⌨️ Keyboard Only Games

Same method as everywhere else on this site: we downloaded the games and read their code. A game that wants a pointer has to register a handler for one — something with mouse, pointer or click in its name — and a game with no such handler cannot respond to a click no matter how hard you try.

Of the 2,292 games in this catalogue whose input code we could read, 535 register keyboard handlers and no mouse handlers at all. This page is drawn from those, filtered and ordered by hand.

They are the light ones

Median download, measured by opening each game in a real browser and counting the bytes: 4.6 MB. For the mouse-only games it is 6.2 MB; for the catalogue as a whole, 7.8 MB.

Keyboard games are the cheapest games to build well, and the reason is what a keyboard is for. It is a movement device: left, right, jump, brake. That points a developer straight at the arcade tradition — a side view, a tile grid, a character made of a handful of small drawings repeated thousands of times. Tiles and sprites compress into almost nothing.

The tags on this group say the same thing without being asked: arcade, 2D, adventure, action, platform. Not one of them describes a picture you look at. They all describe a thing you steer.

Seventy of them are for two people

This is the finding worth the page.

Seventy of these games are tagged for two players — the highest concentration of same-keyboard multiplayer anywhere in the catalogue. One person takes the arrow keys, the other takes WASD, and both sit at the same laptop.

It follows directly from the input. A game that ignores the mouse has left half the keyboard unused and half the desk free, and somebody always notices. It is also the oldest form of multiplayer there is, it needs no account, no server, no lobby and no connection worth the name, and it is the only kind where you can see the other player's face.

If that is what you came for, there is a whole collection of it: two players on one keyboard.

What this page is not

It is not a promise about a phone. Seventy-four of these games add on-screen buttons and are marked for touch; the rest genuinely need keys, and we would rather say so than let you download one on a bus.

And it is not a claim about the games we could not read. 2,292 builds gave up their input code; the others are protected, minified beyond recognition, or structured in a way that hides the handlers. Those games are absent from this page, not judged by it.

The other side of the same measurement is mouse only games.