever one is currently "next" is the only one a click can land on. Every view earned nudges the chain along one radio at a time. It's a real answer to a problem CSS was never designed to solve, verified by reading the markup rather than trusting the pitch.

A genuinely well-made toy about the history of the web

Once past the framing device, what's underneath is a properly-built incremental game rather than a tech demo with a counter bolted on. There are dozens of upgrades running from a first purchase at 10 views up to a capstone at 5,000,000, and — reading the full upgrade list in the source rather than just the first screen — they aren't just bigger numbers with new labels. They trace a loose, funny history of personal websites: custom cursors and a guestbook early on, Winamp and a Geocities-styled "design system" in the middle, a pointed joke about a botnet, and later unlocks for Bootstrap, Material Design and Tailwind CSS as the site "matures." The presentation sells the joke: the whole game runs inside a mockup of an old CRT monitor showing a fake browser window, complete with a cursor-chasing oneko cat (correctly credited to its original author) and a scatter of properly-sourced 88x31 web badges pulled from an established public collection built specifically for that kind of reuse, not lifted from anywhere without permission. It's a well-crafted, funny little museum piece for anyone who remembers what those things looked like, or wants to know.

What the author says about phones, and what testing found

Buried in the in-game FAQ — reachable from the "FAQ" tab once the intro finishes — is a question asked directly: "Does this game work on mobile?" The answer, in the developer's own words: "It's definitely a game intended for desktop browsers, and I wouldn't recommend playing on mobile, but I've added a few tweaks to make it playable on Android phones running Chrome or Firefox. I have not been able to test it on Safari (neither desktop nor mobile), so ymmw there." That is about as plain a first-party statement as a review is ever handed, and it's worth taking at face value rather than assuming the tweaks cover the gap.

Testing on a simulated 390x844 touchscreen backs it up. The game opens on an elaborate, roughly 15-second CSS keyframe intro — title cards, a "no-js game" gag, a JS logo crossed out — gated behind :focus and :active CSS selectors on an anchor element. On repeated runs, tapping into that sequence before it settled did not reliably advance it; more than one run landed squarely on the developer's own diagnostic fallback screen, which reads in full: "If you're seeing this screen, then either you're on mobile or there was a problem loading the page or starting the intro animation. Tap this screen to bypass it... TODO: try setting focus attribute on a random element hopefully it'll fix mobile refresh." That TODO is still sitting in the shipped file. Recovering from it took several more deliberate taps and roughly 20 seconds before the real game screen ever appeared — a rough, fragile on-ramp for a phone player who has no reason to expect a "Click to start" prompt to need that much patience. Once through, the actual gameplay screen does show a considerate "Playing on mobile? The screen can get a little cramped, so use the collapse button if necessary" tip and a clear "Click here" tutorial bubble, which suggests real thought went into the phone pass — it just doesn't survive first contact reliably in the one place that matters most for this shelf: getting in the door.

No save, and a narrow browser guarantee

Two more limits worth being direct about. There is no progress-saving of any kind — the FAQ says so outright, and a refresh or an accidental tab close means starting over from zero views, no exceptions. And the "About" tab states the game was developed and tested only against Chrome 134–136 and Firefox 136 on desktop, adding that "other browsers may encounter weird issues, sorry." Neither is a defect exactly — they're honestly disclosed constraints of a hobby project — but they both cut against recommending it broadly rather than to the specific audience it was built for.

The verdict

As a piece of CSS engineering, CSS Clicker earns its GitHub stars and its "presents" title cards. As a game to hand someone on their phone — which is the entire premise of this shelf — it is working against its own author's stated intentions and, in testing here, against its own code's reliability. That split is the whole review: genuinely original and well-made, and genuinely not meant for the device this section serves first.