Probably goes without saying but fuck war. No war with Iran or anywhere else. End the genocide in Palestine. Leave people the fuck alone. What the fuck. I don’t know how to seamlessly transition from all that to what I’ve been reading lately and just like using the beginnings of these and the indie game posts as my check in/diary, but there you go.
I’ve been reading Alex Rinehart’s blog, which has recently had interviews with ttrpg game designers like Aaron King and Jess Levine. I didn’t even think about how you can just have interviews on your blog but yeah, no shit? Anyway, now that I’ve interviewed two librarians for my grad school class, can I talk to you? (points finger towards the screen)
Rascal had an article today about how DriveThruRPG delisted a game because of its anti-fascist politics. I stopped buying anything from DriveThruRPG a long time ago because it’s a visual nightmare but the site sucks. I’m not going to tell people to not sell their stuff there because it’s the biggest site for ttrpgs, but please make your games available elsewhere. They have a history of crappy decisions like this and that 30-50% cut for selling your pdf is ridiculous.
Unwinnable had a good article about the recent RoboCop game. Ultimately I still ended up enjoying it, but agree with everything this article says in addition to the game being too safe and basing a lot of its beats off Robocop 2, a movie I don’t like that much (it has its fans) because it’s too similar to the first movie. It has its moments but still has the stink of Frank Miller on it (I’m sorry, I am a Frank Miller hater).
And finally, I’m just happy to see erysdren doing a dev log.
This is my first summer participating in the Summer Game at the Ann Arbor District Library and I’m hooked! It’s a yearly event organized by the library, and the 15th one in its current run, where you can get points through a variety of activities and use them to get prizes like shirts, little toys, stickers, etc.
Activities to get points can include:
Entering codes you find around the city on signs at buildings, front yards of people participating,
Codes can also be found at events held by the library
Getting badges, which are challenges like finding specific items in the library’s catalog and plugging in info from newspaper archives, which I believe will be used to help the library later.
And of course, reading
It’s turned my oldest and I into point goblins and we see a code on the side of a bus or at the top of a building and lose our shit. We just started a week ago and she already has the points for the flamingo stuffie at the shop that opens in the middle of July, so anything else is just a nice bonus for her. I’m hoping to get a nice t-shirt and poster. It’s just a really nice way to get you to explore the library’s branches, the city of Ann Arbor itself, encourages reading, and educates people on everything the library has available for checking out.
If you live in or around the city of Ann Arbor, I cannot recommend it enough. You do not need to be an Ann Arbor resident. I’m not, and I was encouraged to join by the director of the library. Many of the activities are virtual too so you don’t not need to drive into the city every time you want to participate.
First I’ll do some self-promo and mention that I’ve made a Steam curator page. I don’t know. It seemed like a fun thing to do. Still the same goofy website name I use here. I probably should have come up with a better site name years ago but then sometimes I think, no, websites should have goofy names like Happy Puppy. I also made a similar list of things I’ve reviewed on Itch.io except you can’t follow Itch lists! That should be something you can do IMO.
Ok, self promo over. Here’s some games. If I missed anything, feel free to mention it in the comments. Self promo is absolutely welcome too!
Video Games
Games To Get Excited About is a little festival organized by Alpha Beta Gamer on Steam. I discovered some neat stuff through there and maybe you will too!
Dreamsettler, the sequel to Hypnospace Outlaw, has been canceled and some of the developers will need work soon. You can read more about it in this post on BlueSky. Really sad to hear about this one and hoping things improve for everyone there soon.
There were a few games zines this week! ChoiceBeat (Itch.io) is a free zine about interactive fiction and visual novels while Adult Analysis Anthology (Itch.io) is a paid one about adult indie games.
Cell Sword (Steam/Itch.io) is a Descent-inspired by where you fly around inside a human body and blast away at anything threatening it. I enjoyed the demo for the game from a previous fest thing and I also strongly recommend the dev’s previous game Liberation (Steam/Itch.io) if you love open world sci-fi flight sims that have an approachable learning and also love classic British science fiction tv like Blake’s 7.
Tower Wizard (Steam/Itch.io release coming soon) is a short incremental game where you help a wizard construct a giant tower.
Korter 1996 (Steam) is a first-person point-and-click adventure where you explore apartments and solve mysteries. It’s described as an exploration of loneliness through adventure games. The Steam page has a demo too if you want to try it out.
