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 polished twin-stick-style arena shooter built for js13k 2013 - move with WASD/arrows, aim and fire with the mouse - confirmed working correctly via real movement and a visible fired projectile trail, and correctly shipped desktop-only since the control scheme is keyboard-plus-mouse throughout.
7.9 / 10
A student-made pair of tile-matching games - Shariki (a from-scratch Bejeweled-style match-3) and Bombi (an original chain-reaction bomb variant) - confirmed genuinely working with real swap-match-cascade mechanics on both desktop and phone.
7.2 / 10
A pixel-art platformer built for GameDev.js Jam 2023 around a time-warping mechanic - confirmed working correctly on desktop with real keyboard movement and a jump that triggers a striking world-state shift, and correctly shipped desktop-only since the game is Unity keyboard/controller input throughout with no touch handling.
7.5 / 10
A Robotron 2084-style twin-stick shooter built on the LittleJS engine - save fleeing family members from red robots across escalating waves - shipped here with a real, verified fix for a missing viewport tag that was shrinking its virtual joysticks to a near-unusable size on real phones.
7.8 / 10
A short, deadpan-funny Bitsy game where you play a robot vacuum wandering an office, narrating the dust and debris it finds — confirmed working by swipe on phone and by keyboard on desktop.
7.4 / 10
A from-scratch, Candy Crush-style match-3 with generic shapes instead of licensed candy art, four toggleable modes, and touch-drag swap controls confirmed working via genuine live-state verification on both phone and desktop.
7.4 / 10
A tight, charming ASCII roguelike built in a week for the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge — climb a tower to rescue a sleeping princess in one focused, coffeebreak-length sitting.
7.2 / 10
A genuinely substantial side-scrolling shoot-em-up built on Andy Balaam's Smolpxl engine - real enemy variety, projectiles, and a scrolling city backdrop, confirmed working via a real scored kill on desktop and a real fired bullet on phone.
7.7 / 10
A tiny local light-cycle game (human vs. bot) built on Andy Balaam's Smolpxl engine - confirmed genuinely working via real directional turns on both desktop and phone, forming clean L-shaped trail corners exactly matching the input sequence.
7.3 / 10
A Ludum Dare 41 entry that combines soccer and a top-down slasher - knock enemies out with a kicked ball while dodging them yourself - confirmed working correctly with real cursor-key movement on desktop, and correctly shipped desktop-only since the game genuinely has no touch input anywhere in its code.
7.4 / 10
A tight, procedurally-generated run-and-gun platformer packed into a JS13K-competition-sized file - confirmed working correctly with real WASD movement and mouse-aim on desktop, and correctly shipped as a desktop-only title since its LittleJS build predates the engine's touch virtual gamepad.
7.6 / 10
A pseudo-3D Pole-Position-style racer built on the LittleJS engine - confirmed genuinely playable on touch via a fallback stick control, with a real touch drag taking speed from 0 to 174mph and score from 0 to 2380, shipped with the same missing-viewport fix as its stablemates.
7.5 / 10
A top-down chase-driving shooter built on the LittleJS engine - confirmed working correctly on both touch (a real stick drag drove and steered the car, and a real button press fired) and keyboard, shipped with the same missing-viewport fix as its stablemates.
7.6 / 10
A clean 1v1 top-down tank arena shooter against a single bot opponent, built on the LittleJS engine - shipped here with the same missing-viewport-tag fix as its stablemates, and controls proven with an actual confirmed kill via genuine touch input.
7.3 / 10
A genuinely clever Tetris/Minesweeper hybrid — clear lines to reveal a minefield hidden underneath the stack — confirmed working with real keyboard input on desktop, shipped here as the same free browser demo build the developer offers on itch.io.
7.5 / 10
A clean, single-file heads-up Texas Hold'em against a bot, entirely button-driven with no drag or hover requirements - confirmed to correctly deal, bet, advance through the flop/turn/river, and resolve a real showdown with correct kicker-based tie-breaking on both desktop and phone.
7.3 / 10
A striking, atmospheric Bitsy narrative piece about grief and light, featured by LIMINAL magazine's GLITCH series — confirmed to control correctly by touch and keyboard alike.
7.3 / 10
A genuinely polished mahjong solitaire with provably solvable boards, hand-drawn tile faces, and a thoughtful mobile layout that scrolls rather than crushing tiles — confirmed to actually match tiles correctly on both phone and desktop.
7.4 / 10
A short, acclaimed narrative game about news cycles and mob psychology - you're a photographer whose choices of who to photograph literally reshape the crowd and, eventually, the world - shipped here as a desktop-only title with mouse-only controls confirmed working correctly.
8 / 10
A recovered 2007 Flash relic, emulated with Ruffle - a ragdoll physics figure fires wire lines to swing across a level, and since the original had no keyboard input at all, it plays on a phone exactly as it did in a browser eighteen years ago, confirmed with real touch taps.
7.2 / 10
A pseudo-3D raycaster FPS-lite in the classic Wolfenstein mould, built on the LittleJS engine with a genuine on-screen twin-stick control scheme - move with one virtual stick, aim and auto-fire with the other, confirmed working with a real touch-fired shot landing on a guard.
7.9 / 10
A tiny, warm Bitsy game about being a ball of bread dough on a kitchen counter — confirmed working by swipe on phone (with real item pickups, not just cosmetic movement) and by keyboard on desktop.
7.1 / 10
The original, official 2048 - slide numbered tiles to combine them into 2048 - whose swipe controls were confirmed correct in all four directions on a real touch profile.
8.3 / 10