We Become What We Behold

Opening

We Become What We Behold is a short, well-known browser game by Nicky Case: you play a newspaper photographer in a crowd of wandering stick-figure "peeps," and the photos you choose to take and publish don't just record the world - they reshape it, as the population reacts to what gets attention. It's a compact, pointed piece of commentary on virality and mob psychology, not a traditional arcade game.

A source mismatch, worked around

The linked GitHub repository looks like it should be the game, but serving it directly throws a real ReferenceError: textStrings is not defined partway through boot - it's mid-refactor for translator support and doesn't match what's actually live on itch. Rather than ship that broken copy, the actual live English build was fetched file-by-file from itch's own CDN (the real shipped game), reconstructed locally, and verified to serve cleanly. One genuinely missing asset turned up in the process - a font file that 404'd on load - and was added before this build went live. A third-party itch.io embed script (meant only for itch's own page-embed context) was also removed since it serves no purpose and isn't appropriate for a self-hosted copy.

The mechanic, confirmed for real

The core interaction is deliberately simple and entirely mouse-driven: move the mouse to aim a camera viewfinder over the crowd, click to take a photo. This was tested directly rather than assumed - a real mouse move tracked the viewfinder precisely onto a specific character in the crowd, and a real mousedown click triggered the camera's flash animation and froze a captured photo inside the viewfinder frame, with the wider scene's lighting visibly shifting as a direct result. That's the whole game's engine in miniature: what you choose to look at changes what you get.

Desktop-only, and correctly labelled as such

This game has no touch input anywhere in its code - aiming and shooting are both handled purely through mousemove/mousedown. That's fine: it's shipped here under the shelf's newer desktop-only tier rather than being forced into a touch mould it was never designed for, so a phone visitor won't be steered toward a game they can't actually play.

Final Verdict

A short, smart, and genuinely original game that earns its reputation - the core mechanic works exactly as intended, confirmed by directly testing it rather than taking the source at its word, and the free-culture licensing is as generous as it gets. Worth the five minutes on a real computer.