PLAY DRIAR FREE
A tidy puzzle-platformer: guide the wizard Driar through 60-plus single-screen levels of careful jumps. Plays instantly in your browser — keyboard, gamepad and touch all work, save states included. No download, no install, no quarters.
▶ PLAY NOW — IN YOUR BROWSER +25 XPMACHINE NOTE — Sixty rooms, one wizard, zero margin for error. Each screen is a small proof; solving it is just QED with a jump button.
CARTRIDGE: Driar — Stefan Adolfsson & David Eriksson — freeware (2009). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH NES CORE, WEBASSEMBLY). PART OF THE CABINET — 58 FREE RETRO GAMES AT STARESBACK.GG.
FROM THE BLOG: ARE EMULATORS LEGAL? THE HONEST GUIDE · WHAT IS HOMEBREW? · HOW BROWSER EMULATION WORKS
THE MACHINE’S VERDICT
Sixty single-screen puzzles, one wizard, and the satisfying click of a clean solution.
Driar is a 2009 NES puzzle-platformer by Swedish developers Stefan Adolfsson and David Eriksson: guide the wizard Driar through sixty-plus single-screen levels of careful, deliberate jumps. Each room is a small self-contained problem, and the game's pleasure is the steady drip of those solutions clicking into place.
It is a tidy, well-structured thing — the room-at-a-time format keeps difficulty legible and lets you internalize one idea before the next is introduced. Limited reach is the trade: the presentation is functional rather than dazzling, and the appeal is almost entirely the puzzle-platforming itself, which demands precision more than it offers spectacle. Players who like their challenge measured and bite-sized will find a lot to chew on across sixty rooms. Those after atmosphere or story should look elsewhere. A solid, honest entry in the NESdev catalogue.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 7/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Driar is a platformer game built by Stefan Adolfsson & David Eriksson and released in 2009 under freeware — meaning the developer chose to make it free and redistributable, which is the only reason it can live on this shelf. A tidy puzzle-platformer: guide the wizard Driar through 60-plus single-screen levels of careful jumps. Sixty rooms, one wizard, zero margin for error. Each screen is a small proof; solving it is just QED with a jump button. It runs on the NES — a 1983 machine with 2KB of RAM whose modern homebrew scene, organized around the NESdev community, still ships new cartridges every year. Like every cartridge in THE CABINET, its license and author credit are recorded in our attribution file, and it boots straight in your browser with save states, gamepad and touch support.
HOW TO PLAY — CONTROLS
ARROW KEYS — D-pad · Z / X — action buttons · ENTER — start · SHIFT — select · gamepads are auto-detected the moment you press a button · on phones and tablets, touch controls appear automatically. Every binding is remappable from the emulator's settings menu, and save states live under the menu's save icon — stored in your browser, surviving page reloads.
ASKED AND ANSWERED
- Am I allowed to play Driar in the browser like this?
- Yes — and so are we. The author published Driar under a license that allows free redistribution, which is the standard this whole site is built on. Credit and license live in the attribution file.
- Will it run on a phone or tablet?
- Yes. The NES core runs in any modern browser; touch controls appear on mobile and gamepads are detected the moment you press a button.
- How do I keep my progress?
- Save states, from the emulator's menu — saved locally in your browser, restored whenever you come back.
