Crime RPGs you can actually play on a phone

The genre and the phone should be a perfect match. These are games made of short decisions with a clock between them — ten minutes at a bus stop is exactly the session they were designed for. In practice most of them were built for a 1024-pixel desktop window some time around 2005, and have been responsive-ified since rather than rebuilt. You find out which is which about a week in, when you realise you only ever play at a desk.

Four things to check in the first five minutes

• Can you reach the navigation with a thumb? A twenty-item sidebar that collapses into a hamburger at the top of the screen is a desktop menu wearing a costume. The test is whether the places you go constantly are reachable without changing your grip.
• Does a page survive a reload? If every screen is the same URL, you cannot bookmark anything, you cannot send a friend a link, and the browser's back button takes you out of the game. On a phone, where you get interrupted constantly, that is the difference between a game you return to and one you restart.
• Does it install? A game that can be added to the home screen and opened without browser chrome is a game you will actually open. One that lives in a tab competes with every other tab.
• How much does it want to download? The point of a browser game is that there is nothing to install. A page that ships megabytes before it shows you anything has given that away.

What currently survives the trip

Torn ships native iOS and Android apps, which is the most complete answer to this problem — the app is a first-class way to play the largest game in the genre. Gangster Nation also ships apps alongside its browser version. Most of the rest are honest desktop games that work on a phone rather than games built for one, and the round-based mafia titles in particular tend to assume a wide screen.

MeowStreets was built the other way round

The city is a browser crime RPG where every player is a street cat, and it was laid out for a phone first: a bottom tab bar rather than a sidebar, every page at its own address so a link can be pasted into chat and a reload lands where you were, and a web manifest so it installs to the home screen with its own icon and opens without browser chrome. There is no app store, no download and no cost — the install is the page you are already on.

The session it is built for is a few minutes: run a crime or two while the nerve is there, put energy into a gym, start a course that finishes while you are asleep, check what the market did. The city keeps running in between, which is the part that makes a ten-minute visit worth making.

If you want the wider comparison rather than the phone one, the alternatives list is here, and this explains what the genre is. Otherwise open the city and add it to your home screen.