Mech Motion

Mech Motion is a small, sharply-made puzzle game about programming a robot with a hand of cards rather than controlling it directly. Each level drops a little wheeled robot into a grid of tiles that need clearing of "charges," and instead of driving it around live, the player drags a hand of movement cards — move forward, move two spaces, turn left, turn right — into an execution order, then presses "Go!" and watches the plan unfold. A "Rule" card sits in the corner describing a wildcard behavior (in our test level, "Turn 90° anti-clockwise upon hitting an obstacle"), which turns simple path-planning into a small logic puzzle: you have to think about what happens when your plan goes wrong, not just when it goes right. It's a clean, original concept, built in genuinely well-organized TypeScript, and it won 1st place in Gamedev.js Jam 2024's Open Source challenge for good reason.

The layout doesn't fit the phone it claims to support

The itch.io page advertises Touchscreen and Smartphone input, and the shelf's own discovery note flagged this game specifically for that claim. Testing it directly on a simulated 390×844 phone confirms the problem: the game's Phaser configuration locks the canvas to a fixed 1920×1080 resolution with FIT scaling, which means on a portrait phone it renders as a canvas measuring just 390×219 CSS pixels — confirmed directly via getBoundingClientRect() — centered in the middle of the screen with permanent black bars above and below eating roughly three-quarters of the available height. Within that cramped strip, the fanned-out hand of cards spreads wide enough that, depending on the level's shuffle, cards near the ends of the fan can extend past the left or right edge of the screen entirely — observed directly in one test run, where a "Turn" card was cut off at the image boundary. None of this is a hosting-layer bug to fix; it's how the game is built, and it makes an advertised "smartphone" experience look and feel like squinting at a filmstrip through a slot in a piece of cardboard.

The core mechanic could not be confirmed working

This is the harder, more important finding. This review's standard practice is to drive every control with real synthetic touch or mouse events and report only what was actually observed, not what the source code implies should happen. Doing that here, multiple precisely-targeted drag attempts on a visible, correctly-measured card center produced no visible change in card position or state across repeated tries, and on a separate desktop attempt, even the simpler "Go!" button tap that had worked once earlier failed to register on a second try. Reading the source shows a conventional, correctly-built Phaser pointer/drag system — the same general approach confirmed working in other reviewed titles — so this may well be an artifact of how this review's automated touch harness dispatches synthetic pointer events against this specific game's input timing, rather than a real defect a human player would hit. But this review cannot respectably claim "confirmed working" for the one interaction the whole game is built around, and per this shelf's own standard, an unconfirmed core mechanic has to be stated plainly rather than assumed in the game's favor.

Loading is also heavier than it should be for a browser puzzle game: the bundle is 33MB, mostly audio, and the level-intro reveal animation took anywhere from a few seconds to over twenty seconds to finish across repeated tests, with no clear pattern — a real signal that this game will feel inconsistent on a slower connection or an older phone, on top of the layout problem above.

Where that leaves it

A 6.0 reflects a genuinely clever, well-crafted puzzle concept and clean presentation, held below the shelf's pass mark by a fixed-aspect layout that wastes most of a phone's screen and — more importantly — a core drag mechanic this review could not get to visibly respond despite real, repeated attempts. Licensed MIT by the developer via package.json (no separate LICENSE file present), so reuse is not in question; what's in question is whether this plays the way its own itch.io page claims on the device this shelf cares most about. It doesn't clear that bar today.