Parallel Experiment (Steam) is a two player cooperative adventure game where each player is a detective that must communicate with the other player to solve puzzles.
Mushroom Musume has been on Itch.io for a while but it just got a Steam release! This is a game where you raise a mushroom spore into a woman and make import decisions that affect her. There’s a demo on the Steam and Itch.io pages.
10S Forever is another game that has been on Itch.io for a while but now has a Steam release. It’s an arcade game described as a Tennis Hell.
the Devil rais’d the storm is the third game this week that was on Itch.io but just got a release on Steam. It’s also ok to just buy games on Itch, where they get a bigger cut from sales. This one is a point-and-click adventure/visual novel where you are at an outpost on a remote planet.
Cast n Chill (Steam) is a cozy fishing game featuring beautiful pixel art where you just relax and fish. No secret horror elements or twists here. You just fish!
Bone Fire Effigy (Itch.io) is a short first-person horror game set in the woods with art inspired by the PS1 aesthetic.
Espirito Delusion (Steam) is a short rpg containing a dungeon full of puzzles and bosses and inspired by Brazilian culture. The Steam page has a demo.
Devil’s Liminal (Steam/Itch.io) is a visual novel in Early Access about a woman that is being hunted by a hungry ghost and two mysterious girls that have shown up claiming they can help her. As you would hope for a game like this, the price for the game is $6.66.
No Way Home (Steam) just looks like a very nice twin-stick shooter that just got a port from mobile platforms. It’s by the folks that made Moving Out 1 and 2.
The River (Steam) is a short point-and-click visual novel about the afterlife featuring some very nice black-and-white art. I discovered this one through a post on Buried Treasure.
Leaving Home (Steam/Itch.io) is a first-person point-and-click adventure where you navigate a series of rooms in an apartment and do puzzles. I recommend watching the trailer because I think it looks very nice in motion.
I would also like to thank Lucas for recommending the recently released games Squeakross: Home Squeak Home (A Picross-like with a mouse), The Explorator (first-person shooter with very nice 2D animated art), Bioysque (horror action rpg), and Autopeli (free driving arcade game in the browser). Always feel free to recommend games by others or your own in the comments!
TTRPGs
Today is Free RPG Day. Check out your local tabletop game store to see what deals and giveaways they’re doing. I also see a lot of folks on social media giving away their games. All of the ttrpgs on my Itch page should have free community copies anyone is welcome to take.
Break Time (Itch.io) is a solo ttrpg based on the show Severance.
The Invisible Labyrinth (Itch.io) is a game for 2-5 players about branching timelines, uncertain futures, and escaping what seems inevitable. It’s a hack of Microscope and I’m Sorry, Did You Say Street Magic. I’m a big fan of Morgan’s games and you should check the rest out on their Itch page like Memoirs of a Barbarian.
Crowdfunding
Take Us North (Kickstarter) is an adventure/survival game by Anima Interactive that follows the journeys of migrants and asylum seekers on their way to cross the US-Mexico border
Pilgrims is a short adventure game by Amanita Design, the folks who made Samorost and Machinarium. You play as a guy exploring a land so you can get the resources you need to get on a boat. The hook of the game is that each playthrough is very short and you come across a variety of puzzles that have multiple solutions, so the game requires multiple playthroughs to see it all. These playthroughs can also have different solutions based on the people that have joined your party. I’ve played through the game a few times and I was shocked by how different my playthroughs were. The game is only an hour long, which is great, and according to my Steam achievements, my playthrough was very different than the one I did three years ago.
The game uses a deck of cards to represent the inventory items and people in your party, and the deck grows and shrinks in size and you gain items and people, or use them and they leave your deck. I think the card inventory mechanic is great. It’s a very easy and quick way to see everything that is available to you without having to open a separate window. Switching between characters that drop in and out of the game through your playthrough is a fun mechanic too. I really enjoyed seeing how each character would react to puzzles and NPCs.
Since it’s a game by Amanita, it features the excellent artwork and sound design that you would expect from their games. I really appreciate how so many of their games have a different art style but also feel like something only they would make.
Anyway, if you like the studios other games, you’ll enjoy this one too. If you’ve never played a game by this developer, consider giving it a shot. It’s fairly inexpensive and goes on sale a lot, and it doesn’t take long to get through but you’ll probably want to play through it again one or two more times.
Pilgrims is available on computers, mobile platforms, and Nintendo Switch. All of these are linked to on the developer’s site.
Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a point-and-click adventure styled after pulp serials and adventure films from the 1950’s and earlier. You play as Jason Roberts, a man in search of his brother in the Amazon rainforest after hearing his brother was attacked, and the adventure grows into something much bigger from there. This one had been sitting in my backlog for a while, and I decided to finally play it when I saw that the Adventure Tuesday streams were going to play it next and wanted to go through it before any of it would get spoiled for me. I thought I would enjoy this one because it was developed by Access Software, the developers of the Tex Murphy series, and I also love cheesy FMV, but it may have been one of the worst adventure games I’ve played in a while.
One of the biggest issues with the game is that it just feels bad to play. It’s a point-and-click adventure but walking around by clicking barely works, so you need to use the arrow keys to move around. That’s fine, I’ve played plenty of other adventures that do that. Movement is an incredibly frustrating experience though. Your character is constantly getting caught on territory or cannot walk around the rooms that you would expect. It gives you a limited area to walk around in, but you don’t actually know what spaces you can walk in and what you can’t.
The game also feels bad to play because everything just moves too slowly. The game constantly does fade-ins and outs in scene transitions that just last too long, every pop-up box describing something hangs for a few seconds longer than it should and you can’t skip them, and the death scenes also take far too long. I don’t mind deaths in adventure games. I even think they can be funny when they frequently happen in games like Space Quest. However, whenever a death happens in this game it plays an annoying siren and the screen slowly flashes “Shock Warning” three times before it finally shows you the death image and description that again, lingers too long before you can load your game. For some reason the game dumps you to the parking lot screen near the beginning of the game with all the inventory items you had. I’m not sure why it does this. The game is unplayable if you are in this state, so you need to reload it anyway.
You will see this a lot as the game is also filled with timed sequences, sometimes there’s timed sequences inside of the timed sequences, and there’s not really any way to figure it out other than through failure. I’m not against learning through failure, but it becomes painful when you have to keep seeing a tedious sequence every time it happens. This game also really loves to only allow one character to do specific actions during the timed sequences, but they don’t tell you that. They just give vague descriptions of how an action doesn’t work, and then you try it with another character and it will suddenly work. Some of the scenes are very violent too and will show someone covered in blood after you lose. Again, I’m not opposed to this in theory but I don’t think it fits the tone of this game.
The game constantly tells you to move closer to objects. I’ll be standing next to an object and it will say to get closer. At one point I had to clip through the game’s graphics and walk on a table, so I could pick up an item. In the screenshot above you can see that I’m attempting to pick up an item that is exactly one white pixel and I’m standing right next to it. This was not good enough and I had to stand on top of it to pick it up. The item in question were cigarettes and if I forgot to pick up this one-pixel item, it will lead to a softlock later. The game is filled with many opportunities for softlocks that you don’t see until much later.
The softlocks, pixel hunting, and bad controls unfortunately hurt the puzzles as well. Puzzles are difficult to solve because the room art is ugly and everything blends in together, making the pixel hunting even more frustrating than usual. Puzzles are often very finicky with how you interact with the solution so even if you have the right idea, the game gives you the impression that it’s wrong. For example, one part of the game wants you to put a gas cap on a jeep. Ok, so you would pick it up, right? Incorrect, if you try to pick up the gas cap on the ground, it will give you a message saying your character has no interest in the gas cap. You must “Use” the gas cap to pick it up this time, so your character will pick it up and put it on the jeep. This is despite the game just telling you that you have no interest in the gas cap.
Another fussy puzzle is one that wants you to use a coat hanger to break into a car. You have to grab the correct specific hanger in a closet lined with them that all look the same, or else you get a message saying the hanger is attached.
I wanted to like the FMV in this game more but a lot of it is very flat. The main character, Jason, is so incredibly dull and generic. You get to have a second playable character later, Maya, and she’s not great either, but at least I liked her more. I think if anything, the actors should have gone even bigger, but I can’t really fault them that much when they have the script they do and it was a brand-new technology that everyone was trying to figure out. To some extent I even wish it didn’t have FMV because once you leave the office building at the beginning of the game and go on your adventure, half the characters you run into are some sort of racist trope or another. I guess it’s not surprising that a game from the early 90’s that’s inspired by adventure serials would be filled with this kind of thing. It just sucks and it’s a huge bummer to keep seeing as you play. It’s all very weird. It’s a game that feels very ahead of its time technically in some parts, like the FMV, and at the same time it feels like the game is barely holding together because I was constantly running into bugs, frustrations with the controls, and lack of descriptions when trying to use objects.
