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 Monument Valley-inspired isometric puzzler for js13k 2023 — drag golden objects with telekinesis and walk Merlin the wizard along a hand-drawn SVG castle to solve chess-piece- inspired puzzles — ranked 2nd out of the entire 2023 field, with real, developer-acknowledged rough edges on mobile that this review takes as seriously as the praise.
7.5 / 10
A Ludum Dare 32 hex-grid twist on Minesweeper — instead of flagging tiles, you drag a finger across the board to draw a scoring path before a 60-second clock runs out, while spatialised audio hums from nearby mines you haven't revealed yet.
7 / 10
A perfect-score js1024 2022 winner that fits an entire live-webcam sliding puzzle — cut your own face into a classic 8-puzzle and solve it — into under 1024 bytes of HTML, with touch and mouse controls that this review confirmed work correctly at the DOM level once a real camera feed was actually available to test against.
7 / 10
A faithful Simon-style color-and-sound memory game whose four-panel touch targets were confirmed to register correct taps by directly reading the game's own sequence state and turn logic.
7.5 / 10
A crisp, neon-lit take on the classic rotate-and-thrust lander genre, with a real on-screen dual-stick that we confirmed lands (and crashes) the ship correctly by touch alone.
7.5 / 10
A point-and-click medieval adventure built for js13k 2023, judged 12th of the field for its graphics — genuinely beautiful flat-vector art wrapped around a short, occasionally obtuse puzzle-adventure that works properly by tap on a phone.
7 / 10
A small, no-objective isometric builder for whitewashed Mediterranean villages that was designed touch-first rather than retrofitted for it — tap to place, drag to brush, a real long-press to erase, pinch to zoom — undercut mainly by a slow, heavy first load.
7.5 / 10
A short, introspective interactive fiction about surviving a party you don't quite belong to anymore — from the same author and Dendry engine behind three already-accepted works on this shelf, and just as solidly built for a thumb once a missing dependency is fixed.
7.3 / 10
A precision stealth-platformer that won js13k 2020 outright — first of 200 entries overall, and the Mobile category too — built around scaling a corporate tower while dodging security cameras, with alternate routes for speedrunners and a full touch control scheme mapped onto the same input state as the keyboard.
8 / 10
A js13k 2023 entry that turns a viral fake mobile-game ad into a real, tightly-designed arithmetic puzzle — tap the bigger number to kill it, absorb its power, and watch a simple rule grow into an elemental rock-paper-scissors puzzle across 29 hand-built levels.
7.5 / 10
A sharp, specifically-observed piece of interactive fiction about a Chinese-American teenager pushed into a beauty pageant by her parents — and one of the very few games on this shelf that reads better on a phone than a desktop.
8 / 10
A landmark 2014 "playable post" by Vi Hart and Nicky Case that turns Schelling's model of segregation into a scrollable essay you interact with directly — drag unhappy triangles and squares around a grid and watch a mild, individual bias for "some sameness" spiral into total segregation, with nothing more than simple rules and honest math.
7.5 / 10
The overall winner of js13k 2023 — a beautifully polished 13th-century beat 'em up with blocking, dodging and stunning mechanics that community judges rank among the best entries the competition has ever produced — undercut, for this shelf's purposes, by a movement scheme that tested exhaustively and simply does not respond to touch at all.
7 / 10
A js13k 2018 Mobile category winner that turns Star Citizen's seamless planet-to-planet flight into a tiny 2D platformer — land carefully, walk the curved surface of five distinct worlds, and use a sound-based radar to hunt down the satellite station on each one.
7.5 / 10
Google Chrome Labs rebuilds Minesweeper from the mine grid up for the touchscreen era — a Clear/Flag switch instead of a right-click, full screen-reader and keyboard support, and a feature-phone mode — wrapped around gameplay that is, deliberately and entirely, the 1990 original.
7.3 / 10
A js13k 2019 puzzle game built on a genuine real-time fluid dynamics simulation — drag a finger or mouse across the water to create currents and steer stranded boats home, ranked 4th out of 200 entries that year, with touch and mouse controls confirmed working identically.
8 / 10
A clean, well-built Othello/Reversi built on Frank Force's LittleJS engine, with a tap-to-place-a-disc control scheme that is close to the ideal touch interaction this shelf looks for — confirmed working identically across phone taps, desktop mouse clicks and full keyboard shortcuts, correct flip logic, and a real AI opponent with a visible thinking indicator.
7.9 / 10
A js13k 2015 isometric tile-connection puzzler — drag road pieces from a queue to link one side of the map to the other, then unlock a free-build sandbox — still actively maintained a decade after placing 2nd out of 60 entries, with the developer's own bug tracker openly documenting where its touch controls still fall short.
7 / 10
A Flappy-Bird-style endless jumper built for js13k 2016 — hop from stump to stump ahead of a rising fire, with wind and speed actually affecting your trajectory. A single tap does everything, and this review had to go further than usual to prove that tap genuinely works on a real touchscreen.
7 / 10
A js13k 2021 entry that fuses an infinite-runner's three-lane dodging with a light deck-builder's hand of ability cards — tap or click a card to swerve, shoot, or shield, with identical, equally responsive controls on a touchscreen and a mouse.
8 / 10
A circular, emoji-reeled slot machine where the payout is decided by your reflexes, not a random number generator — every action lives on a single global tap, confirmed working end to end on a real touchscreen, and there is no real money anywhere near it.
7.5 / 10
A clean, well-produced Snake — eat apples, grab gold, avoid the walls, with a VERSUS mode alongside the classic solo grind. The virtual analog stick that steers it was confirmed here to change direction correctly by watching the snake's own state respond to a drag, not just by reading that a d-pad exists.
7.5 / 10
A meticulously researched card-driven political strategy game about the Social Democratic Party of Germany trying to stop the Nazi seizure of power — genuinely MIT-licensed, built on the same touch-friendly link-and-tap interface as the author's acclaimed Archivist, confirmed working with a thumb.
8.5 / 10