Switchback Hut Book
Misty alpine valley at sunrise, a braided river below and a marked track crossing the grassy slope in the foreground

Switchback
Hut Book

A logbook for four slow browser games, each filed as a hut on one long track.

Follow the track

Some games want a quick look. These four want a long walk: light a fire, eat the candy, make paperclips, gather food.

Each hut below is a game written up the way a hut book would do it. How the first screen looks, what holds attention after dark, when to stop, and what the page itself says.

Four huts, one track

A small corrugated-iron hut on a ridge above a sea of cloud, with an orange marker pole beside the track

Universal Paperclips

The saddle hut

The first screen is one button, Make Paperclip, beside a wire counter measured in inches.

Read the hut entryOpen Universal Paperclips on its own site

A Dark Room

The bush hut at night

It opens on two lines of text, the fire is dead and the room is freezing, and one button: light fire.

Read the hut entryOpen A Dark Room on its own site
A timber hut with one lit window in a snowy beech forest at night, an orange marker on a post in the snow

Candy Box 2

The meadow hut

It begins with a candy count in plain monospace text and a button that reads Eat all the candies.

Read the hut entryOpen Candy Box 2 on its own site
A stone hut on a sunlit meadow of tussock and white daisies above a glacial stream, with an orange marker pole on the path

Trimps

The river hut

A Food meter with a Gather button, a message log at the top right, and saves kept in the browser’s local storage.

Read the hut entryOpen Trimps on its own site
A green hut beside a braided glacial river in a misty mountain valley, with an orange marker pole in the foreground
A frosted rocky track with an orange-banded marker post and a glacier in the distance

What goes in an entry

Each page is built from what the game’s own page shows: the first screen, the buttons, the footer links. If something can’t be seen there, it stays out of the book.

  • How the game greets a first-time visitor
  • What the page offers once the first minutes are over
  • How saving and stopping work, where the page says
  • Links and notes that sit on the page
  • The kind of reader it suits
  • Screens and browsers named by the game
A still alpine tarn at dusk under a peach and slate sky

Slow games, short sittings

Idle and text games are easy to leave open for hours. A few habits keep them a pleasure, and they’re written down on one page.

Read Play well