There are few better ways to spend time that should be productive than browser games. These humble titles can often provide hours of mild entertainment on a very simple premise, sometimes steeped in nostalgia for simpler times. Who among us in the 1990s didn’t spend our lives playing Flash games and daydreaming about bigger things?
In this post, we’ll cover a few of the big names, in addition to a smaller alternative that you may not have heard of.
Cookie clicker
Cookies of all kinds. World-ending threats by sweet old ladies. Extra-dimensional horror. Cookie clicker has it all and is seen by many as the definitive idle game. What starts with repeatedly clicking on a giant cookie ends in an apocalyptic nightmare, and it will do so again and again.
Cookie Clicker is so popular that it has made its way to Steam – that’s right, you can buy it as a game in its own right. How much fun you’ll have with it depends on what you’re looking for.
I would describe it as an interactive screensaver. It ticks away in the background and collects cookies, which you can then use to buy upgrades, well, bake more cookies. And so it expands, endlessly into eternity, just like a TOOL song.
I really can’t emphasize enough how perfect Cookie clicker is like a way of doing nothing at all. Anyone who tells you that there are strategies or multiple ways to achieve peak performance is lying to themselves. They’re just trying to feel better after clicking cookies for 300 hours.
If you’re looking for a game to be more active – and not just a boredom killer during those quiet moments at work – this might not be for you. Luckily, we’ve got a few more suggestions in store, so peel it back and take a look.
PLAYS.ORG
You may not have heard of plays.org, but it offers quite an impressive catalog of browser games. The website itself is quite simplistic, but functional – delivering hundreds of games with a simple interface. What I really like about plays.org is how widely compatible it seems to be – whatever browser I use, it works effortlessly and loads quickly.
You can play variations on classic games like Mahjong and Tetris. One of my favorite simple activities was Blocky, a 3D puzzle based on Tetris. It starts out relatively easy – almost painful – but soon starts to offer some gentle brain teasers.
If you’re just looking for a quick distraction, games like Avoid Dying offer a bit of engaging, physics-based fun. I’m a sucker for archery games and Avoid Dying was perfect for killing a few minutes with here and there during the day.
Each game is judged on a number of factors, such as design and difficulty, so that you can get a general idea of how good a game is before you get started. One thing I want to say about plays.org: it’s not organized in the best way. Some category names are clumsy and it doesn’t put its best foot forward. If the categories were simpler and less like umbrella tags, it would be easier to navigate.
This means that you have to get through a lot of average or disappointing games before you often find a winner. Somehow that’s a bit nostalgic. It’s exactly the same experience you would have had browsing Newgrounds or any other browser game site from the 1990s!
I’m sure the team behind plays.org didn’t really intend their website layout or game curation to simulate the browser gaming experience of the 1990s, but I’m going to congratulate them on a nice touch anyway. Well done, you made me feel like a kid again. And that normally only happens when my parents are disappointed in me.
CONGREGATE
Kongregate is one of the biggest browser game sites out there – and for good reason. It offers a huge selection of titles, which can be played literally anywhere you have a web browser, and there are some really quality titles to be found. Of course, not all of them are winners, but the overall level of quality is quite reliable.
I found myself stuck on Realm Grinder for a while. It’s an idle game, similar to Cookie Clicker, but it seems to focus on faster rewards. You will progress much faster and can take multiple paths to success. Whether you want to lead a good, peaceful kingdom or an evil, infernal kingdom, you can choose your own path.
Kongregate offers a lot of ‘high-end’ browser games – titles that you could technically classify as MMOs, and a large number of MTG-style card games.
Kongregate is also home to some of the most classic browser games around – remember Bloons? It essentially kickstarted the entire tower defense genre. And you can play the entire series for free on Kongregate!
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