Here I am, clipping through a table so I can grab the item on it
Even if the game didn’t have these racist tropes, it would still be tough to find anything good about the writing because the game essentially has no interesting ideas. I will give the game this, the serial format is a lot of fun. The game is broken down into chapters and each one has a nice little intro and cliffhanger. I think this format works really well and wish they leaned into the pulp serial nature more. One issue is that it doesn’t commit to a specific type of serial. It is going for more of a Cold War-era vibe at the beginning with references to Communism and a robot security guard in one puzzle at the beginning, and then all of this is dropped as it becomes a jungle adventure story once you leave the office.
Unfortunately, I think most of this part is very dull and feels like busy work. You’re supposed to be on the run from a guy you never really see much and be on the search for Amazon women, who you don’t see until an extremely brief part at the end of the game. Most of this game is spent doing very tedious sequences like stealth sequence, doing the equivalent of side quests in the jungle, or arcade sequences where you ride a canoe down a river. So much of the game feels like filler and then you’re done. There are so many more interesting directions with this they could have gone in than just going down rivers and investigating spots to see what happened at places you already saw in cutscenes. At least it has a pro-environmental message at the end? It’s all very frustrating because I think the game becomes much more interesting at the very end when you get the change of scenery and new characters, but it’s so brief. At least you fight a giant ant. The giant ant looks very good.
The canoe sequences are absolutely miserable. The controls are terrible and you have a massive hit box that is bigger than your canoe. If you touch a single rock, you get the fail screen I mentioned earlier that goes on for too long. In addition to this, you’re supposed to take one of two branches at various points and if you get the wrong one then you fail. The correct sequence is given to you before you start the canoe section, meaning you write it down and look it up as you play. I’m not actually sure if you get the right sequence in the third and longest canoe section though. I did all three so I could say I 100% the game but skipping it is an option. There’s a button in the top left you can click to skip the arcade sequences. It’s like they developed all of this and then realized in testing that people hated it so they added the Skip button as a fix.
Why did this room load with one character standing on the other?
The audio for the game is odd too. The music itself is perfectly fine and some of it is very good. The game keeps choosing to use a cheerful jingle you hear in the office at the least appropriate moments though. An important character is introduced and then immediately killed off and I think it’s supposed to be emotional but doesn’t feel like it because it plays the office jingle. It plays the office jingle when people are shooting arrows at you. The game loves this song.
I’m probably being a bit unfair to the game. This is a lot of words to say that a game that’s over 30 years old isn’t good, and it’s not even a game that anyone is really talking about. But a lot of the frustration comes from it being created by a developer that I like who should have known better, and the reviews for it. Access Software was very successful with the Links franchise and would go on to create some of my favorite adventure games like Under a Killing Moon and other Tex Murphy games after it. Reviews at the time praised the game. I assume it was because of the FMV novelty, because the game is filled with so many faults that Lucasarts and Sierra were not doing. I can be very critical of Sierra at times, but at least they nailed the pointing and clicking part of a point-and-click adventure. Their games felt good to play, even if they could sometimes be loaded with design faults. The reviews for the game on GOG are no surprise. It’s people complaining that the criticisms of racism are by people being too sensitive and generally praising a game because they remember liking it 30 years ago when they were children and haven’t revisited it since then.
So would I recommend this game? Well no, probably not. You could maybe watch a stream of it or play one of their later and much better games like the Tex Murphy series instead. If you want a pulpy adventure, go play Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis or Flight of the Amazon Queen. Both do this thing much better and the latter game is even free.
Developer: Outsider Games Publisher: Outsider Games Year: 2022 Genre: Adventure
Since AdventureGamers has decided to become a gambling slop farm and is slowly deleting all their old content (and was apparently stealing content from other sites before that anyway), I have decided to repost the review I sent to them a few years ago here. The key for the game was directly sent to me so I don’t think the site really deserves any loyalty since they didn’t do anything to enable this opportunity. It’s a good time to repost it anyway since the game just got a release on the Nintendo Switch
Throughout their ups and downs, adventure games have had a devoted following for decades, partly because of their willingness to tell stories where the players can see themselves represented in ways they may not in other genres. Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries by Outsider Games continues this tradition by exploring themes of queerness that I rarely get to see in other games. Despite occasionally frustrating issues with the controls, Jennifer Wilde is a well-crafted adventure game that features a unique story and beautiful black-and-white art.
