Indie Game Roundup (October 30, 2025)

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Yes I know I just did one of these a few days ago but I’m sad about real life stuff so I’m doing another. There’s a few Halloween appropriate things too since I thought it would be good to mention those before tomorrow and the list of things to post about has already grown a ton in the last couple days so here we are. If you enjoyed this post, please donate money to support Jamaica in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa.

someone in a ghost costume collecting candy at night

Sugar Ghouls (Itch.io) is a cute browser collect-a-thon where you run around collecting candy while avoiding monsters. It has some really nice PS1 inspired art too. I also recommend checking out soda raptor’s Itch page if you want more games with a PS1 aesthetic and game recommendations from them.

Slop (Itch.io) is a short horror Twine game and the exciting thing about this one is that it’s meant for three players over voice chat. I always get excited about multiplayer interactive fiction.

Barbarians (Itch.io) is a Pay-What-You-Want strategy game for DOS where you need to defend your empire from barbarians. It’s also available for the ZX Spectrum.

first person view of someone exploring low poly fantasy environments

Gorgon’s Garden (Itch.io) is a short, free horror game about exploring a dead MMO and forum devoted to it. I will always get excited about games focused on dying/dead MMOs.

a person running through a snowy field with lots of fences

Ron Gilbert’s newest game Death By Scrolling (Steam) is now available. It’s an arcade game with roguelite elements where you explore purgatory and collect gold by killing monsters. The screen is constantly scrolling upwards and you occasionally have to avoid the grim reaper, who is chasing you. I’ve been really enjoying this game. I love the pixel art and as someone that bounced off Vampire Survivors, I don’t think it actually has much to do with that game other than the auto attacking. I’ll probably write more about it later but I really like it.

two people talking in a forest and someone saying "School of Childonia. It's where we learn and share knowledge"

I don’t know a whole lot about the action rpg Stray Children (Steam), which just came out today, but it’s by the Moon and Rule of Rose devs and people love those so I think it’s worth a mention.

Microvania (Steam) looks like a lovely small retro-inspired Metroid-like and it has a demo if you want to give it a shot too!

a low poly woman on the roof of a building at night

Greek Tragedy (Steam/Switch/Playstation/Xbox) has also just come out today after being in development for a few years. It’s a survival horror game where you must survive a college campus that has been overrun with cultists.

a screen filled with blocks that look like pedestrian lights

I haven’t had the chance to try it yet but I’ve seen a lot of praise online for シンゴウブレイカ SINGOU BREAKA (Steam). It’s a puzzle game where you destroy blocks modeled after pedestrian lights. It has a demo too if you want to give it a try.

Simon the Sorcerer Origins (Steam) is now out after being in development for a while. It’s a prequel to the Simon the Sorcerer adventure game series. I’m not the biggest fan of the games but a lot of people are and the art in this looks nice too.

a boy in a workshop

lil’ Henry and Penny’s Big Adventure Pack (Steam) looks really cute. It’s a set of short point-and-click adventure games that the developer made with his kids, with voice acting and options to make adventure games more accessible to kids too. More people should make games with their kids. I think it’s a lot of fun.

A few folks have said it’s the year of the ninja in games but 2025 is actually the Year of the Egg between the twin stick shooter Evil Egg (Steam), Terry Cavanagh’s free browser game Egg (Itch.io), and Dizzy’s corpse making a cameo in Lumo 2.

And last but not least, the free zine ChoiceBeat #15 is here, featuring news and reviews of interactive fiction and visual novels.

Indie Game Roundup (October 27, 2025)

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Oops, I guess it’s been a while since I’ve posted on here. Because of so much real life stuff I just haven’t really had the time but I thought I would do one today since I will be too busy to do one on Halloween and there’s some stuff in here that you may want to play before the Halloween season is over. If you enjoy these posts and can afford to, please consider donating money to your local food bank. Food donations are good too but they can get so much more with money than you’ll be able to. You can probably find one close to you here.

