Soyuz 404

There's a particular kind of confidence in shipping a game that fits in 13 kilobytes, and Soyuz 404 has it. Markus Fisch built this for js13kGames 2020, and rather than fight the size limit with compression tricks, he leaned into a single clean idea: everything on screen is flat, faceted vector art, and everything you do is one gesture — press and hold to look, lift your finger to act.

The setup is deadpan disaster movie: two cosmonauts, a stricken Soyuz capsule, and dialogue that reads like it wandered in from a Douglas Adams paperback ("Food, adhesive tape and a towel. It's always good to have a towel."). You advance the story and interact with the ship by holding your finger on the screen — a held press pulls up context, releasing commits to it. It's a small idea, but it's the right idea for a touchscreen, and it's rare enough to be worth calling out on its own.

Controls (8.0). This is where the game earns its keep. We tested the hold-to-explore, release-to-use gesture directly with real touch dispatch on a phone profile, not just a description taken on faith — repeated press-and-hold inputs correctly advanced the intro dialogue, and a held press over the capsule interior triggered the "look into storage" interaction, changing both the on-screen hint text and the dialogue line to match (the food/tape/towel line above is literally the result of that action, confirmed by inspecting the DOM state before and after). No dragging, no double-tap ambiguity, no dead zones. It's a mouse-era point-and-click mechanic actually rebuilt for a thumb.

Layout (pass, not scored separately). This is the detail that sinks a lot of the games we test: a correct viewport tag that doesn't actually stop the page from overflowing. Soyuz 404 doesn't have that problem. On a real 390px phone viewport, window.innerWidth and document.body.scrollWidth matched exactly — nothing off-canvas, nothing requiring a horizontal scroll to reach. The SVG scene scales to fit and stays there on both phone and desktop profiles. Zero console errors, zero page errors, zero failed requests on either device.

Visuals (8.0). Everything is rendered in crisp, flat SVG polygons — no photographic texture, no gradients doing heavy lifting, just well-chosen silhouettes and a muted olive-and-white palette that reads as "Soviet space program" without a single word of exposition. For 13KB total this is a small miracle of art direction.

Gameplay and originality (7.0 / 7.5). The moment-to-moment loop is simple: explore a scene, find the thing the game wants you to find, move on. It won't tax anyone looking for a puzzle, but the delivery mechanism — the hold/release gesture itself — is the actual point, and it's executed cleanly enough that it stands out from the pile of "adventure games" that are just menus with extra steps.

Value and replayability (6.5 / 6.5). Be clear-eyed about what this is: a competition entry built to a byte budget, not a full release. It's a short sit, there's no meta-progression, and there isn't a strong reason to play it twice. That's a fair trade for something free, public domain, and this polished, but it caps the score rather than a game we'd tell you to clear an evening for.

Soyuz 404 is exactly the kind of small, well-made thing this shelf exists to surface: it does one unusual thing, does it correctly on the device people will actually use, and gets out of your way in twenty minutes. Recommended.