Jumpman

Jumpman doesn't disguise its inspiration: a red-capped hero runs across brick platforms, stomps small brown enemies, breaks question blocks for coins, and walks toward a castle with a flagpole outside it. It's a direct, competent homage to Super Mario Bros.'s first level, built as one of the smaller entries in Frank Force's open-source LittleJS Arcade collection, and on a keyboard it plays exactly the way that description suggests — run and jump, snappy when you let go of the jump button early, floatier when you hold it, precisely the input feel the source comments describe as "SMB-style tuning."

The one button that doesn't work

This shelf exists to catch exactly the failure mode this game has. The touch overlay looks right: touching the bottom-left corner of the screen produces a real analog/digital d-pad, and dragging it steers the character with the same responsiveness as the keyboard. That was directly confirmed — the world visibly scrolled and the character moved right and left as the stick was dragged, using Chromium's real touch input pipeline rather than a synthetic click.

The jump button, on the same overlay, does not work. This isn't a single failed attempt: testing computed the exact hit-test coordinates from the engine's own published logic (the touch gamepad resolves a touch to a face button by distance from the button cluster's center, using a published touchGamepadSize constant), tried the mathematically dead-center point of the button zone, tried both face button regions, and used two different real-touch dispatch mechanisms — a discrete press-and-release and a held drag, the exact same drag mechanism that reliably drives the movement stick moments earlier in the same test run. Every attempt left the character standing flat-footed on the ground. Keyboard jump on desktop, tested the same way, worked immediately and visibly. The touch stick works. The touch buttons do not.

Why this is disqualifying here, specifically

A platformer is definitionally a game about jumping. Steering left and right without being able to jump gets a player exactly as far as the first gap in the platform, the first pipe, or the first enemy — which in Jumpman's single level is a matter of seconds. This is the same category of failure this shelf has rejected before under a different shape: a touch surface that handles one axis of control convincingly while leaving the genre-defining action unreachable. It doesn't matter that the rest of the implementation — the movement feel, the pixel art, the SMB-accurate jump arc — is genuinely solid, because none of it is reachable on a phone past the opening steps.

Verdict

Jumpman is a well-made keyboard platformer let down by a touch control scheme that looks complete and isn't. The movement half of its virtual gamepad works exactly as it should; the jump half, tested thoroughly and by multiple methods, does not respond to touch input at all. Recommended on a keyboard. Not recommended, in its current state, on the device this shelf is built around.