Anyway, here are The Games

a series of lit pumpkins standing on pedestals at night

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it before, but The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is up again! It’s a free (but consider donating money) MMO where you are a ghost that carves pumpkins, can do an escape room, hedge maze, watch public domain movies, go on a hay ride, and more. It came out a few years ago but gets new stuff added on every month. I’ve been playing it with my kids and cannot recommend it enough.

Trimjob (Steam) is a game that combines mini golf and lawn mowing. I’m against lawn mowing in real life for environmental reasons but this is a video game so it’s fine. It’s less harmful than shooting people or doing a capitalism I guess.

I just really like that CaptainD keeps using Adventure Game Studio to make things that aren’t adventure games. This time it’s The Last Bite (Itch.io), which is Snake but with power ups.

Darkenstein 3D (Steam) is a free FPS where you shoot Nazis. It’s clearly inspired by Wolfenstein 3D but plays a bit more like late 90s/early 00s FPS and lists Return to Castle Wolfenstein as an influence.

Leaftaker (Itch.io) is a free short mystery game about investigating a body in a grave and inspired by games by The Roottrees Are Dead. I think we’re using terms like Deduce-em-ups for that style of game now? I don’t know what’s going on anymore. Anyway, good game. Go check out Kaden’s tabletop rpgs too.

The Séance of Blake Manor (Steam) is another game with those influences and looks wonderful. It’s been getting some great reviews so far and I was a big fan of their Darkside Detective games.

Issue #4 of Funland (Itch.io) is here! It’s a video game zine that always has some great layout design and covers and this issue is focused on Halloween stuff.

Call of the Golden Valley (Itch.io) is a first-person adventure game where you search for your missing friend in the Australian outback. I don’t know a whole lot about it but it looks like it’s influenced by the Nancy Drew adventure games, Steam reviews have been positive so far, and there’s a demo so I think some people may find it interesting.

a wizard looking guy looking at old computer joysticks floating in the air

Lumo 2 (dev site) is an isometric Metroid-like inspired by 80s British computer games where you wander from room to room and solve puzzles. I was a huge fan of the first one and this one looks like it has lots of fun little surprises buried in it too from looking at the screenshots.

wireframe person running down a long cylinder and dodging shapes

HYPERBEAT (Steam) just looks like a great Rez-inspired rhythm game with lots of accessibility options.

Dispatch (Steam) is a superhero management comedy game where you are a former superhero working as a dispatch at a superhero dispatch center. The game was developed by folks from Telltale and seems like a good time from watching the stream on DecafJedi‘s channel.

pixel art of girls and birds and mushrooms on green platforms

We got a new Sylvie game! This one is Discover the World (Itch.io), a free turn-based rpg platformer. Go check it out and the play everything else by Sylvie.

There’s also a few games being crowdfunded right now. Midnight Saturn is a new sci-fi point-and-click adventure by Cosmic Void, Shores of Night is a cosmic horror ttrpg with no Lovecraft or Sanity rules, and Stomp and the Sword of Miracles is a cute platformer by the developer of the wonderful Frogsong.

Indie Game Roundup (October 11, 2025)

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Apologies in advance for this being a big one. Even with how massive this list is, I am missing a ton of stuff. Everyone released a game these last two weeks so this one is probably focused mostly around who I follow on Itch.

Video Games

two people sitting on blocks saying "no, nothing will ever top that" "lmfao"
New Eyes Cycle from the DOMINO Club Boneyard Collection

A new collection of DOMINO CLUB games is out! No one is doing experimental games better than this anonymous collective. You can check out all the games from the Boneyard Collection for free on Itch.io

a man saying "perseverence: if you can believe a sports car, you can achieve a sports car"

Landlord Quest (Itch.io/Steam) is a new point-and-click adventure where you play as a landlord. This is not a pro-landlord game. If you buy it on Itch.io, then you can run the game on any platform you want using ScummVM.

I think most people reading this know about Unfair Flips (Steam) but in case you don’t, it’s a short incremental clicker game about flipping a coin and getting 10 heads in a row.