Jennifer Wilde tells the story of a young French artist named Jennifer Chevalier living in Paris in 1921. Suspecting that the recent death of her father was not an accident, Jennifer investigates her father’s apartment. After finding a locket in his room, she attempts to use her childhood gift of talking to ghosts to summon his spirit. She accidentally summons Oscar Wilde’s ghost instead, with whom her father had an affair many years ago. The two team up and travel across Europe to find the murderer and uncover a massive conspiracy along the way.
The controls, as in your typical point-and-click adventure, feature clicking on parts of a room to walk around, interact with an object, or talk to someone. I thought the speech text moved too fast, and the dialog controls didn’t feel as responsive as they could have been when talking with people, but there were various options that allowed me to resolve both issues. I also appreciated that this game let me play with a controller and found it a very enjoyable way to play.
The primary mechanic for solving puzzles is a fun innovation. Throughout parts of the game, you will come across obstacles, like a police officer not letting you pass a crime scene while they are doing an investigation. To progress, you must gather clues by talking to people and interacting with objects relevant to the mystery. Each time you get a clue, it shows up in your inventory, resembling something that looks like a comic panel. Once you get three or four of these, you must organize them in a linear order that recreates the sequence of events of the mystery you’re trying to solve. I had some issues with this mechanic a couple of times because I wasn’t sure if I was missing a panel or just putting things in the wrong order, but overall I thought it was a commendable concept and would like to see something like it again in the future. I believe some feedback, such as Jennifer saying a line about how that doesn’t seem like the right solution, would have helped me learn the mechanic and know if I had the wrong answer or wasn’t following the procedure correctly.
At first, I thought the game was too easy and linear, but eventually it opens up a bit more and introduces more challenging puzzles. You can switch between Jennifer and Oscar to solve puzzles due to their different abilities, which adds complexity. This never feels too difficult though, and I didn’t get stuck on any puzzle for too long. The game has an objective tracker that helps manage everything you’re investigating, so the process never gets overwhelming once additional goals are added. There’s also some nice variety in the types of challenges later on that keeps the experience from ever feeling tedious.
Jennifer Wilde features incredibly detailed 2D black-and-white artwork that often evokes a comic book style. This is appropriate since it’s based on a comic mini-series released in the early 2010s. Characters have speech bubbles when speaking, and captions appear on the page when describing new locations. The game reminds me of a motion comic; characters generally only have animations when walking, and other actions have a slideshow effect. It all works very well in-game and suits the comic book style.
Aside from the catchy, period-appropriate music on the menu screen, there isn’t much music in the game, and most of what you’ll hear are ambient sound effects that fit the room you’re in.
I was initially skeptical about the inclusion of Oscar Wilde, but I felt it was a good fit with the story they were telling. There aren’t many commercial adventure games that explore queerness, so I thought it was nice to see. I appreciate that this shows a kinder and deeper portrayal of Oscar Wilde than we usually see in media. He often just seems to be portrayed as some guy with witty one-liners. He shows a lot of empathy towards others here, which is also a rarity in a video game. I thought Jennifer was a well-written character, and I liked her interactions with other characters and the arc she goes through. At a few points, you are allowed to make minor decisions that don’t affect the outcome but help make it seem a little more personalized, which was a nice touch.
The core mystery is fine, but it felt rushed towards the end. It took me about 3.5 hours to complete, which usually would be the perfect length since I generally prefer shorter games, but I think I would have preferred some more time in the end to allow the plot elements to unfold more slowly. Where the writing shines is in the character development and the interactions between Jennifer and Oscar, and that is where the majority of the focus remains. Aside from some quirks with the controls and feeling a little rushed toward the end, Jennifer Wilde is a good adventure that explores themes you don’t see too often in commercial games. I enjoyed playing it, and I hope we see these two engaging characters in a game again soon.
This year the family and I attended the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival (also known as A2CAF) at the Ann Arbor District Library and it was great! We’ve been going for a few years now. It’s a free comics convention at the library aimed towards children but they get some big guests every year and it’s nice to have an event focused completely on comics. There’s some comic conventions in my area that I haven’t gone to in a long time, partially because they’re incredibly crowded and covid, but also because they’re all just focused on pop culture stuff now. Whenever I leave A2CAF, I feel excited about comics as a medium again. It’s the same energy I get when I go to my local zine fests and I think it’s because all of these events are very focused on how anyone can make comics. I think it’s also good for my kids to be exposed to that DIY attitude, although I would strongly recommend the event to local folks even if they aren’t parents.
