What is a Towlr?
A Towlr is a puzzle game with the following defining features
- are visually and auditorially simple and crude (large blocky & color squares, somewhat unpleasant 8 bit audio, and so on)
- a + symbol located in the game somewhere that does nothing
- do not have a title screen or intro, and do not give any guidance as what you're supposed to do
- have puzzles whose solution is trivial to execute and obvious in hindsight
In short, it's basically "flash games that play like terrible atari 2600 games".
(see a copy of the Towlr manifesto at this repo: https://github.com/willurd/burymyheart. unfortuately, it seems like the original Towlr website has since gone down, and nearly all of the Towlr games that exist are Flash games, which also have evaporated. It is on wayback machine, but the games aren't available: https://web.archive.org/web/20190610044211/http://towlr.ludumdare.com/)
The Original Towlr

As an example, here's the original Towlr. I have no idea where you can play this now. Someone who's better at wayback machine, please try finding it?). You play as the as the orange circle in the middle. Your goal is to land on the red area to the left of the white rectangle. The yellow horizontal bar at the top is your fuel. Holding up burns some of your fuel and rockets you upward. Holding left or right moves you left or right. Running out of fuel or touching the white rectangle kills you, automatically restarting the game after a red flash and unpleasent noise. This also adds one to the death counter in the upper left. The white plus symbol does nothing. Winning the game rewards the player with an image of a cake.
When playing, you realize quickly that it seems impossible to get over the rectangle--there just isn't enough fuel. So what's the solution? You have to be holding up as you spawn in. This will give you enough height to rocket over the rectangle and onto the red platform. Doing this wins the game.
Nostalgia and Modernity
Towlr, and it's various sequel games, were all like this--ugly, low-fi, harsh, simple, and had a very specific aesthetic. At the same time, it's an extremely 2010s genre of game--the win screens are always cake, because Portal "the Cake is a Lie" memes. It's this weird pseudo-nostalgia for Atari Games mixed with 2010s era memes?
While Towlrs, on the outset, are harsh and unpleasent to play on purpose, it doesn't actually seem to be player-hostile "for real"--if the games were really meant to be player-hostile, then why make the solution so easy to execute? Towlrs don't have the "The Creator Hates You" vibe of 2000s-era Kaizo ROM Hacks, but instead as weird, standalone art objects. The original Towlr website even has a banner saying " + Warning: Dangerous Games + ", as if it's something to be preserved, lest the Authorities discover it and try to censor it.
This doesn't seem entirely incorrect--Towlrs do violate many game design principles on purpose, but their goal isn't to violate those principles Just For The Sake of It, but to produce a type of game experience that would be outside the bounds of Good Game Design TM. It's transgressive in that sense--Towlrs end up being " + Dangeous Games + " because of the potential that they have in them.
Cohost Games
Now let's look at cohost games. They're
- are visually simple and crude? (as in, cohost games so far have a web 1.0 aesthetic to them that seems deliberate)
- say "good job" when you win them usually
- have an eggbug located in the game somewhere that does nothing?
- have gameplay whose solution is trival to execute
To me, cohost games are Towlrs in the sense that they have a pseudo-nostalgia (web 1.0 era social media) mixed with modern, 2020s era memes. They typically ask the player to complete oddly wholesome or cute tasks--click the X of the Windows XP dialogue box, or put the lizard back into the tank. Sometimes they're more involved--find the keys in the drawers or play a WarioWare minigame.
There's also a bunch of... communal(?) games? Things like the Ao3 Doom Post, or the /r/Place recreation are good examples of this. They're also relying on these lo-fi Web 1.0 sort of aesthetics. No doubt the overall Web 1.0 "feel" is driven by the fact that all of these are just CSS + HTML games, and are coded to fit into the post size limits--which is somewhat similar to the intentional restrictions that Towlrs designers place on themselves with the Atari-esque graphics and gameplay.
There's a sort of, air of "magic" that these games carry for me--social medias aren't supposed to have CSS, let alone games! It seems like Unauthorized Posting, against the rules for how Twitter/Tumblr/Youtube/Facebook pages are Supposed to look like. Think about when Tumblr accidentally allowed for images to break out of their posting boxes--everyone seemed to treat it like it was Powerful Magic, or when the viral #carp Tweets appeared over Twitter. These sorts of posts Broke The Rules of normal posting and hence had to be Contained. For cohost to embrace these sorts of wild, rules breaking, unusual posts is cool for that reason--the same way that Towlrs can explore a weird, unusual game design space by deliberate eschewing Game Design, cohost games get to eschew Posting Guidelines in order to explore their own "interactive post space". In this way, cohost games get to be their own " + Dangerous Post + ".
Aaron told me on voice chat about how Towlrs were like Cohost interactables, and I said to write that down so I could post it for him, and then he wrote an essay about it.
