Sokoban
A clean, classic box-pushing puzzle with seven hand-built levels, whose touch controls needed a missing viewport tag fixed before they'd work at all — but are solid once that's done.
7.4 / 10
The Wanderer reading room
Game Reviews
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.
Browse the reviews
Soyuz 404
A pocket-sized, wordless-but-witty space adventure where you explore a stricken spacecraft by pressing and holding, told entirely in flat vector silhouettes.
7.4 / 10
Endless runnerBrowser
SPACECRAFT
A three-lane endless runner across the Solar System — swipe to change lanes, jump, shrink under space junk or boost through asteroids, collecting data tokens from moon to moon. A js13k 2018 entry with some of the clearest in-game touch instructions this shelf has seen, and swipe controls confirmed here to work exactly as they're described.
7 / 10
Arcade / PhysicsBrowser
Space Wizard Toast Spinning
A genuinely original js13k 2019 physics-flick game about magically hurling a slice of toast so it lands butter-side up — the drag-to-apply-force mechanic was tested directly and confirmed working identically by touch and by mouse.
7.6 / 10
Stolen Sword
A 13-kilobyte js13k 2020 entry that turns swordfighting into a one-finger slingshot — pull back on the screen and release to launch your character, sword-first, through whatever is in the way. The pull-back gesture is the entire game, and once you understand it is a slingshot rather than a flick, it works.
7.2 / 10
Sudoku
A clean, modern Sudoku built on Frank Force's LittleJS engine — three difficulty tiers, notes mode, hints and a full auto-solver, with an on-screen number pad confirmed to drive cell selection and number entry entirely by touch, no keyboard required.
8 / 10
Swimming with Sharks
A short, funny murder-mystery point-and-click adventure judged 10th of the entire js13k 2022 field for gameplay — confirmed working by tapping a suspect directly and getting a distinct, written response, though its navigation arrows are genuinely too faint to see.
7.5 / 10
The Archivist and the Revolution
A quietly devastating piece of interactive fiction about a chronically ill former surveillance worker in a dying, sealed city — critically acclaimed across the IF community (4th at IFComp 2022, an IGF Honorable Mention, an IFDB Award for worldbuilding) and, on this shelf, an example of touch support requiring no engineering at all: every choice is a plain tappable link.
8.5 / 10
The Evolution of Trust
Nicky Case's 2017 interactive explainer turns the iterated prisoner's dilemma into a 30-minute playable argument about why cooperation breaks down — and how it can be rebuilt — using nothing but a handful of tap-driven choices and a running tournament of computer opponents.
7.5 / 10
The Last Pawn
A minimalist turn-based survival game — you're the last black pawn, the white army closes in from every side each turn, and every move is a swipe. The touch controls are a full, confirmed parity with the keyboard; the in-game instructions screen, less so.
7 / 10
Tile Collector
A Ludum Dare 58 puzzle where a single drag both places a tile and picks its colour by direction — a genuinely inventive one-gesture mechanic, confirmed working with a real touch drag, wrapped in a rough-edged 48-hour jam build with several non-blocking JavaScript errors.
7 / 10
Tiny Yurts
A 13-kilobyte Mini Motorways reskin — swap roads for footpaths, cars for settlers, and traffic jams for hungry goats — that does the harder job properly by building its dragging around Pointer Events and giving its one desktop-only action a real tappable alternative.
7 / 10
Traffic
A polished isometric traffic-light management game that placed 2nd in js13kGames 2013's Mobile category — a one-line viewport fix was needed to unlock it, but once applied, a tap precisely toggles the exact light under a finger, with a visible confirmation highlight.
8 / 10
Water Sort Puzzle
A clean, well-built water-sorting puzzle across nine difficulty levels, with tap-to-pour touch controls confirmed working precisely - after fixing three real bugs in the shipped repository, including broken icon files and a dead reference to an external component the game doesn't actually need.
7.3 / 10
Word Groups
A clean, well-built word-categorization puzzle in the style of the NYT's Connections - sort sixteen words into four hidden groups of four - with tap-to-select and submit confirmed working correctly by touch after a broken Next.js export was fixed.
7.7 / 10
Wordly
A faithful, no-nonsense Wordle clone with daily and random modes, whose full on-screen QWERTY keyboard was confirmed to type and submit guesses correctly by touch.
7.9 / 10
Arcade / Minigame collectionBrowser
Work-Life Balance
A Gamedev.js Jam 2025 honorable mention where you play two split-screen minigames at once — spot the typo, match the dance pose, balance the books, mow the lawn — all confirmed working through real on-screen buttons rather than gesture guesswork.
7 / 10
Meditative / interactive experienceBrowser
You have found
A meditative js13k 2020 entry about drawing a trail through a hand-illustrated world and looping it around things if you feel like it — no score pressure, no fail state, just a soft pastel scene and a line that follows your finger exactly where you take it.
7.5 / 10
1000xRESIST
One of 2024's most critically decorated narrative games — a Peabody Award nomination, an IGF Grand Prize shortlisting, a 90 on OpenCritic — telling a genre-blending story about clones, generational trauma and a pandemic-scarred future through the eyes of a devoted Watcher serving her ALLMOTHER, undercut for a small but genuinely coherent minority of players by exploration sections several call needlessly oversized for a game built almost entirely around its writing.
8.5 / 10
Age of Mythology: Retold
A genuinely excellent, critically acclaimed remaster of the beloved 2002 fantasy RTS, undercut by a pattern of anti-consumer decisions that has nothing to do with the strategy game underneath it — an always-online requirement briefly forced onto single-player campaigns, and gore content stripped at launch only to be sold back later as paid DLC.
7.5 / 10
Ale & Tale Tavern
A first-person fantasy tavern-management sim built for up to six players — genuinely charming and enormously popular in co-op, with nearly two years of continuous free content updates, but shadowed by weak combat, thin solo content, and unresolved player suspicion about AI-generated dialogue and voice work.
7 / 10
Arisen Force: HeroTest
A pixel-art hero-collecting beat-em-up/ARPG that mixes River City Girls-style combat with a Fate-adjacent time-travelling cast — genuinely satisfying once its early bugs are patched out, and backed by one of the more responsive small-studio support records in this year's lane.
7 / 10
Astrodle
A solo-developed space idler that does something the genre rarely does — deliberately ends, in ten to twelve hours across two modes — and largely delivers on that promise, though reviewers argue about whether "idle" is even the right word for it.
7 / 10
Baby Steps
Bennett Foddy's follow-up to Getting Over It replaces a hammer and a pot with a pair of legs you have to consciously place one step at a time — a deliberately, meticulously frustrating physics-walking game whose review corpus is full of players who say they hate it, hate the developers for making it, and are recommending it anyway.
7 / 10