Browser Games, Interactive Fiction, Tools & More

A complete archive of the three-part Tumblr series.

Part 1

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

Part 2

since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

Tools

  • Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)
  • Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.
  • Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)
  • Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.
  • PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

Non-Games

  • Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.
  • Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.
  • 17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.
  • Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.
  • The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)
  • Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)
  • Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)
  • If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.
  • r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.
  • r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.

thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.

here's the big update i said was coming.

as promised, i turned about a year's worth of reblog recommendations and an unreasonable number of browser tabs into one enormous post. some people might be crazy enough to do that twice. unfortunately, it was me again.

the truly gigantic version turned out to have more links than tumblr allows in one post, because apparently there are limits to human ambition. this version has the tumblr blogs, reblog and tag recommendations, plus as many highlights as i could fit. so i had to make a rentry version.

some notes:

  • many of these resources came from simple searches, so don't come yelling at me if someone listed has been designated by the community as undesirable or if i accidentally included ai-generated content. this was put together solo over a long period of time. let me know if something needs removed and i will remove it. if you have something on this list and you don't want it listed, let me know and i'll remove it as well.
  • there is going to be a significant amount of overlap between the big master resource lists and github lists. a lot of stuff is listed multiple times. any duplicates in this list have been weeded out, but you'll still find many of these games and resources on one of the fmhy pages or in the various lists. the complete rentry version has the rest.
  • please feel free to add anything i missed. i went back through reblogs up until november 2025 before the browser tab crashed, so i only got about a year's worth of recommendations. if yours was left out, it wasn't intentional.

Interactive Fiction on Tumblr

Games

  • A Dream of Silence by Abigail Corfman - Baldur's Gate 3 interactive fiction focused on Astarion (via @screechingphantommaker)
  • A Murder in Fairyland by Abigail Corfman (via @darudedogestorm)
  • ABA Games - play with one button
  • Allchemy - alternative to Little Alchemy; item crafting
  • Antimatter Dimensions - one of the all-time great incremental games if you enjoy numbers getting alarmingly out of hand (@winged-lesbian-catgirl)
  • Beat the Couch - you get $10,000 and two random years of real stock market history, but you don't know which years. one button: buy or sell. your opponent is a couch.
  • Best of Three by Emily Short (via @darudedogestorm)
  • Birdland by Brendan Patrick Hennessy (via @darudedogestorm)
  • Choice of the Dragon by Dan Fabulich and Adam Strong-Morse (via @darudedogestorm)
  • Conway's Game of Life - cellular automaton game
  • Crank - not quite an idle game where you crank your shit or something (via @bonddogsaint)
  • Crosswind - land an airplane under heavy wind conditions
  • Dialed - it's hard to remember names of colors
  • Dice Hard - dice-building roguelike
  • Don't Look Back - platformer based on Orpheus and Eurydice escaping from Hades (@galaxypuddle)
  • Enclose Horse - build an enclosure around the horse. daily game.
  • Evolve Idle - idle/incremental evolution game (@bigfootismyonlyfriend)
  • Gerrymandle - daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
  • Goodbye Strangers & Serina the World of Birds (@shidraoftheworldpillar)
  • Hidden Joey - daily game about words that hide their own synonym
  • Human Benchmark - cognitive tests and brain games
  • Kerkerkruip - downloadable interactive fiction roguelike (@hydra-collector)
  • Kittens - classic incremental game like Cookie Clicker but with kittens (many people)
  • Lawndle - cut your lawn. efficiently. daily game.
  • Lazy to Work - games that look like spreadsheet and word processor software
  • Messenger - deliver messages on an alien planet
  • Metazooa - guess animal species by taxonomy (via @little-alien-thoughts)
  • MonsterBreeder - breed monsters. i will not elaborate. (@stillgr8)
  • My Grandmother's Lingo - interactive story that uses your microphone
  • Nearly Nothing - eat-to-grow game set in a Victorian museum where you start as a dust mite
  • Pendulo - simple but challenging timing game
  • Penrose - nonlinear interactive sci-fi narrative game from the makers of A Dark Room (via @ace-of-flame)
  • PokeFarm Q - Pokémon egg-hatching game (@dravencore)
  • Rush - control traffic lights. try not to cause accidents.
  • Space Cadet Pinball - classic Windows Space Cadet Pinball
  • Terminal 00, Lomando, and angelangelangel - horror games/websites similar to corru.observer
  • The HTML Review - interactive stories and poetry written in code
  • The Revival - political sim where you rebuild a broken centre-left party. a little raw, but good for a 15-minute browser game.
  • The Useless Web - useless website aggregator (@harbinger-of-soup)
  • TVGuessr - GeoGuessr, but you guess the TV channel's broadcasting country
  • Type Help - puzzle-mystery game (@stuckinpermafrost)
  • Unsubscribe Hell - forgot to unsubscribe from a free trial simulator
  • Urinal Game - pick a urinal and see what percentage of people picked the same one
  • Why I Run - text-based RPG based on Android: Netrunner, the card game (via @la-femme-de-stardust)
  • World's Biggest Pac-Man - infinite Pac-Man with friends
  • Worlds Apart - downloadable interactive tale of self-discovery set in an alternate universe (@hydra-collector)
  • You Can Buy Every Upgrade - 1-bit metroidvania where you can buy every upgrade
  • You Have Not Died of Dysentery - Oregon Trail with alternative dysentery mechanics
  • Your AI Slop Bores Me - real-time multiplayer game where humans role-play as AI
  • Your Turn to Die - freeware negotiation/horror/adventure game by Nankidai made in RPG Maker MV (@lucywynnf)

Game Hubs, Archives & Master Lists

Tools & Learning

Non-English Games & IF

Non-Games

FMHY

thank you to everyone again for all of your contributions and recommendations. always support independent developers and media.

Warning

LINK

You are about to visit a link which has been flagged with the above content warnings. Do you wish to continue?

Cancel
Edit
Raw PDF PNG WebP JPG

Pub: 30 Aug 2026 19:44 UTC

Views: 1284

new· what· how· langs· contacts· login