We also signed up for the Summer Games challenge that the Ann Arbor District Library also does. I’ll probably do a big post about this later this year since it’s really interesting. I’ve never done it before but it’s been fun so far. You do NOT need to be an Ann Arbor resident to play.
Also shout out to my five year old who I thought had a more nuanced question planned for Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud at the Q&A but instead yelled “HOW DO YOU DO THAT?” into a microphone at the Michigan Theatre.
Libraries are the best. Go support them. I think I’m turning into someone who is getting shirts from all their local libraries.
I just realized that when I did my indie game roundup two days ago, I didn’t even realize it was Friday the 13th. Would that have changed anything? Probably not! Maybe I could have said it’s the scariest round up of all. Anyway, today is Father’s Day in the US. Yesterday I went with my kids to a yearly comics event I love at the local library, although I left earlier than I wanted to since I had a migraine that was building up all day from me not getting enough sleep. I also learned I could sign up for the library’s Summer Games and win prizes, and that’s already becoming my whole personality. I’ll probably end up doing a post or two about that at some point. I’m glad the turnout for the protests yesterday was great. Again, there was a huge one where I was at but the whole migraine thing so I wasn’t able to join.
Anyway, people came here to look at some blog links. Consider adding them to your RSS feed reader of choice. I use Inoreader, which I gripe about because it’s starting to poke at AI summaries, but there’s probably something better at that. RSS beats refreshing social media all the time for updates anyway.
And if you don’t have a blog? Start one! It doesn’t have to be anything big, it can just be a free blog on Bear Blog, and then post a link to it so I can add it to my feed reader.
Video Games
I’m a huge fan of Rob‘s blogs (and games). He has the b-movie blog but there’s also the video game one. This time he writes about the slog that is the Summer Games Fest.
I haven’t followed the Steam Next Fest at all so maybe it’s over. I’m still going to link to round ups though because they may help you find stuff to add to your wishlist. Buried Treasure did a very nice one and so did Adventure Game Hotspot if you’re looking for games in that genre specifically. Alex Rinehart posted a few demo reviews on his blog too.
Unearthed Treasure Room is the only thing I watched during this summer fest and it was very good. Startmenu has a writeup about it and links if you want to learn more about the showcase focused on obscure games that have been already released. Maybe all of us can just do our own showcases.
Bros Get Stoked writes about Interface Dramas, games set entirely on a computer desktop. I had called them Desktop Simulators as a joke but Interface Dramas is probably a better term.
The Good Old Days has a nice review of Air Pico, a flight sim made in pico-8. I just like that there’s multiple sites I follow that are just personal games databases. Jefklak’s Codex is another one I follow. I’ve thought about doing that someday if my list of reviews gets to be pretty big.
Tech
It’s an older post I keep forgetting to mention, but usebox writes about being back on xmpp, which is something I really need to give another shot. I get so excited about talking to people outside of the big social media sites and apps owned by corporations because it makes the web feel bigger and somehow more personal to me when I’m talking to people outside of bluesky or Discord.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually posted about Computer Chronicles Revisited on here before? Which is really weird because I’m a huge fan of it. Anyway, it’s been back for a while after a hiatus and covering Macworld Expo/San Francisco 1989
Food
Brain Baking found his Granddad’s Cooking Notebook and I just thought it was a really nice read. It reminds me that I need to digitize all the old recipes my grandparents have.
Dev Logs
erysdren makes great games like Bitch Hell and I’m happy to see the site posting .plan updates again.
Developer: Soft Not Weak Publisher: Soft Not Weak Year: 2025 Genre: Puzzle
Recently I played through Spirit Swap, an incredibly polished match 3 that I got a few months ago from backing it on Kickstarter. I had backed the game because the artwork looked great and I wanted to support queer games, but I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting it is mechanically. The game has a story mode that breaks into a dating sim and there’s powers you can use during the puzzling parts. The powers add a nice twist to the gameplay. When you configure blocks into specific shapes, like a diamond, you can use one of your three powers and those will have effects on your board and your opponents. Each character has different powers and you can also specify what powers you want. It’s a nice way to add some variety to this style of game, which I think has existed for 30+ years.
