Logbook · editorial notes
Each note explains one choice behind the finds, the tide table or the picker.
Flash ended in 2020 and took a generation of browser RPGs with it. Some moved to launchers or Steam, some closed, and some kept a website that no longer starts the game in a browser.
A game only makes the list if it opened in an ordinary desktop browser on the day we checked. Drakensang Online now starts with a download and Alter Aeon offers only launchers, so both are left out, however good they are.
An idle game keeps working while the tab is closed, but it is designed so that coming back pays off. The minutes a day on each tag count those visits, not the hours the game runs on its own.
If a game starts to feel like a chore of checking in, the tide table compares the nine: Idle Pixel rewards four visits a day, while Angband and the two text worlds never call you back.
Multi-user dungeons, or MUDs, began in 1978, long before browsers. The two on this list run in a web page: you type commands, read what happens and share the world with whoever else is logged in.
They ask for more reading than anything else here, and they reward it. The Reading bar on each profile shows how much.
Each find carries the same six lines: who runs it, since when, how to start, whether a phone browser works, what the shop sells and how much of your day it asks. There is no overall score.
The four profile bars (reading, pace, waiting, company) describe a game; they do not rank it. A high Waiting bar is a warning for one player and the attraction for another.
Each find carries a photograph of something from its world: a lit castle, a library, a stone stairway into the dark, a knight by a fire, the Earth from orbit. They were taken by photographers on Unsplash and are credited by name. None is a screenshot or official artwork of a game.
For what a game looks like today, its own site is linked at the top of every find, and it will always be more current than a picture here.