I needed a 2D game engine for an action game I'm building in React Native. I went looking for one. There is no React Native game engine in 2026. There are four partial options - each serious in its own domain, each missing something fundamental for the others. I spent two weeks mapping exactly where each one breaks. By the end of the second week, I'd started writing the missing layer myself. This post is the map I built before that decision. The four options I evaluated: react-native-game-engine (RNGE), Phaser 4 inside a WebView, the graphics primitives expo-gl and react-native-wgpu , and @shopify/react-native-skia paired with Reanimated 4. None of these is a React Native game engine in the sense of "install it, add a game loop, render sprites, play audio, manage scenes." Each one is something else - a renderer, a context, a web engine in a sandbox, a dormant project - and each one fails at a specific cliff. Here is where each cliff sits and what it means.…