JunoJS

There's a particular pleasure in confirming that something built for a 13-kilobyte code jam in 2013 still runs exactly as intended in 2026, and JunoJS clears that bar cleanly. It's a tube shooter in the old-school sense — a low-poly ship flies forever down a starlit corridor, firing automatically, while a ring of white obstacle blocks scrolls toward the camera and the player's only job is to not be where they land. Robert Kotecki built it for the very first js13kgames competition, and js13kgames.com's own archived results still show it placing 2nd out of that year's 20 entries — a real, citable result from the format's founding year, not a claim to take on faith.

One mechanic, executed cleanly

There isn't much to describe mechanically because there isn't much here: drag to steer, obstacles approach in a ring, auto-fire chips away at anything in the ship's path, and the score climbs for as long as the player stays alive. Reading the shipped code confirms this is genuinely all there is — no power-up system, no weapon variety, no level structure beyond obstacles arriving in denser waves over time. For a 2013 entry built under a hard size limit that's a perfectly reasonable scope, and it's worth judging on those terms rather than against a decade of games that came after it. The low-poly ship and obstacle models (built from actual .obj files converted into inline JavaScript arrays, visible directly in the repository) hold up well, and the glowing engine trail and radial star-field give the whole thing more visual identity than the mechanic alone would suggest.

Controls actually verified, not just documented

The game's own js13k description is specific: "use mouse to move your ship left and right" on desktop, and "touch the left / right side of the screen" on mobile. Both were tested directly rather than taken on faith. On the phone profile, a real emulated touchscreen drag from the centre of the screen out to either edge smoothly moved the ship to that side of the tube, confirmed by watching it visibly relocate across three separate test sequences. On desktop, arrow-key input (a control scheme the game doesn't advertise but which works anyway) moved the ship identically, and the on-screen score climbed steadily in both cases with no stutter or dropped input. Across every one of these test runs, browser console output stayed completely clean — no errors, no failed network requests, nothing — which is a genuinely clean result for a game old enough to predate most of the web platform APIs in common use today.

The one real interface flaw worth flagging: the title screen's instruction text, "touch anywhere to play," is sized for a wider screen than a modern phone provides, and on a 390-pixel-wide viewport it runs off the right edge with the final letters cut away. It doesn't stop anyone from understanding "touch anywhere," so it isn't a functional blocker, but it's a real, easily reproduced cosmetic bug on exactly the device class this shelf cares most about.

Final verdict

JunoJS doesn't pretend to be more than it is: a tight, single-mechanic arcade toy from js13k's first year that still runs cleanly and still responds correctly to both the touch and desktop controls its author promised. The ceiling on how long it holds attention is low — there's a real lack of structure beyond "survive longer" — and the one interface bug found here is a minor but genuine rough edge. What earns this a pass rather than a miss is that the thing this shelf cares about most, whether the controls actually work on the device in front of you, checks out cleanly on both counts, backed by a real js13k placement that's stood for over a decade.