Every week I slowly lose my mind as I see more takes about how no one makes interesting games anymore instead of just reading my posts and supporting the people that do. Did you know people are also already making GOTY lists even though there’s still a month left and great games being released every week? Weird shit! Here’s some of those great games! As usual, feel free to tell me about things you or friends recently made. Comments on here or through any of the ways listed on the About page are fine. I’m only one person and can only find so much. If you enjoy these, subscribe to the RSS feed and tell a friend.
Video Games
The AdventureX Jam has ended and now there’s tons of free point-and-click adventures for you to play on Itch.io.
Vaultron (Itch.io) is a free toy that lets you build underground cities and then you watch it come to life as elevators and trains on monorails start moving around in your city. I thought it was really impressive and hope it gets more updates.
Pym’s Daily Word Square Puzzle (Developer Site/Itch) is a brand new puzzle game for DOS. Each day reveals a new partially filled word square which you must complete. The game is available for free but the developer also accepts donations.
Botos do Diabo (Itch.io) is a short dolphin horror point-and-click adventure.
Michigan Tech University has a game making club and since I live in the state I’m obligated to report that they’ve just published a new set of games on their Itch.io page!
I wasn’t able to go to No Quarter because I don’t live anywhere near NYC but it sounds like there were neat things there, including an exhibit that involved lots of smaller games? Or something? I don’t know, I’m a dummy, but anyway it means we have new Bitsys from Rose and Adam.
PERSON – adventures in WORLD (Itch.io) is short and somewhat autobiographical walking sim but it’s made in the Doom engine. Or GZDoom I think? Don’t yell at me, I don’t know all the different Dooms. I just think it’s neat.
Frosty’s Snowed Under! (Itch.io) is a platformer made in PICO-8 for the PICO-8 Advent Calendar. I haven’t played any of the entries in the calendar yet but I’m happy that such a thing exists. I’m not familiar with it, but I guess this is a remake of the Commodore 64 game Frosty the Snowman/Frosty’s Busy Night.
A Body Is Subsumed In The Work (Itch.io) is a browser collage game created by Hyphinett using the Flatgame Maker plugin for Unity.
LocZine (Itch.io) is a browser-based zine made in the Hypercard-like tool called Decker that’s all about video game localization.
Escape From Castle Matsumoto (Itch.io/Steam) is a free game where two shinobis race against each other to recover stolen items and escape a castle. It reminds me of that old Spy Vs. Spy game from decades ago. The same developer used (I think) this engine to remake the adventure game Enclosure and experimented with remaking scenes in old Sierra adventure games. It’s a neat look!
Caves of Qud (Steam) 1.0 is out after being in Early Access for so long! I don’t have anything interesting to say about the game. It’s great. Lots of smarter people have already talked about it.
The Twine Cookbook (Store) is now available in print. All proceeds from sales go toward the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation.
Honor Bound (Steam) is an interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith where you protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard. Harris is a great writer and I really liked their previous interactive fiction writing.
IKEELYA (Itch.io) is a game where you play as a disillusioned hitman who has grown tired of his day job, and dreams of becoming an interior decorator. During the day you must do hits on people so you can buy furniture at night and eventually get side gigs doing interior design. The game is available for Pay-What-You-Want.
Cave Hikers (Steam) is described as a relaxing and humorous 2D interactive cartoon mockumentary that follows three characters through a cavernous world, on a quest to find the mystical “cave with an infinite ceiling”. I haven’t played this one yet but I really like the art and it has a demo if you’re interested in trying it out.
Ollie-Oop (Steam) is a game about a skateboarding dog. It looks cute!
TTRPGs
Shoot the Moon (or, Die in the Labyrinth) (Itch.io) is a ttrpg created for the Minimalist Jam by Adam Bell that uses the game of Hearts as its central mechanic. Players are stuck in a labyrinth built by the Queen of Spades and held together by the power of the renegade moon and must either escape the labyrinth or shoot the moon with a huge gun.
The Devil They Buried (Itch.io) is a new solo journaling TTRPG by Kienna Shaw following an outlaw revenant’s quest for revenge.
Tiny Tome 2 (Itch.io) is a book of 50 RPG treasures from 50 different creators. It includes complete games, variant rules, one-shot adventures, and many other things. The Itch page has a link to where you can buy a physical copy too.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve done one of these but I’ve made good progress on stuff since then.
The adventure game I’ve been making for the library is almost done. All the playtesting went well and I just have a few final tweaks left for the final version. It will be good to move on from this. I had a great time making it and learned so much but also deadlines are tough for me, especially when they’re for projects in my spare time. That said, a big thing on my to-do list in life was to make a game in Adventure Game Studio and I actually fucking did it. I had it as a goal for this year and it seemed unlikely until the work came in early this fall so I feel incredibly fortunate to have something kick me in the butt and finally do it.
Now that I finally cleared the roadblock of learning AGS and will be putting a game out there very soon, there will be more tiny adventure games to come. I’m still not 100% sure what I’ll do next. I have a half finished clay animation adventure game sitting around and I should probably do that one. I don’t think it will take too long and it would be fun, so it’s likely to be that. I have ideas for what I can work on after that but we’ll see where the next few months lead me. I’m also working on doing more streaming on Twitch and posting the VODs to my YouTube. I was anti-streaming for a long time but I think it’s actually good for me to talk to folks while playing comforting games so I’ll keep doing it.
Pretty much all of November was a rough month for me mentally so that wasn’t fun. I’m past it all now and doing much better. Don’t really know if I could have done much to prevent it since it’s election/SAD season/increase of work but happy to be past it.
Well, lol, sorry that ended on a bit of a downer note but I’m through the rough part now and doing better. Really!