Indiepocalypse #69 is now available (Itch.io)! This nice issue features another collection of games including a new game commissioned for this issue.

Detective Daydream (Itch.io) is a free stealth puzzle game for browsers where you sneak through rooms without being seen

a person looking at a bridge and tree on a sunny day

Messenger (website) is a relaxing browser game where you explore a city, doing tasks for folks living there, and you can see other folks running around the city as they play.

Radar Rally (Itch.io) is a fun take on the Rally-X style of arcade game for browsers. This dev has made quite a few remakes of old arcade games.

time down view of a woman fighting a big monster in a mansion

House of Necrosis (Steam) is a turn-based horror rpg where you explore a haunted mansion with art inspired by the original Resident Evil. I have never played Mystery Dungeon but that’s an inspiration, so if you’ve played it then maybe that’s very exciting to you.

Hoop Dungeon (Itch.io) is a basketball turn-based strategy game currently undergoing testing. Give it a shot and fill out the feedback form.

I’m a fan of Akril15’s adventure games and they made another one! Like the others, this one is free. I recommend checking out the rest here.

screenshot of a fps playing on a crt
I Made a Game for You from the BRIEFS 2025 collection

BRIEFS 2025 (Itch.io) is a collection of three games that were created for the Australian art collective gold extra, with this year’s theme being cheese.

a dragon character looking at a series of floors with obstacles like spikes and cars

SloanySoft makes plenty of cool games for the ZX Spectrum and they’re back with another one. BubbleBack: The Story of Forward to the Past 2 (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want sequel to a platformer. If you’ve never played a ZX Spectrum game before, consider downloading an emulator and trying a few out on Itch.

a woman looking at the camera on a tv show and the headline says "Clone Trois"

Blippo+ is out on Itch.io/Steam/Switch! I was a big fan of this one on the Playdate and it’s fun seeing it come to more platforms and in color. You basically uncover a storyline by flipping through channels on tv.

a fox in a creepy mansion with a monster and other fox in sight

Videonauts (Steam/Itch.io) is a new game by resnijars where you must escape from a haunted mansion with your friends while solving puzzles. I’m a big fan of their previous games so I’m looking forward to this. The developer lists Illbleed as an influence, which is super interesting to me too.

Tabletop

Melisma (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want ttrpg created by Adam Bell that is part character generator and part music trivia game. It was created for the minimalist jam, and you can check out the rest of the entries for that here.

Monster Truckers (dev site) is a ttrpg by Table Cat Games where you play as truckers that just happen to be monsters. It’s also on Itch and DriveThruRpg.

VOID_SHIFT (Itch.io) is a deckbuilder where you are the captain of a corporate-owned salvage and repair ship and need to put together a deck to complete jobs.

Jazzmanji (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want card game for 1-4 players where you explore a jazz dungeon and fight The Jazzman.

Not Games

There were also a few things released on Itch that weren’t video games but I think are still worth a mention.

Star Sword Nemesis (Itch.io) is a new book by Christine Love, developer of games such as Digital: A Love Story and Get in the Car, Loser. Girls in mechs!

Cats in a Frame (Itch.io) lets you have pictures of cats sitting on your desktop.

Moosadee released a tutorial for learning how to program for the TIC-80 virtual machine with either Lua or Python (Itch.io). Since I’m learning Python right at this moment, this is very interesting to me.

Rose made a Lovely Lodgings character generator for browsers (Itch.io) based on the recent batch of Domino Club games.

The Works of Egan put together this nice template and tutorial for creating your own blog (Itch.io). I’ve said it a million times before but I can’t recommend having your own site enough, where you have more control over the platform and this tutorial will help you setup a RSS feed too so anyone following you can see your posts through their feed.

Wurm Fud made a nice pay-what-you-want asset pack of folk magic pixel art icons (Itch.io)

CGALIB 2 (Itch.io) is a free library for making CGA DOS games and includes a sample game.

