Sometimes, all you need on that first day back at work is something to make you smile. I’ve yet to wipe the big daft grin off my face from playing around with Froach Club’s Titonic Fisherman, a little browser-based software toy/music synthesizer with an adorably doodled aesthetic, and a very silly range of samples to annoy the neighbours with.

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Y’know those browser games where you click things and numbers get bigger and bigger – you like ’em? If so, you might enjoy a spell of clicking on Dunno Dice Incremental (“I didn’t know what to call the game”, says creator Psidereal Games), which has us rolling dice and hoping to hit combos which each big bucks. We start with only one dice and ten rounds to each play, hoping to earn a few measly dollars, but before long we’re jacked full of persistent perks and flinging great handfuls of dice to rake in a million dollars a roll. It’s not new but it’s new to me (thanks, Adam) and I’ve happily rolled away a fair chunk of the afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m hiding in a bush with my AK at the ready. There are only 6 players left, and the encroaching zone of death has left us all with very little room to manoeuvre. Someone approaches. They could spot me, if they looked hard enough. I hold my breath as I let him draw just a little closer, then pounce out and secure my place in the final five with a barrage of gunfire.

How many dimensions did you imagine that in? If your answer’s 3, then… hah! Jokes on you – I’m actually playing Surviv.io, a free browser-based top-down take on Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. It’s the Battle Royale game that everyone will poor depth perception has been clamouring for! If your answer was 2 because it’s obvious from the header, then… aw. You win this round.

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I’m a cat now. I used to be a rabbit but I went into a hole despite being warned that it was a bad place to go, and then I think I was in something’s guts for a while. There seemed to be a ribcage around me, but I can’t be entirely sure. Then the cat ate me so now I am the cat as is the natural way of things. Now, every time I eat a rabbit, the screen is saturated with blood and then, full of meat and sated, I sleep beneath the stars, quoting Hamlet to myself. Then I dream of hunting rabbits and I don’t know how to escape from this loop and become a rabbit again.

Rabbit Game is a very peculiar thing that reminds me of games made by thecatamites. It’s free and you can play it in your browser right now.

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Technically this was released last Christmas but it feels every bit as fresh and relevant now as it did then. Media-collage-abusing developer Jack King-Spooner (creator of Dujanah) wishes to share with us the tale of three shepherds on a long winter’s night, awoken to share stories gifted to them by the heavens above.

And it all begins with the most grungy, urban retelling of The Little Match Girl that I’ve ever had the fortune to hear.

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Whether you’re an old and creaky adult or a precocious tyke that has somehow found themselves on this dark and scurrilous corner of the internet (Run while you still can! Crawl if you can’t!), you should give Hupsi – an interactive musical storybook from 5pm Kids – a look as your free browser pick of the day. It’ll put a smile on your face, I promise.

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Forget ‘God Games’, because Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh has come up with something that that shows you what it’s really like to be a deity. Constellation is a free game with a five word premise: type stuff, see what happens. You can run it in your browser, and while it’s designed to be played at events I’ve been having fun poking at it on my lonesome.

There’s little consistency to the results of whatever you type in, but that’s part of the joy of it. It’s probably best if you go in completely blind, but there are enough possibilities that I can tell you about some of the weirder stuff that went on when I took it for a spin.

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Fancy driving a tram through picturesque mountain villages populated by cats? Course you do! What you want is Short Trip [official site], a new free browser-based game from Alexander Perrin. It’s a delightful hand-drawn tram simulator rolling through hamlets and forests, over streams and up hills, taking in the sights and sounds. Just the ticket on a Monday! Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something nice, but also depressing. I started playing The Evolution of Trust [official site], a short browser-based game, expecting it to show me why trusting other people is a good thing. Ten minutes in, it’s taught me that I need to cheat more.

It has you playing a quick ‘Game of Trust’. If you stick a coin into a machine, the person at the other side gets three coins, and vice versa. So, should you co-operate and play the slot, or cheat, withhold your money and hope the sucker on the other side is feeling generous?

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I should’ve posted about an hour ago but, to be honest, I was too distracted by It Is As If You Were Doing Work [official site] to do actual work. Pippin Barr’s free browser-based game offers a virtual desktop with all the thrills, chills, and Windows alert trills of actual work – but purely for funsies! Mash your keyboard to fill out nonsense e-mails, click buttons, watch progress bars, and feel the real satisfaction of a job done well. Take your fake job seriously enough and you can even earn promotions. Ah, work! Read the rest of this entry »

EEEEE! The Google Doodle celebrating the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy [link] is such an adorable little cricket game! You control a pair of little crickets who have ventured out to bat while the fielders are all snails! Read the rest of this entry »

Today feels like a day for small games and quiet games so I have been keeping Brendan Keogh’s Pond [itch.io page] open in a browser and skimming stones along its surface as a reward for each email I send. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve lost entire afternoon’s to GeoGuessr, hitting the button again and again to teleport to a random place in the world in Google Streetview and then try to work out where I am from the scenery. Now I’ve spent a similarly long afternoon making Google do the guessing. Quick, Draw![ official site] is a sort-of game, sort-of web tool in which you doodle images upon request and a neural network tries to guess what it is you’re drawing. Come, play, abandon productivity. Read the rest of this entry »

I live in Bath, England, a Georgian city with an abundance of coffee shops and places to buy hummus, but a real lack of hardware stores. This is a problem when I need to buy nails, but also when playing Corpseburg. It’s a free browser game in which you attempt to survive a zombie apocalypse, the trick being that it’s played upon a Google Map. You provide the starting address, and the locations you’re then looting and dying inside are the real shops, pubs and schools nearby.

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I’m terrible at art. Give me all the time in the world, an actual canvass, and a set of proper tools and I will utterly fail to create anything of artistic value. Artners [Official Site] gave me 99 seconds and a deliberately awkward set of keyboard controlled brushes: as you can see from above, I’ve outdone myself.

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