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.
Nicky Case and Monplaisir's follow-up to Coming Out Simulator casts you as a person's anxiety itself, and dresses its ordinary tap-to-choose dialogue in an HP bar and "special attacks" — a clever costume for a mechanic that, underneath, never gets more demanding than a menu.
7.5 / 10
A 2011 teaching-sample vertical shooter built for a mobile HTML5 game development book, notable for genuinely correct on-screen touch controls years before that was common practice — but the whole game is one 25-second enemy pattern that loops identically forever.
6 / 10
A handsome medieval-themed adaptation of the ancient board game for js13k 2023, whose board could never be interacted with in any mode during testing — not a touch-specific failure, but a total absence of any selectable piece, which matches a rendering bug the author himself has repeatedly acknowledged.
3.5 / 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
An 18-level tap-and-swipe puzzle built for the 13-kilobyte js13k 2021 competition, where every square on a 6x6 board is either something you remove, something you push, or the black hole eating whatever falls into it — small, free, and entirely swipe-and-tap to control.
7.2 / 10
A tidy little planet-defense shooter whose tap-to-fire mechanic genuinely works via touch — confirmed directly — but whose fixed 900-pixel-wide layout pushes the Start button, score display, and the player's own ship entirely off a real phone screen with no way back.
5 / 10
A faithful Atari Kaboom homage — a Mad Bomber drops bombs from a rooftop, and a bucket that follows your finger's exact horizontal position is all that stands between you and a miss. The simplest possible touch control on this shelf, confirmed here to track precisely.
7.5 / 10
A from-scratch, MIT-licensed rebuild of the real-time area-denial puzzle Microsoft shipped in its 1990s Entertainment Pack — wall off empty sections of the board to trap bouncing balls before they can wreck an unfinished wall, rebuilt here with dedicated touch controls rather than a mouse-only port.
7.5 / 10
A js13k 2024 entry that turns Minesweeper-style tension into a shared cauldron of arithmetic — you and an opponent throw ingredients into the same pot, and whoever pushes its putridity to 13 or drags it down to 0 first loses, all controlled with nothing but a single tap on a card.
7.5 / 10
A Wordle-style puzzle where you guess a hidden 8-bit binary number by entering it in decimal - built on a plain native number input that triggers the phone's own numeric keyboard, confirmed working correctly by touch - and openly described by its own author as the rougher predecessor to the more polished Hexle.
7.1 / 10
A snake-vs-snake clone that started as university coursework and grew a genuine neuroevolution-trained AI opponent, several multiplayer modes, and a touch d-pad built from a repurposed QR code image.
7.4 / 10
A clean Atari Go (first-capture) variant on a 9x9 board with a genuine AI opponent, whose tap-to-place stone controls were confirmed working by reading the exact board state before and after real touch input.
7.6 / 10
A clean 20x20 Gomoku (five-in-a-row) implementation with local two-player and a working CPU opponent, confirmed to place stones exactly where tapped - though the board runs a touch wider than a phone screen and needs a small scroll to reach its far edge.
7.2 / 10
A Godot-engine cat-burglar platformer whose public repository contains only raw engine source - no compiled HTML5 or WebAssembly export exists anywhere in it, so there is currently no way to play it in a browser at all.
1 / 10
A faithful hex-grid clone of the classic Chat Noir puzzle, undermined by a canvas that never learned to fit a phone screen.
4.5 / 10
A genuinely deep 13th-century resource-management sim, confirmed complete and well-liked by multiple competition judges — undone on this shelf by a missing viewport tag that makes the entire game unreachable on a real phone, from the very first tap.
3.4 / 10
A Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven squeezed into js13k's 13-kilobyte limit, starring a black cat that auto-attacks waves of enemies while you drag it around a flower field — and the drag-to-move touch control genuinely works.
7.5 / 10
A clean, correctly-implemented Checkers built on Frank Force's LittleJS engine, using the same tap-to-select-then-tap-to-move scheme as its Reversi sibling in this collection — confirmed working identically on phone touch and desktop mouse, with a real AI opponent that is noticeably slower to think than Reversi's but does complete every move tested.
7.4 / 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
A seven-day roguelike about lobsterfolk, a stolen jewel, and a randomised deck of one-shot blessings instead of the usual inventory — and, unusually for a 2015 jam game, a touch control scheme that was clearly built rather than bolted on.
7.3 / 10
An ambitious, mostly-complete open-source Civilization-style 4X built on jQuery and Snap.svg — build cities, research technology, and manage diplomacy on a hex grid — with touch-native controls confirmed to advance real game state, though several menu features (Save, Load, Help, Settings) are unfinished stubs.
7.5 / 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 genuinely well-crafted Risk-style territory conquest game whose click-to-select, click-to-attack mechanic works beautifully via touch — confirmed with real taps and the game's own on-screen guidance — but whose fixed-width board leaves a third of the map permanently off a phone screen with no way to reach it.
6 / 10