That’s it for this week! Thank you for reading this and making it to the end. Always feel free to comment or email me if there’s stuff you’ve worked on.

Blog Roundup (October 6, 2025)

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It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these but with Bluesky currently imploding because of its dipshit staff, maybe people will want some other websites to look at and add to their RSS feed reader. I’ve been using Inoreader since it has a solid free tier (although I pay for it now) and syncs everything I’ve already read through all the platforms I use it on, and adding sites to it is easy.

Creating Care is a new favorite newsletter I’ve subscribed to. If you’re like me and always feel compelled to be online looking at the news, maybe you’ll also find the latest post on staying informed without staying inflamed to be helpful.

My friend Steven, developer of games like WaveCrash!!, just started a newsletter where he will be posting his writing.

Video Games

Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia, recently had a post where he talks about all the ports of the first game and which ones are his favorites, which include some he wasn’t involved with.

Interactive fiction designer Andrew Plotkin covers the release of the remaster of the Making of Myst video that Cyan just released

Super Chart Island talks about the history of the classic UK computer game Monty on the Run which IMO has one of the greatest game theme songs in a video game.

A few months old but Syl’s Blog praised the multimedia cd-rom Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia so of course I have to mention that.

Also older but I need to include this post about the video intro at the beginning of some cd-roms that came with General Mills cereal.

Brain Baking has had a million good posts recently about card games but this one was how I found out about a fan remake of the card game in Might & Magic 7.

Sometimes you just like reading a post listing someone’s favorite ZX Spectrum games.

Ephemeral Enigmas is always reviewing retro games I never heard of, like this Gundam game for the Virtual Boy.

Tech

I think this post does a good job covering everything happening with Bluesky right now.

TTRPGs

Hosting your own mini-con is not as hard as you think!

Dev Logs

This guest post by Elissa on Ron Gilbert’s blog goes into the level design of their upcoming game Death By Scrolling.

erysdren is doing dev logs on making a new game for DOS

I’m also really enjoying the updates on Ben’s new point-and-click adventure

Writing

Yozy has been doing pixel art covers of the books they’ve been reading and they’re all very good.

Unpacking

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Developer: Witch Beam
Publisher: Humble Games
Year: 2021
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

isometric view of a dorm room with a desktop pc

I think at this point everyone has heard of this one. It’s a game released in 2021 where a story is told through a series of relaxing puzzles where you unpack boxes in a new home and need to fit all your stuff in each room. This is one of those games that had been sitting in my backlog for a while despite it being relatively short. I think everything about this game has been covered by folks smarter than me but I did enjoy it. It’s one of those things where there had been so much universal praise for it for years that when I finally got around to it, my first thought was “well yeah it’s good but that’s it?” It’s not fair to the game but it’s so simple and straightforward that I had expected there to be more to it when I finally played it. In fact, if I did have an actual criticism of it, it’s that I had felt like I had “got it” after I played just a few levels. I remember people complaining it was too short at the time but I think it would have become a slog if it was longer.

Anyway, glad I played it. Sometimes you like a thing and think it’s very good, just not as much as everyone else. Like everyone says, it’s a good time and the pixel art is fantastic. Something I didn’t expect would be that my 5 year old would see me playing it, ask to try it out, and fall completely in love with it. She now says it’s one of her favorite games.

It was fun looking up the studio and seeing that they had made Assault Android Cactus+, which I think is brilliant and deserves to be just as popular as Unpacking. It looks like they have one game I haven’t played yet, Tempopo, which was released earlier this year. I’ll have to check that one out too given that I’m a fan of their other work.

Unpacking is available on basically every platform.

Well, Never Mind on RetroAchievements Then

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About a month and a half ago I made a post about how I just learned about RetroAchievements and how it was a fun thing to use when revisiting old games. Well, hmmmm, I’m now deleting my account. It has just been discovered by folks that the site has a bit of a Nazi problem, which kills any interest I had in using the site so I put in my account deletion request, which apparently takes them two weeks to process. The quote retweets list other examples of the site’s moderation team not really caring about what users do. They can say as many times as they want that they’re neutral and just care about preservation but folks, they’re adding achievements to video games and that’s it. They can do whatever they want. You don’t need to add achievements to a far right rom hack.

