Humwin & Darbold

Humwin is a small, friendly robot dropped onto a strange planet to find his exploring partner Darbold, who's gone quiet. The whole game is walking that world — a striking pink sky over a purple, softly glowing landscape, stylised alien flora, and the occasional creature to route around — and for the first several minutes, that's a genuinely lovely thing to do.

Touch movement confirmed, extensively

This was tested properly rather than assumed from the source: a held drag gesture on a simulated touchscreen moved the robot, tracked by comparing the horizon line and surrounding plant life before and after each drag rather than trusting the character sprite's own on-screen position (which stays roughly centred while the world scrolls under it). Across two separate sessions, including one that chained eight consecutive drag gestures in the same direction, the scenery changed dramatically and consistently each time, with zero console errors anywhere in the process. That's a real, working touch implementation for the one thing this game asks of a thumb.

Where this review and the one outside account agree

Here's the honest problem: after that extended session — moving a long way across the planet, passing collectible flowers and an egg, and dodging at least one alien creature along the way — no ending, goal marker, or resolution ever appeared. That could easily be written off as this reviewer simply not finding the right path, except that the only other public account of playing this game describes precisely the same experience, unprompted, on the game's own competition page: "I picked up all the white flowers and an egg, I went through the whole area and then what? I haven't figured it out yet." Two independent playthroughs landing on the identical dead end is a real pattern, not a coincidence, and it's worth weighing heavily against a game whose entire premise is a search with an implied resolution.

It's also worth noting plainly that this is the one entry among this author's several js13k games reviewed so far without a full set of competition-judged category scores to lean on, and the one where holding the arrow keys did not move the character on desktop — touch and mouse are the confirmed input paths, not keyboard.

Final verdict

The art here is genuinely the best-looking thing found in this pass of this author's catalogue, and the touch controls that carry the whole experience were tested thoroughly and work. But a short exploration game whose entire hook is finding someone, that two separate playthroughs both failed to resolve, isn't ready to recommend without reservation. Worth another look if a clearer ending state or objective marker gets added; as it stands, this doesn't clear the bar.