Journal · 2026-05-08 · 6 min
Why we make slow games.
The phrase "respect for the player" gets thrown around a lot in game design talks. It usually means clear UI, fair difficulty, no dark patterns. Those things are fine. But the version of respect we keep coming back to is much smaller and weirder. We think it means: let them put the phone down.
The problem with most "casual" games
Look at any free-to-play casual game on the App Store. The systems are sophisticated. There's a daily login bonus to protect a streak you didn't ask for. There's a progress bar that fills 81% of the way and then stops. There's an energy mechanic that runs out exactly when you were about to quit anyway, except now you feel bad. There's a leaderboard you didn't sign up for, showing you the score of someone called Megan_2017 who is, statistically, probably a bot.
These games are very good at what they're trying to do. What they're trying to do is keep you. That's a different thing from respecting you.
What "slow" looks like, in practice
We have a small list of rules we try to obey. Most of them came from things we removed during playtesting because they felt sticky.
- Game-over is a destination, not a punishment. When you crash in Drift, you see how far you drifted. Not "Continue?" with a 5-second countdown. Just the number, and a button. You can leave.
- No streak counters that you can break. Our daily puzzle counts days played, not consecutive ones. Miss a Tuesday? It's still seven.
- No cliffhangers in level design. Each game is a complete experience after one round. Bloom looks like a finished thing whether you planted three flowers or three hundred.
- Optional friction, not forced friction. Rewarded ads exist (we have to pay rent). They unlock small extras — a season change, a hint, a stronger breeze. If you close them, the game does not become worse. It just becomes the same.
- Best-scores live on your device. No accounts. No login flow. If you clear your browser, the slate is clean. The studio doesn't know your scores. That's a feature.
It's still a game
Slow doesn't mean shapeless. Drift has a real difficulty curve — the river narrows, the speed climbs, you will eventually crash. Stargaze has actual puzzles where you can be stuck. Kintsugi rewards a steady hand. The games still do something. They just don't do it to you.
Designers sometimes call this "respectful difficulty" — the game is allowed to be hard, but it isn't allowed to be sticky. We don't think those are the same thing.
The economic risk
The honest reason most games aren't like this: slow games make less money per user. If your KPI is daily active users, every quiet minute we leave on the table is a quiet minute someone else's game is converting into ad views. There's no way around that math.
Our gamble is that there are more people willing to come back to a place that lets them go than there are willing to feel mildly guilty for skipping a streak. We don't know if we're right yet. We'll find out.
How we build them
Each game is hand-coded in plain HTML5 Canvas — no game engine, no asset packs, no analytics beyond aggregate page views. The whole studio is one folder of files. A new game takes two-to-three weekends. Drift took the longest because we kept rewriting the fog.
The advantage of staying small is that we can make decisions like "no leaderboards" and not have a quarterly review where someone tries to put leaderboards back. That feels worth something.
What we want for the player
Five quiet minutes. Maybe ten. Then back to your day, slightly more put-together than when you started. That's it. That's the whole pitch.
If we ever stop being able to do that — if you find yourself opening Drift instead of going to bed, or feeling guilty for missing a daily — please email us. That's the kind of bug report we most want to receive.