Oh well, one less account for me to think about I guess and I can go back to not using RetroArch.

EDIT: They’ve since put out an apology and stated the right right rom hack won’t be added to the site which is good. I’m still probably going to let my account delete itself because I don’t really need to keep doing achievements for old games anyway, but I’ve got two weeks to think about it and see if they do anything else I guess.

Indie Game Roundup (September 26, 2025)

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It’s Friday! How are you? How was your week? There’s been a billion indie games that have come out in the last week so there’s going to be a lot that this post leaves out. Also if you’ve written me an email and I haven’t responded yet, sorry, I have just been super busy. I even saw Devo and the B-52s last night and had a good time. But please feel free to let me know about your indie game through my contact info on the About page. Or even just to say hi! That’s always nice too.

imagine of blocks falling into a cauldron
Spirit Drop, an entry in the Falling Blocks jam

A few game jams wrapped up this week with many wonderful games created for each. If you like games like Tetris then I highly recommend the Falling Blocks Jam on Itch.io. There’s a lot to dig through there but it has lots of interesting takes on the falling blocks genre. If you like adventure games, you may enjoy the $109 Adventure Game Challenge. I’m a bit less enthusiastic about this one since it allows AI art, especially since it has a cash prize, but there’s some good games in there like Eulogy for Nonno or Intern’s First Day.

cartoon of someone saying "What should I do with my free time?" and a big to-do list on the left side.

I think one of the biggest releases this week is Consume Me (Steam), an semi-autobiographical game about being in high school. It won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival!

top down view of a little blue guy surrounded by spiky enemies and text saying "Don't die"

3D Don’t Die Mr. Robot (Steam) was one of my favorite indie arcade games from last year so it’s fun seeing it get a demake for the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Well I guess technically it’s a demake of the first game but I only played the 3D one. Also on Itch.io if you prefer that

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 got a standalone expansion? Prequel? Anyway, the Puzzle Quest-like Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 1 Re-Raptored is now available on Steam.

Arctic Awakening (Steam/PS5/XBox) is a first-person sci-fi thriller about surviving in the arctic after a plane crash.

gif of a woman hitting a light to jump even higher

Waste Your Wedding (Itch.io) is a free platformer about trying to eat a giant cake.

first person view of shooting at robots

Mala Petaka (Steam) is one of those retro shooters but look at those colors! It’s made in the GZ Doom engine too. If you want to try it out, there’s a demo on Steam.

That’s it for this week! Like I said, feel free to let me know about your game in whatever way works best for you. Nothing with AI art please!

Play an Old Indie Game?

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a screenshot from Yip Quest showing 3 kobolds outside a jail cell
Yip Quest

I’ve now put all the indie games covered in the indie game roundups that are on Itch in a single Itch list and will add things to this going forward. This isn’t a perfect list, sometimes my posts covered an entire jam or collection of games. For cases like this, I kinda just included one or two games from the list. Not an ideal solution but oh well. Of course it’s missing anything that didn’t have an Itch.io release. It’s also missing all context for why I thought the games were interesting that I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I just think it’s a fun way to check out small, experimental indie games from a year or two ago since the memory on games feels like it’s extremely short lived and people move on extremely quickly unless it’s a massive hit. Search on Itch.io has also always been flawed. So I guess consider checking out the list, scrolling down a ton, and opening a random game?

