RPS

RPS is a small arcade game Quinten Clause built for itch.io's Weekly Game Jam 154, themed around rock-paper-scissors, and the author's own README says as much about its scope as any review could: it was sized deliberately small enough (an 11KB zip) to double as a warm-up exercise for js13k, the annual 13-kilobyte web game competition. That context matters, because it explains both what the game does well and how much of it there simply isn't.

The one thing tested here that actually matters: controls

This shelf exists because Flash games can't be played on a phone, so controls get weighted heavily in every review here, and RPS's control scheme was worth taking seriously on its own terms. The README claims the player shape "moves to the horizontal position" of a finger tap and that you "don't have to release your finger" — both claims were tested directly rather than taken on faith. A sequence of alternating taps at the left and right edges of the play area repositioned the player shape to each tap's x-coordinate cleanly and repeatedly, with no need to lift the finger between moves, exactly as described.

Desktop took more digging to get right. A single discrete mouse click did nothing at all — the player shape stayed dead center regardless of where the click landed, and a passive mousemove with no button held did nothing either. What does work, confirmed by two separate tests, is a genuine mouse-drag (button held down while the cursor moves) and holding an arrow key, both of which drove the shape smoothly to the left edge of the screen. The README's claim that "keyboard and gamepad also work" checks out for keyboard; gamepad was not testable in this environment and is not claimed as verified here.

Past the controls, there isn't much game

An extended run — repeatedly dodging left and right against a stream of falling rock, paper and scissors icons — surfaced how thin the actual loop is. The on-screen SCORE counter sat at 0 for the entire session while HISCORE quietly changed from 0 to 1 at some point during play, with nothing on screen to explain what caused it. Eventually a collision ended the run, and the game gave no acknowledgment of that at all: no game-over screen, no final tally, just a silent cut back to the "RPS / Tap to Start!" title card. For a game built around a decision rule everyone already knows — rock beats scissors, paper beats rock, scissors beats paper — none of that logic is ever shown to the player while it's happening; there's no on-screen cue for which of the falling shapes is currently safe to touch and which one ends the run, so the RPS theme sits on top of a generic dodge-the-falling-objects template rather than growing out of it.

Visually, the game is four white line-drawn icons (a pair of scissors, a folded paper shape, a rock-like blob for the player, and matching enemy variants) on a single flat teal background, with no animation beyond straightforward vertical falling. That's a reasonable amount of art for a 13KB budget, but it leaves nothing to look at once the shapes themselves stop being novel, which in testing was well under a minute.

Verdict

RPS is honest about what it is: a code warm-up, not a finished game, and it should be judged as one. The control layer is the one part that got real engineering attention, and it holds up under testing on both phone and desktop once you find the right desktop input (drag or keyboard, not a plain click). Everything wrapped around that control layer — scoring, feedback, difficulty, the actual rock-paper-scissors decision the theme promises — is either missing or too opaque to register during play. It's a fine five-minute curiosity and a clean citation for "drag-to-move touch controls done right," but not a game with enough underneath that to earn a shelf slot.