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.

Blog Roundup (September 14, 2025)

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It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these but Bluesky suspending accounts over the mildest posts reminded me that blogs and personal websites are good and should have more attention, so here’s some posts I liked. Since it’s been a while and I kinda of a backlog on my rss feed reader, there’s some older posts in here and other things not on here just because I haven’t read them yet. Anyway, if you like any of these blogs then consider adding them to your RSS feed reader!

If you’ve been bored with how this site has fallen off with indie game coverage at the moment, I feel like Wraithkal has always done a great job and is always writing about games I never heard of like Woodo.

Does anyone know about this Mystery McDonalds Machine?

Atari Archive can make anything interesting, even the history of a 3D tic tac toe game.

Dinoberry Press wrote a retrospective on their ttrpg Dinocar, which I’m a massive fan of and loved playing with my kids.

Michael Coorlim has been uploading lots of BASIC programs to a Bear Blog. He’s also been doing an epistolary Let’s Play blog of the games Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas on another Bear Blog. Both are great.

Andrew Plotkin analyzed the Hugos and how they do their game award.

Dhippo.net wrote about another Hugo.

Game designer Farfama wrote about playing ICO. Obviously I am a fan of people blogging about games after playing them and making it more of an experience than just “another game to get through in the backlog.” Which is probably another reason I’m grumpy about the site Backloggd.

It just makes me happy to hear that the Myst Online community is still active and doing meetups.

And finally I’ll end today’s post with some nice pictures of a dog. Hope you’re doing well and have had/are having a nice weekend.

Ween: The Prophecy thoughts

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Developer: Coktel Vision
Publisher: Coktel Vision
Year: 1992
Genre: Adventure
System: DOS

two weird humanoids with giant mustaches saying "We're UKI and ORBI"

To be a fan of French DOS games is knowing that mechanically the game may not be the tightest thing, but it could be weird enough and take enough swings to be worth it. Some of my favorite games are French DOS games and include: Alone in the Dark, Little Big Adventure, Lost Eden, and The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble. I’m a huge fan of Coktel Vision so it was unfortunate that I mostly found Ween: The Prophecy to be a frustrating experience.

The game has a plot about you stopping an evil wizard, but it’s mostly an excuse for you to move to various rooms, in an almost puzzle room level-based format, and solve the various inventory puzzles before moving on to the next room. This is one of those games that quickly wraps up with a block of text when you beat the final puzzle. Unfortunately I frequently found these puzzles to rely heavily on moon logic or sometimes broken, which meant mostly doing trial and error and trying every item on everything, or just pulling up a walkthrough because I got tired of the sluggish response from every action. I took notes while playing and there’s many instances where I just did not understand what was happening in the game or instances of me trying an action, checking a walkthrough to see that I was doing the right action, but was just not trying it enough times for it to actually work. The entire game consists of these inventory puzzles so the game quickly became a huge slog to play. There are one or two points where there are multiple solutions, but those were the only clever bits in the game’s design.

an illustration of a boat and text at the bottom saying "Bad idea..."

Even worse than a game consisting of trial and error puzzles is that the game tells you that you had a bad idea, or that your character is getting frustrated, or something isn’t working. It’s aggressively hostile in a genre called Point-And-Click Adventure, where you often just want to click on something to get a description or to see what happens. Instead of either of those things happening though, you are just scolded. It’s immensely frustrating to play an adventure game where you are actually discouraged from clicking on things. I wasn’t even trying to solve a puzzle. It is just common practice to play around in an environment and click around but this is a game that does not want you to do that. I suppose to the game’s credit, I didn’t come across any softlocks.

It’s so frustrating that the game is so unfun to play because the parts surrounding it are nice. Like just about every other Coktel Vision game, I like the art and music. Charles Callet does a fantastic job on the soundtrack like he did on every other game he worked on. There’s also some really weird FMV in here that other people online seemed to find disturbing but I liked how weird it was. The weirdness is why I usually play French DOS games.

So unfortunately, I can’t really recommend this game. I generally love Coktel Vision’s games, even when the gameplay is a bit clunky like in Inca, because there’s usually a lot of really interesting stuff going on and the game has something to say. Ween: The Prophecy just does not have enough to justify playing through the game.

Ween: The Prophecy is not available for sale anywhere but is probably on your favorite abandonware site and playable through ScummVM.