Disposable Tricks

Disposable Tricks is a small, dark stealth adventure designed to be played on a phone held sideways. You guide a tiny hero with a living flower growing from his head across dried-out lands, where light gives him away and monsters hunt him. Before each run you choose one of four weapons — or type anything you like, from “a bazooka” to “a dragon” to “zombies” — and an AI turns your words into a real, playable part of the game. It is one of the few AI-native games we have found where the model is not a gimmick bolted onto the menu but a mechanic that changes what you carry into the world.

Stealth comes first and the sword second. Monsters grow suspicious before they attack, every attack is telegraphed, and each one can be avoided without a weapon by hiding, lying flat, jumping or stepping aside. Surviving also leaves an opening, so patience is usually stronger than swinging. Your goal in each of the ten worlds is to find seven of ten living flowers, break stones, take detours through glowing gates and plant what you have collected at the end. The world itself is the health bar: as you restore flowers, the palette warms, the music gains a bell note, and the finale brings the sun up and turns the world green.

The AI layer is built with a fallback rather than a promise. The developer assembled an evaluation set of 57 written wishes, added an answer checker and shipped an offline parser, so the game still gives you something playable when the model is unavailable — and the reported result went from 35 of 49 wishes handled correctly to 57 of 57. Under the hood it is a TypeScript and Phaser 3 game on Cloudflare Pages, with a small server that tries Groq first and Cloudflare Workers AI second, repairs and checks every answer, and stays inside free-tier limits. All art is drawn in code as silhouettes, and all music and sound are generated with the Web Audio API. The 350 Vitest tests include bot playtests, every boss’s moves and the AI evaluation set.

Disposable Tricks was designed and directed by Amin Ranjbar and built with Claude Code as the AI engineer. The team documents its research and measurements, from silhouette studies of Limbo, Inside and Hollow Knight to bot players with human reaction times testing 60 roads each — which lifted the skilled-bot finish rate from 63% to 87%. The final build is around 380 KB gzipped, works without an account, collects nothing and is rated 16+. If you want a tense, beautiful mobile stealth game that lets you write your own weapon, this is the most interesting browser release of the week.