There’s probably better ways of highlighting indie games that are older than a year but aren’t old enough to be considered “retro” and I think it would be fun to poke at that more. I think point-and-click adventures and interactive fiction seem to have a pretty long tail to them for maintaining interest after they come out, despite having smaller audiences, but who knows.

an image of a cartoon snake
SNAKE Lucky Laugh, one of the games that’s already been delisted from Itch

The biggest bummer about going through the list was that there’s been a few games that have already been delisted even though I’ve only been doing this for a few years. It’s good stuff so it kinda stinks I wasn’t able to save them. I thought I should start submitting this stuff to MobyGames as I do these roundups but I tried to submit one just not and got hit with a message about how I hit the limit on pending new game submissions because it takes mods there months to look at anything. You’d think with Atari owning the site it would have a bigger budget to deal with this but I guess not. I have no interest in submitting anything to IGDB since it’s owned by Amazon and Backloggd, which uses the database, just feels like another harassment vector at times. So the only documentation of some of these games is just my half assed weekly posts, and nobody deserves that.

Indie Game Roundup (September 19, 2025)

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Every day I wake up and say “What a week.” But it’s Friday, which means it’s actually near the end of the week so that’s something I suppose. Being back in school while having a full time job means that lately it’s just been free and pay-what-you-want indies I’ve been playing. Nothing wrong with that of course, but if you’re wondering why a lot of the bigger commercial indies aren’t on here, that’s why. Six One Indie did a nice indie game showcase yesterday and that’s probably a better way to become more familiar with those. You could also always look at my list of indie game websites and plug them all into your RSS feed reader of choice.

The Play for Peace – Games for Palestine 2025 Charity Bundle (Itch.io) bundle sale ends in a few days. Foor $8 or more you can get tons of great games

a canoe sitting on a lake at sunset

There’s another anthlogy from the game dev collective I’m in! I didn’t work on this one but Locally Sourced Anthology II: The Timeline (Steam) is a collection of 5 games set in different points in time in different genres.

an inactive mech in the rain at night

_ΩMEGA_POINT (Itch.io) is a Pay-What-You-Want walking simulator where you explore the last moments of a dying world in a mech.

Indiepocalypse #68 (Itch.io) is out. Check it out for a great collection of experimental indie games. Only one more month until we get to the nice number.

martians walking on a planets surface with giant people in glass tubes?

I’m just really fascinated by Mars Attracts (Steam) using the dormant Mars Attacks license to make a sim game. It’s nice to see that the user review for it have been positive too. What a weird thing to exist (complimentary).

first person view of someone in a field and their hand sticking out

Eclipsium (Steam) may not be for me because I’m not a big horror games person but I really like it looks. I just like a game that always has a hand sticking out in front.

person standing on a checkerboard pattern

Toward From (Itch.io) is a short experimental browser game that I think does some neat stuff connected to movement and was created for the Game Poems Community Showcase.

Matt Stark keeps creating really fun browser toys focused on building things and they’ve made another one. Mazegarden (Itch.io) is, as you would expect, a game focused on building maze gardens.

A new PUNKCAKE Délicieux game has arrived! Frontline: War of Echoes (Itch.io) is a capture the flag game where you play against recordings of yourself from previous runs.

a big purple hooded figure telling a man to surrender

Snarl (Itch.io) is a short point-and-click horror adventure set in a diner and available for Pay-What-You-Want. Be sure to check out the developer’s other adventures on their Itch page too if you’re a point-and-click adventure fan.

it's a bird with a space helmet on a planet's surface

A Chirp in Space (Itch.io) is just a cute 3D puzzle platformer available for free!

Finally, have some Bitsy game poems!

Stop Allowing AI Art in Game Jams/Competitions

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Like what are we even doing here? Why are IF Comp and $109 Adventure Game Challenge allowing AI slop in their competitions? Doesn’t that defeat the whole point? I don’t think any game jam or competition should allow AI art. I have a billion other reasons why I’m against using that stuff to make games but it especially seems to go against the spirit of making something for a jam where things can be messier and more personal. If I’m following along with a jam and see a game that clearly uses it, I’m going to give it the lowest possible rating because it’s boring shit. Bruno has a much more elegant take on this and the use of AI in IF Comp but I mostly wanted to vent because….fucking why use it? The sooner this bubble bursts, the better. Every jam allowing it should be embarrassed.