The pitch writes itself and that is exactly the problem with it: a fighting game where caricatures of world leaders beat each other up. Every third person on the internet has had that idea in the shower. The difference here is that this one exists, it runs in the tab you are currently looking at, and it took no engine, no build step and not a single downloaded asset to do it.

Everything you see is drawn by code. Every sound is synthesised in the browser through Web Audio. There is no sprite sheet, no texture atlas, no 40-megabyte first load — the entire thing is plain script tags and a Canvas, which is why it starts before you have finished reading this sentence. That is not nostalgia for how things used to be built. It is the only way to ship a game that has to boot instantly inside a news article.

The violence is deliberately toothless. Nobody bleeds; hits throw confetti and paperwork. This is not squeamishness so much as accuracy — the genre's usual spine-ripping would suggest these figures face consequences, and the joke lands harder when the worst thing that happens to any of them is being buried in their own documents. Fatalities are replaced by bureaucracy, which is the most realistic mechanic in the game.

Controls, because they are never where you expect: A and D to move, W to jump, S to crouch, J to punch. Player two lives on the arrow keys with comma or Num1 for punch. On a phone, touch controls appear at the bottom and the game defaults to one player against the AI, which comes in three difficulty levels — the top one does not flatter you.

Two modes: one player against the machine, or two players sharing one keyboard, which remains the only local multiplayer format that has never needed a patch. Play it in the frame above, or open it full screen and stop pretending you came here to read.