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 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 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
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
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
A full hex-based 4X Civilization-style builder rendered in 3D with Three.js — nation select, city founding, research, and a real production/turn loop confirmed working with real touch events on phone, with genuine multi-touch pinch-zoom and rotate implemented for the map.
8.4 / 10
A clean, fully-featured chess implementation from the LittleJS engine's own author, with tap-to-select-tap-to-move touch controls confirmed working end to end against a real AI opponent.
8 / 10
The overall winner of js13k 2025 — a black-cat revenge platformer with instant die-and- retry pacing, silhouette-and-shadow visuals ranked 1st in the competition for graphics, and a fully realised touch control scheme that this review confirmed works, once tested with an actual sustained touch rather than an instantaneous one.
9 / 10
Nicky Case's autobiographical dialogue game reduces every interaction to a single tap — read the next line, or pick what you're about to say — and uses dozens of quietly tracked choices to make that tap carry real weight through to a genuinely different final act.
8 / 10
A bubble-shooter with a real twist — you clear gems by matching them to their complementary color (red to green, orange to blue, yellow to purple) rather than an identical one, and holding the shot before firing grows the gem for a bigger, riskier play.
8 / 10
A genuinely inventive fusion of Minesweeper's number-deduction logic with roguelike combat and permadeath — the viral 2025 hit that earns its reputation, confirmed here to work cleanly with a tap for its core loop of revealing tiles and fighting whatever's under them.
8.5 / 10
A genuinely deep Vampire-Survivors-style bullet-heaven built entirely from emoji — five heroes, five stages, a coin economy and a shop, all requiring nothing from a touchscreen but movement, since every weapon fires itself. Confirmed here by watching the hero's own position update in exact response to a drag, not just by finding a virtual joystick on screen.
8 / 10
A clean, faithful word-guessing puzzle with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard confirmed to type and submit guesses correctly, letter by letter, when tested against real touch input at exact key positions.
8 / 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 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 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 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 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
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
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
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
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
A genuinely beloved childhood franchise, dormant since 2011, returns as an actively developed Early Access time-management sim — landing Overwhelmingly Positive on nostalgia and a faithfully expanded formula, undercut for some by a difficulty curve several reviewers say spikes well past what the earlier games asked of players.
8 / 10
A 2008 co-op beat-'em-up that Steam still rates Overwhelmingly Positive across over 109,000 reviews, and one that its own developer is still actively expanding — new paid DLC arrived in August 2025, seventeen years after launch, to a mix of genuine celebration and a specific, detailed complaint from a nearly 8,000-hour veteran about changes to combat mechanics nobody asked for.
8 / 10
