Games that play in your browser — phone or desktop.
The Leetdom 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.
Featured review
Seven years after it was announced, Team Cherry's sequel arrives faster, meaner and bigger than the original, and mostly earns every one of those seven years.
9 / 10
Silksong takes everything that made the first Hollow Knight worth the fuss — hand-drawn world-building, precise acrobatic combat, boss fights built like puzzles you solve with your reflexes — and turns the difficulty and the movement speed up together, so Hornet's game never feels like it's just repeating the Knight's.
Every review carries as many genres as it honestly is — an idle RPG appears under both.
A four-day joke about achievement bloat, built by Armor Games' first employee, that turned "do 100 arbitrary things to a blue elephant in one room" into a bigger hit than anything with actual level design that Armor Games shipped that month — and that got a real Steam re-release with real achievements fifteen years later, which is funnier than anything in the original script.
7 / 10
A 3.5-megabyte base-defense game a self-taught 17-year-old built for a portal contest in 2007, whose single hook — watch your caveman army evolve into laser tanks — spread it, unlocked, across every major Flash portal within a year and still outlasted Flash itself through Ruffle emulation and its own native mobile ports.
6.5 / 10
A single-level, ten-minute Newgrounds shooter from August 2002 that got popular enough to fund its own $1.3 million sequel — the original prototype the console games grew out of, not a demo for them.
6.5 / 10
A one-man Flash arena brawler about hitting blobs with an oversized sword, saved from disposability by a 110-medal award system that turns every fight into a checklist worth chasing — and still running today, cleanly, in Ruffle.
7 / 10
A solo developer's Kongregate exclusive that Wikipedia's own history of the incremental genre credits as an early pioneer, years before Cookie Clicker made the format famous — by refusing to let "idle" mean passive, then burying that good idea under seven parallel levelling systems, a card game its own players don't trust, and a clicking minigame people call painful rather than tedious.
6.5 / 10
Ninja Kiwi's August 2007 debut took the balloon-popping cast of its earlier toy Bloons and dropped them onto a single winding road, arriving months after Desktop Tower Defense had already defined the genre it was borrowing. It is historically the seed of a franchise that is still shipping new entries two decades later, and mechanically the thinnest, shortest-lived entry that franchise ever produced.
6 / 10
A 2006 archery-and-castle-defense hybrid built by one small team to advertise its own sequel — thirty levels of click-and-drag ballistics and troop economy that still turns up millions of plays on the portals that hosted it, wearing a name that gets it mixed up with a completely different game every single day.
7 / 10
A solo Bullfrog veteran's fourth entry in his own top-down zombie-shooter series added the one feature its title promises — local two-player co-op and deathmatch — to an arsenal of ten weapons across eighteen rooms, and that addition is close to the whole review, because almost everything else about it is the same arena-survival loop the series had already run three times before.
6 / 10
A Croatian college student's solo take on Capcom's Super Pang spent 2002 spreading from his own website to Newgrounds and Miniclip, and unlike almost everything else that travelled that route, it never actually died — its own developer rebuilt it in HTML5 years before Flash shut off, and it is still live on major portals today.
6.5 / 10
A luchador launches himself out of Candy Land, bounces off gummy bears for distance, and spends the loot on permanent upgrades — Juicy Beast's February 2011 debut launcher, still readable today as the rough draft for the much bigger Burrito Bison Revenge a year later.
7 / 10
A one-button endless runner built in five days for a "Bare Minimum" game jam in August 2009, given away free with no portal exclusivity, and now sitting in MoMA's permanent design collection as the game that invented the endless-runner genre — while remaining, on its own terms, about ten minutes of content that never asks anything new of you after the first run.
7.5 / 10
A two-phase Newgrounds boss fight built as an in-joke about Tom Fulp's vow not to shave until The Behemoth finished Castle Crashers — a fan tribute by BoMToons, not a Fulp production, that turned out tight enough to be voted Newgrounds' game of the month anyway.
6.5 / 10
A Newgrounds exploration game a teenage Thomas Brush built alone in ActionScript 2.0, drawing over 8 million plays in 2010 on hand-drawn atmosphere and dream logic that its own fifteen minutes of gameplay can't fully carry.
7 / 10
A trebuchet-artillery destruction toy that Armor Games sponsored into a 2009 Flash hit and that keeps getting called "the game Angry Birds copied" — a claim that gets more complicated once you notice Crush the Castle licensed its own core idea from an earlier, smaller Flash game with the developer's blessing.
7 / 10
A 2010 Flash tower defense that flips the genre's morality — you play the overlord, and the "heroes" are the wave of invaders trying to steal five gems out of your cave. A NotDoppler sponsorship deal turned it into, by the developer's own account, Kongregate's number-one-rated game for the better part of a year; a real skill-point system and a genuine difficulty wall around level 14 are why that reputation is only partly still deserved today.
7.5 / 10
A 2002 self-hosted Flash Pong variant that added one real idea — brush the ball with a moving paddle and it curves — then built a punishing AI ladder around that single trick and spread across the early web without ever needing a portal launch to do it.
6.5 / 10
A ten-screen father-and-son beat 'em up that Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin uploaded free to Newgrounds in July 2005, won the Independent Games Festival's Best Web Browser Game award for it, and never followed up — a tighter, better-built game than the two-guys-prototype label usually implies, and still a short one underneath the rage meter and the charm.
7 / 10
Paul Preece's one-man, ad-funded Flash game let players build the maze the enemies walked through instead of just shooting at a fixed road, and the idea spread to 15.7 million plays within four months of its March 2007 launch. Eighteen years on, the core puzzle still works; the presentation, the solo content, and the multiplayer spin-off that ran for over a decade have not all aged the same way.
7.5 / 10
A free browser puzzle uploaded to Newgrounds and Kongregate on 23 June 2010, twelve days after JoyBits had already put a paid twin on the iOS App Store, that went on to become one of Newgrounds' biggest hits of the year and the root of an entire multi-platform franchise — while contemporary reviewers, on the day it launched, were already naming the trial-and-error grind that the design never grew out of.
5.5 / 10
A 2010 eat-and-grow arcade game about a fast-swelling underground worm devouring stick figures — the deliberate middle link between Death Worm and the mobile "Worm Game Wars" of that same summer, built on a hunger bar, a two-choice upgrade menu every stage, and a control scheme roughly half its audience never made peace with.
6.5 / 10
Damien Clarke's solo-built stick-figure tournament fighter added a regenerating slow-motion meter to the mid-2000s Xiao Xiao lineage, spread across every major portal without a single-site lock, and survives today only as a documented Ruffle patient — its own primary modern host currently lists it as unavailable.
6.5 / 10
A free 2010 turn-based JRPG parody that gave its three-hero cast a walkable overworld for the first time in the series, wrapped a genuinely deep elemental-combat system in deliberately juvenile humour, and is still free to play today on Steam and itch.io.
7.5 / 10
PuffballsUnited's second Henry Stickmin game locks its stick-figure lead in a cell with a mystery cake and thirty-six branching choices, and bets the whole experience on the joke waiting behind every wrong answer rather than on the puzzle logic of picking the right one — a bet that made it Newgrounds' most-viewed entry in the entire series within its first year.
7 / 10
A six-day art-game experiment about quitting your job, one act of quiet refusal at a time — five minutes long, endlessly written about since, and still one of the cleanest arguments Flash ever produced for treating games as a critical medium rather than a toy.
7.5 / 10