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 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 10-kilobyte js13k 2018 entry that plays turn-based tactics on a continuous 3D plane instead of a grid — tap a unit, tap a spot to send it there, and it fights automatically if that walk puts it next to an enemy. The idea holds up; the fixed-camera phone view and the total absence of any on-screen instruction do not.
6 / 10
A js13k 2022 "Overcooked in Hell" cooking game with real charm and a cinematic intro to match, undermined by a source-confirmed frame-rate-dependent speed bug and recipe-clarity confusion that multiple independent competition judges hit on their own, separate playthroughs.
6.5 / 10
2048 reimagined as a physics puzzle — drag numbered cushions around a sofa instead of sliding tiles on a grid, and let soft-body physics decide how they settle and merge. A js13k 2016 entry judges called "amazing" for exactly that twist, with a drag control confirmed here to work cleanly on touch.
7 / 10
A 13-kilobyte pirate roguelike that layers a real press-your-luck dice game and a three-role crew system onto a single-button combat loop — and then fails the one test this shelf exists to run, because the page never tells a phone's browser how big it actually is.
3.8 / 10
An honestly-scoped incremental game — dozens of themed upgrades, a running joke about web design eras — built with a real, verifiable technical stunt underneath it: not one line of JavaScript, including the numbers on screen, which increment through a hand-built chain of hidden radio buttons. The author's own FAQ says plainly they wouldn't recommend playing it on a phone, and testing here backs that up.
5.5 / 10
A complete, no-JavaScript Minesweeper built as a deliberate "stress test" for a CSS boolean-logic trick called Space Toggle — genuinely inventive engineering, measured directly against a hard number that matters more than the engineering does here: the only board on offer is Minesweeper's 30x16 Expert grid, which comes out to roughly 12.5 CSS pixels per cell on a phone screen.
4 / 10
A gentle, ten-piece picture-matching memory game built by a father for his two-year-old son who struggled with a mouse - and it shows, in the best way, with real button-based cards that were confirmed to flip correctly under a real finger tap.
7.6 / 10
Salvatore Previti's js13k 2022 double winner packs constructive-solid-geometry hell, cascaded shadow maps and a genuinely functioning dual-thumb virtual joystick into 13 kilobytes — wrapped around a fetch-quest loop thin enough to finish in one sitting.
7.5 / 10
A js13k 2022 top-down survival shooter, in the vein of Vampire Survivors, that ships a genuine dual-virtual-stick mobile control scheme alongside WASD-and-mouse — both tested here and both work exactly as the developers' own instructions describe.
7.5 / 10
A faithful, dependency-free take on the Chrome offline dinosaur game, with dedicated on-screen JUMP and DUCK buttons whose collision detection was confirmed working correctly by touch - ducking under a jump-only obstacle produced a genuine, correct game over.
7.8 / 10
A tight, no-frills block dominoes game against a genuine alpha-beta search AI, with tap-to-select-then-tap-to-place touch controls that work correctly on a real phone.
7.6 / 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 polished Connect Four with a genuine minimax AI opponent, player-vs-player, and even an AI-vs-AI spectator mode, with tap-to-drop touch controls confirmed working straight out of the box.
7.7 / 10
A clean Dr. Mario clone with cascading virus clears, whose touch controls are missing an entire input the keyboard has - counter-clockwise rotation - confirmed by reading the game's own source and live orientation state.
6.8 / 10
A js13k 2019 idle-clicker about drafting dwarfs and sending them off for gold that quietly turns into a small, scripted story about ale, hubris and an orbital strike — ranked 8th out of 200 entries that year, let down on phones only by a viewport that never learned to resize itself.
7 / 10
A tap-to-move elemental transformation puzzle that placed 7th of 129 entries at js13k 2014 — undone on this shelf by a missing viewport tag that makes every phone tap land on the wrong part of the screen.
3.2 / 10
A match-3 puzzle with levels, objectives, and power-ups, whose drag-to-swap touch gesture was confirmed working correctly - after discovering the game requires a genuine held drag rather than two separate taps to swap tiles.
7.4 / 10
A decade-old, MIT-licensed browser reskin of classic Minesweeper — competent, unusually accessible for a hobby project, and undone by a dead third-party image CDN that leaves its default board rendering as a wall of broken-image icons, plus a hold-to-flag feature that only works on iOS.
3.5 / 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 reversed, tiny roguelike about escaping the dungeon after you've already killed the boss — its two-finger fight gesture works exactly as advertised, but the rest is too thin to carry it.
6.7 / 10
A cute ladybug platformer whose real achievement is a genuine multi-touch control scheme — drag to run, drag up to climb, and a second finger tapped mid-hold to jump — built from the ground up for touchscreens rather than retrofitted onto a keyboard game.
7.1 / 10
A charming two-player frog-hopping board game built for Ludum Dare 56, undone on this shelf by a touch bug that leaves the actual board completely unresponsive to touch of any kind.
3 / 10
A clever fuzzy-matching tile game from Ludum Dare 51 — pairs don't need to be exact, partial matches on colour or parity still score — undercut on phones by a confirmed layout bug that shrinks the board to tiles roughly 15 CSS pixels wide by default.
5.5 / 10