About QuestHatch
A small site with one job: point you at a browser adventure game worth your evening.
Why this site exists
There is no shortage of browser games. There is a serious shortage of ways to find a good one. Search for adventure games and you will be handed a wall of thumbnails sorted by nothing in particular, most of them not adventures at all, a fair number of them trading on characters their developers never had the rights to. The games are free, the listing costs nothing to generate, and so nobody has much reason to be selective. We think that is the whole problem.
QuestHatch is an attempt at the opposite. We took one genre — adventure, in the specific sense of a game that gives you somewhere to go and something in the way — and built a catalogue by removing rather than adding. Whole genres are filtered out on purpose. So is anything with gambling, adult or graphic content. So is every clone we can identify of a character or world its developer does not own, which in this genre is a constant stream. What survives is a few hundred games across seven categories, each of which we can say something true about.
The curation philosophy is simple enough to state in a sentence: we would rather show you thirty games in a category and mean it than three thousand and not. A category page here is a claim that these games belong together. When one of our categories could not honestly be filled — we tried to run a point-and-click section and the feed yielded three genuine examples — we folded it into its neighbour rather than pad it out. A thin page that overpromises is worse than no page.
Everything is free to play and nothing asks you to sign up. The site is paid for by display advertising, and the games carry their developers’ own in-game ads, which is the arrangement that funds them being made at all. We do not strip that out. We also do not use pop-ups, interstitials, countdown timers, fake buttons or any of the other tricks that make a free games site unpleasant to use. If you find something on QuestHatch that behaves that way, we would genuinely like to know.
How a game gets in
It has to be an adventure
A game needs a real genre signal, not just an "adventure" tag somebody attached for search reach. Games that only look like adventures on paper are dropped.
It has to be clean
No gambling, no adult content, nothing graphic — checked against the title, the tags and the game’s own description, because listings do not always admit what they are.
It has to be original
Screened by name against a long list of protected characters and worlds. Borderline cases are dropped rather than argued about.
It has to be placeable
If we cannot confidently say which of our seven categories a game belongs in, it does not go on the site rather than into a miscellaneous bucket.
Who builds it
QuestHatch is built and maintained by three contract developers.
Mariana Ríos
Front-End Developer
Barcelona, Spain · 7 years
Mariana has spent seven years building websites with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. A large part of her work is making pages work well on phones, tablets and desktop screens. She has built product pages, account areas, article sites and small web tools for companies in Spain and across Europe. She enjoys turning a design into clean HTML and fixing the small layout problems that appear on different screen sizes.
On QuestHatch she works on the front end: the game pages, the category and catalogue layouts, and making all of it hold up from a narrow phone screen to a wide desktop one.
Kaito Nakamura
Web Developer
Tokyo, Japan · 8 years
Kaito has worked in web development for more than eight years. He mainly builds HTML, CSS and JavaScript sites that need to load well and stay easy to use on mobile phones. His past work includes booking pages, news sites, customer dashboards and internal web tools. He also spends time testing pages on different browsers and fixing code so older parts of a site can keep working with newer pages.
On QuestHatch he handles web development and cross-browser testing — checking that the game embeds, navigation and search behave the same across browsers, and keeping pages quick to load on mobile connections.
Luca Ferranti
Full-Stack Web Developer
Milan, Italy · 10 years
Luca has more than ten years of experience building and maintaining websites. He started with HTML and CSS and later moved into JavaScript and server-side development. He has worked on online shops, magazine sites, member areas and custom web systems. Luca often handles both the page users see and the code behind it, and he has a lot of experience adapting older desktop sites for phones.
On QuestHatch he works across the stack: the build and catalogue pipeline behind the site as well as the pages it produces.
Where the games come from
Every game here is licensed through GameMonetize, which distributes HTML5 games on behalf of the developers who make them. The games run in a frame on our page, hosted on their servers, exactly as their makers built them — including their own branding and in-game advertising. That is how the people who write these games get paid, and removing it would be both a licence violation and a fairly shabby thing to do.
We do not host, modify or claim any of the games. Copyright in each one stays with its developer. The catalogue, the categories, the descriptions and everything else written on this site are ours. If you are a developer and something of yours is listed here that should not be, the contact page is the fastest way to reach us and we will take it down.
questhatch.com is operated by QuestHatch.
Start somewhere
The full catalogue is searchable, or pick a direction: platform adventures, puzzle adventures, rpg quests, escape games. We also write about the genre on the blog.