2pt Interactive

When I was in middle school I was obsessed with browser games. This was back in the heyday of Adobe Flash, a legendary release at the time that now feels unwieldy and hand-powered to say the least, and for a few years there seemed to be no limit to the amount of television-inspired carnival rides that studios could cook up to keep me stunting on Mandark, Aku, and the like. In many ways, TV-themed Flash games were the closest you could get to Disney World in the Virginia suburbs when AOL was still mailing you the Internet, and I was in love. There was even a Dragon Ball Z training gym RPG that I would have sold my parents into captivity to keep playing.

During Covid, I started being interested in browser games again more as a concept than a hobby. I had grown (and continue to grow) incredibly weary with the mono-culture of frustration and toxicity that Triple-A Gaming seems hellbent on churning out, or at least doing nothing about, and the browser felt like an untapped resource again for the first time in years. I spent long nights brainstorming a game about playing cards in a tavern and going to the farmers market in a snowy mountain village, and I started jotting down examples of folks who seemed to agree that this type of real estate might be a good idea to build on.

The picture above is from one such example that I stumbled aboard courtesy of my girlfriend this week. I’d never heard of 2pt Interactive or Alexander Perrin, but his game Short Trip is incredible to me and the perfect example of the sort of calming snack break a browser game can provide. Sometimes your day sucks and the only way through it is to deliver your fellow catfolk to their mountainside abodes in an orderly fashion. Maybe at the end of the day all we really want is quaint transportation up the hillside.