Lagos Life controls

How you control Lagos Life

There is no WASD, no arrow keys and no character to steer. Lagos Life is a point-and-click game. You move through the world by selecting labelled places on the city map — Amala Shitta, CcHub, Quilox, the Polling Unit and so on — and the game takes you there. Everything else is buttons and forms.

That design choice is why it works so well on a phone. There is no control scheme to learn, so the game is equally playable on a laptop and on a bus.

In-game input

Note the cookie choice: Lagos Life says it uses one cookie to keep you signed in and another to count visits, and states plainly that it uses no ad trackers. Essential only is a legitimate choice — it just means the game may not remember you between visits.

Controls on this page

The game window on our homepage and play page adds its own small set of controls on top of the game.

Why signing in needs its own window

This is the one genuinely awkward thing about playing Lagos Life inside someone else's page, and it is worth understanding because it is not a bug we can fix.

Lagos Life keeps you signed in with cookies — the game's own notice says as much: "We use a cookie to keep you signed in." Browsers treat cookies set inside an embedded window as third-party cookies, and they restrict them hard:

The failure is silent, which is what makes it confusing: you type your password, the form looks like it worked, and you are still a guest. The cookie write is simply discarded, with no error shown.

The fix is a normal window. A popup or a tab is a top-level context, so the game's cookies are first-party and everything behaves the way it does on the game's own site. That is why our Sign up / Log in button opens one — it is not a workaround, it is the correct way to do it.

Three ways to play, and when to use each

The practical sequence most people end up with: open the game window once, create your account there, and then play wherever you like — your save lives on Lagos Life's servers and follows the account, not the window.

Fullscreen on mobile

Fullscreen behaves differently on phones, and it is worth knowing why. On iOS, Safari does not offer the fullscreen API for ordinary page elements, so the Fullscreen button hides itself rather than sitting there doing nothing. On Android, fullscreen works, and the game fills the screen in landscape particularly well.

If you are on a phone and want the closest thing to a native game, open Lagos Life in its own tab and add it to your home screen. The game ships a web app manifest, so it can launch without browser chrome — which is a better fit than an embed for a long session. See download for the detail.

Why point-and-click is the right call here

Lagos Life is a social world, and the map is the interface. In a game where the interesting content is where you are — a specific amala spot, a specific club, a specific polling unit — making travel a menu of named places is clearer than making it a walking simulation. It also means every location name is a piece of Lagos vocabulary you absorb as you play.