Games that ask for nothing but your attention

The first thing most games ask for is you. Your name, your email, a password you will forget, permission to send you things you did not ask for. By the time you are allowed to play, the playing feels like the smallest part of the deal. I wanted to build the opposite: a game that opens the moment you arrive and asks for nothing back.

The cost of an account

An account is a small tax collected up front. It says: to enjoy this, first prove who you are, then stay reachable. For a five-minute puzzle that you might play once, that tax is larger than the game. Worse, it changes the relationship — suddenly the maker has a line to you, and the line usually wants something.

So my games keep no account. They do not even keep your score unless you choose to submit a new best, and even then the score goes nowhere but the screen in front of you.

A puzzle that remembers nothing about you

Lantern Grove is a quiet deduction puzzle: place lanterns by row, region, and spacing clues until every garden is lit. It saves nothing on a server. There is no login, no profile, no "welcome back." You open it, you solve, you leave. The only trace is the small progress note your own browser keeps — and even that is yours to clear.

If you search for games with no account or no-login browser games, this is the promise you are really after: play now, be forgotten later, owe nothing. It is a lower ceiling for growth, maybe, but it is a calmer floor to stand on — and the kind of game I am happy to leave my name on.

A game that asks for nothing is, in a small way, a polite one. On a web that is mostly trying to keep you, politeness is rare enough to be worth making on purpose.