I love that you “complete” the story mode very quickly and most of the game’s story mode takes place “post-ending” and it becomes a dating sim. If I did have any criticisms, I guess it would be that it throws so many characters at you in a short time span that it felt a little tough having much of an attachment to any of them by the first time the game ends. Some of this is on me since I have been and will always be terrible at remembering names, but that and the lack of any major conflicts and drama in the game means that some of it blends together. I really wish it introduced them more gradually or cut one or two characters from the game, which pains me to say since I like them, but I think it was too much.
It’s also just a great looking game. The effects for the blocks matching and disappearing look nice and the character design and animation while you play is very well done. Everyone in this game is beautiful and actually in a variety of body shapes! It’s great to play a game, or honestly experience any art, that doesn’t just see only skinny people as beautiful.
The soundtrack is fantastic and I recommend both of the soundtracks available on Bandcamp, here and here.
The only other real gripe I had with the game is that there were some typos in the dialogue that I wish got caught. There’s a lot of text so it’s easy to see how it slipped through but it stood out.
The game got some criticism for the “everybody is beautiful but no one is horny” trope but it doesn’t really bother me with this game. I guess maybe because I don’t know if it would have worked if the game was more adult and had characters fucking in it? I don’t know, maybe it would have, what do I know. Usually it’s something I wish for more of as well but I’m not bothered by it here. This isn’t the same thing as what we see in basically every Marvel film. I don’t even know if I completely agree with the criticism to be honest. It would also be great if some of the people throwing the criticism around were covering the queer adult games that do exist. There’s quite a few and they’re great.
I’m one of those annoying people that played Tetris Effect 30 years ago and still goes “hmm this is a good match 3 but it’s no Tetris Effect.” but I really enjoyed my time with this game and it’s nice to finally have a Match 3 that doesn’t require me bringing up SNES emulation if I want to recommend it. Nice work Soft Not Weak!
Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To is available on Steam, Itch.io, and Xbox
A few days ago I made a post about how the forums for AdventureGamers, which had existed for over two decades, were suddenly deleted with no warning. There was speculation it was from a bad site migration but no, it looks like they were intentionally deleted and the site is in the process of being converted to a gambling site. Here is my attempt to recap everything that happened.
It sounds like earlier this year the previous site’s owner Ivo had sold the site to a company that made an offer, based on this message in the AdventureGamers Discord from a moderator who had reached out to the former owner.
The site had been struggling for money for a while now. The site’s editor Jack, who had been here longer than Ivo, was let go a few years ago and went on to start Adventure Game Hotspot, and many of the staff who were working for free left to help with that. I believe an offer to buy the site then was also declined. So I’m not completely shocked the site was sold, but was definitely not prepared for the site to be bought by a gambling company that would delete the forums, break tons of links in the process, and replace huge amounts of text with gambling crap, like this deeply cursed About Us page.
So I suppose that if you wrote for the site or you’re a developer who wants to save a positive review of one of your games, now would be a good time to grab it. I understand having to sell a site but it makes me angry that a place with so much history was just sold off to a gambling company with no care for the history or community there. In addition to everything here, AdventureGamers had also grabbed all the assets for another old adventure game site, Just Adventure, about a year ago with the intention to preserve that. Is that going to be wiped out for gambling info too? Who knows!
There’s also an AdventureGamers patreon that is still running. I have no idea if money is being made off this and if so, is the money going to the previous owner or this new gambling site? The idea of either grosses me out. Like I said at the top, this info was grabbed from the AdventureGamers Discord, which was basically inactive, so it seems very unlikely they know about it. I’m glad that Adventure Game Hotspot is going and is basically AdventureGamers in everything but name, but that doesn’t make up for the history getting wiped out by this sale. I don’t necessarily want people looking at forum posts I made when I was 14, but there was also a lot of history in that community during a very specific time for the genre. That said, they’ve been planning a forum at AGH for a while, before this AG forum deletion happened, and it should be up very soon. I hope that the community can land there and events like the community playthroughs can happen again.
I know it’s not the same as a forum, but I’ll also mention the Adventure Game Club Discord I run, where we do monthly playthroughs and discussions of adventure games, new and old. If you’re curious, feel free to join. There’s no intro channel, so no one will know if you join and spam you with welcome messages. It’s totally fine for you to join, see if it’s your vibe, and leave if it isn’t.
It’s a shame this happened to such a long running community, a site that started in 1998, during a time when the internet continues to feel a little smaller every year.
