The Wanderer reading room
Idle RPGs, MMOs, browser games and mobile RPGs, taken apart properly. Every review carries a score out of 10, what the game does well, what it does badly, and the kind of player it is actually for.
A genuine physics-based construction puzzle - place blocks to build a bridge, ramp, or structure so a car can reach a goal flag, then run a real Box2D physics simulation - confirmed working via real block placement and simulation on both desktop and phone, backed by a 192-level catalogue from a genuine multi-author community project.
8 / 10
A Mastermind variant where the computer never actually commits to a secret code until it has to — an adversarial twist confirmed working cleanly through a tap-native color-picker UI.
7.3 / 10
A time-travel puzzle-platformer built for GameDev.js Jam 2023 (tied 7th, Open Source category) - confirmed working correctly on desktop with real held-key movement and a genuine mid-air jump, and correctly shipped desktop-only since the game is keyboard-only throughout with no touch handling anywhere.
7.3 / 10
A Ludum Dare 33 satire in which you play a dragon filling out a fantasy tax form under a ten-minute deadline, cross-referencing scattered appraisal reports and angry peasant complaint letters — a genuinely funny, complete desktop game confirmed working with real mouse clicks and keyboard input, but built on mouse-only dragging with no touch support.
8 / 10
A charming, instantly-readable Pac-Man homage built in Rust and WebAssembly — eat every apple in the maze while dodging a ghost, faster clears score more — confirmed to control flawlessly on both touch and desktop with no bugs anywhere.
7.1 / 10
A js13k 2020 3D puzzle where you hop a cube across a tilted pyramid of blocks to reach a target tile — genuinely touch-playable via a dedicated on-screen d-pad toggle, confirmed with real taps that visibly moved the player, correcting an earlier finding that touch didn't work.
7.5 / 10
A clean, faithful FreeCell built on the same drag-and-drop card foundation as the rest of Frank Force's LittleJS Arcade card games — confirmed here not by finding a virtual card that looks draggable, but by watching a specific card leave one pile and land in another inside the game's own state, on both a simulated phone and a desktop mouse.
7.5 / 10
Freedoom's free, original-content second episode, played through the unofficial Dwasm WebAssembly port of PrBoom+/PrBoomX - confirmed working correctly on both desktop (keyboard) and phone, with a genuinely functional on-screen touch control layer, one of the only fully touch-native FPS control schemes found in a wide sweep of similar games.
7.8 / 10
A one-room Bitsy puzzle jam game whose title is also its entire plot — except the level keeps repeating, and the real puzzle is figuring out why.
7.2 / 10
A striking WebGL anti-gravity racer that still looks impressive over a decade later - confirmed working on both real touch (a genuine on-screen accel+turn drag drove the ship from a standstill to a track-ending crash) and keyboard, retrospectively reviewed after being on the shelf since before the review pipeline existed.
8 / 10
A well-known, touch-first hexagonal take on Tetris - tap either half of the screen to spin the hexagon and catch falling colour blocks - reviewed retrospectively after being on the shelf since before the review pipeline existed, with a third-party analytics script found and removed.
8.2 / 10
A faithful implementation of the ancient Norse asymmetric board game (attackers vs. a king trying to reach a corner) - confirmed genuinely working with real click/tap-to-move mechanics and correct turn alternation on both desktop and phone, though the fixed-width 11x11 board overflows a typical phone screen and requires horizontal scrolling.
7.1 / 10
A tight, single-screen arcade shooter built for Gamedev.js Jam 2024 - move a cannon along the top of the screen and hold fire to defend a central shield from a spiralling web of enemy tendrils, confirmed working correctly via real movement and a dramatically expanding fire-beam, and correctly shipped desktop-only since the game is keyboard-only throughout with no touch handling anywhere and no responsive mobile layout.
7.4 / 10
A Joust-style flying-knight arcade game - flap and glide across floating platforms to knock rival knights off their mounts - confirmed genuinely working via real altitude and horizontal movement on both desktop and phone.
7.5 / 10
A clean, classic 6x6 animal-face match-3 with cascading matches - confirmed genuinely working via real score-increasing swaps on both desktop and phone, after fixing a real canvas-overflow bug that made two-thirds of the board invisible on high-DPI phones.
7.4 / 10
A Fire Emblem-style turn-based tactics game built with Phaser 3 - move units across a grid, manage HP, and plan attacks - confirmed working correctly through a full select-unit, view-move-range sequence on desktop, and correctly shipped desktop-only since movement is bound exclusively to keyboard.
7.6 / 10
A clean, single-file Minesweeper whose default Easy board is genuinely well-built for touch — confirmed responsive at exactly 390px with no overflow, tap-to-reveal and flood-fill working correctly — but whose Medium and Hard difficulties measurably overflow a phone screen, and whose long-press-to-flag control relies on the browser's native gesture rather than custom code, which this review's tooling could not fully verify on a physical device.
7.2 / 10
A long-running, actively developed PC roguelike side-scrolling shooter built on the matter.js physics engine — WASD movement and mouse-look aiming confirmed driving real gameplay, with a deep tech-upgrade and physics-based combat system built up over a decade of updates.
7.5 / 10
A short, atmospheric Bitsy "run poem" about grief and memory, exceptionally well-received on itch.io (4.8/5 from 1,463 ratings) - confirmed genuinely working with real directional movement on both desktop and phone.
7.9 / 10
A clean React-built Nonogram/Picross with an elegant single-tap cycle — tap once to fill a cell, tap again to cross it out, tap again to clear it — confirmed working correctly on both phone touch and desktop mouse, undercut only by a header navigation bar that overflows a narrow phone screen once a puzzle is loaded.
7.1 / 10
A clean, modern nonogram/picross build with three board sizes and a deliberately dual touch-friendly control scheme - quick tap to fill, long-press to mark empty - confirmed working correctly on a real touch device.
7.6 / 10
A side-scrolling shmup in the River Raid/Xevious mould, built on the LittleJS engine - confirmed working correctly on both touch (a real d-pad drag and fire-button press moved the ship and fired) and keyboard, shipped here with the same missing-viewport-tag fix as its stablemates.
7.5 / 10
A Defender-style side-scrolling shooter built on the LittleJS engine - rescue humans from alien landers before they mutate - confirmed working correctly on both touch (a single-stick-plus-button scheme, matching the arcade original) and keyboard, with real fired shots visible on both platforms.
7.7 / 10
A chess tactics trainer drawing from a bundled 24,595-puzzle offline database - confirmed genuinely working with real chess-engine-validated moves on both desktop and phone, including finding an actual mate-in-one during testing.
8.1 / 10