It’s the first day of December and the year is almost over. How are you? I hope you had a lovely weekend. I’m tired and writing this too early in the morning. If you enjoy these roundups, tell a friend, subscribe to my RSS feed (I use and enjoy Inoreader), and consider doing your own roundup (like this one by Mike Egan) if you have a website. It’s hard to find stuff on the internet these days so being vocal about what we like is probably the best we can do right now. I also always like comments. What have you enjoyed reading lately?
Books
Classics of Science Fiction revisits the out of print book A Mirror for Observers and finds that it maybe doesn’t hold up.
It was an incredibly busy week for people to post about ttrpgs on their blogs and sites. That’s wonderful! It sounds like in the Prismatic Wasteland discord they’re doing a thing called Blog Fridays, which sounds fun.
Wraithkal does great ScreenshotSaturday roundups of Mastodon posts on their blog.
robotspacer helps us get into the Murder Club series.
Nathalie posts the transcript for a talk titled Creating for a Better Industry, which features lots of links to cool little tools for making games and personal websites.
Things That Aren’t Blogs
John Walker did two big lists on Kotaku recommending indie games. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.
SpindleyQ has a NES emulator that replaces everything with cat noises.
AllTinker has just released a patch (Itch.io) for the first Gabriel Knight game that fixes the pops and crackles in the audio. They made a video showing the before and after and it’s really quite impressive. The page for the patch also goes into detail how one can fix the mixed resolution effect in the cd version where objects you can interact with are displayed at a higher resolution. I’ve always wondered if you could make a patch for the remake that moves the audio from this version into the remake and replace the new recordings but someone pointed out to me that the remake also has new lines that the original cast did not record. Anyway, thought this was really cool and just wanted to share.
After developing the massive hit Dune 2, Westwood was looking to make another RTS but set in a property they owned and created Command & Conquer. C&C is about a war between two factions, the Global Defense Initiative, which is a military force setup by the United Nation, and the Brotherhood of Nod, a terrorist cult. The war is focused on their fight over a resource called Tiberium, a material that has arrived from space and is a powerful resource, but at the expense of it destroying the planet wherever it grows. Bretty Sperry, a producer for the game, had slowly been developing a fictional universe for a few years which would set the foundation for the C&C universe. The game was designed to be set in the very near future since modern military combat was on the minds of folks at the studio due to news events at the time such as the Gulf War. From watching the GDC classic game postmortem, development of the game seemed to go along very smoothly. It was described as a very collaborative environment and morale was generally high during development.
It’s clear from playing it that a great amount of love went into each part of the game. Even the installation process is very elaborate and visually impressive. The game was originally planned to have mission briefings given through text but after some testing, realized this was too boring and went with the approach to have actors in live action video describing the mission to you with graphics overlaid to show you what you needed to do on the mission’s map. Since it was still the early days of full motion video, the game’s cutscenes were very loosely put together. The set, consisting of just a green screen, was a room that Westwood rented out on the other side of the office building they were in, and Eric Gooch, who oversaw video and film and played the Brotherhood of Nod’s Seth, just bought some linoleum from a store and painted it green. Rewrites frequently happened too, including on the set on the days of filming. Joe Kucan, who worked in casting and direction at Westwood and had even voice acted in some of their previous games, portrayed the game’s main villain Kane, the head of The Brotherhood of Nod. His performance is the standout in the game’s cutscenes and even in later games when Westwood started to hire famous actors for their games, his scenes usually remained the most interesting. Many of the other actors in the game came from the Las Vegas strip, since Westwood Studios was in Las Vegas, while others were employees of Westwood or people that the developers knew. Even if they’re low budget, the cutscenes are very charming in their unique and cheesy way. It’s not quite as intentionally campy as the cutscenes would be in later games but they never feel cringeworthy either and are a nice little reward after completing levels.
Screenshot of the game from the remastered collection
Multiplayer also contributed to the game’s success. The game supports 4 players over a network. It helped that the game shipped on two CDs, one for the GDI campaign and one for the NOD campaign, so two people could play multiplayer with one copy of the game. Multiplayer would be a big component of future games as well and there was even a multiplayer focused Command & Conquer game released in 1997 called Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor. This was a multiplayer only game where players each controlled one unit and would explore a map and gain power ups, while engaging in deathmatch with other player controlled units. The game was considered a disaster at the time but could maybe be considered a proto-MOBA today.
The memorable soundtrack by Frank Klepacki, which took advantage of the switch to CD and streaming audio, features a mix of influences from basically everything and determined the sound for the rest of the franchise. Westwood must have been confident in how great their soundtrack was because the game also features a Jukebox option, which lets people select what songs they want to use while they play. Highlights of the soundtrack include the tracks Mechanical Man and C&C Thang.
The game is a bit dated due to all the advances made in the genre since it has been released but I was pleasantly surprised that most of the game still held up for me and it was very enjoyable to revisit. It featured enough quality of life items like being able to select multiple units at once to attack that kept it from feeling too dated for me to enjoy, like Warcraft 1 and Dune 2. The story and cutscenes were good, cheesy fun that kept me playing and there’s still nothing else like that game’s soundtrack outside of the C&C series. It might be a little harder for people with no nostalgia for 90’s PC games to get into it, but if you grew up playing the game or other RTS for the era, consider going back to play Command & Conquer.
Screenshot of the upscaled video
In 2020, we got the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, a compilation of Command & Conquer, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, the expansions for both games and levels that were originally exclusive to console versions of the game. The compilation was developed by Petroglyph, a company started by ex-Westwood employees, so it was nice to see the original creators of the series still involved in some capacity. It’s a pretty nifty package and the unused and behind the scenes videos from the making of the original game are interesting. The game also features some upscaled videos and 4K graphics for the art, to mixed results. The updated art looks fine enough but I turned that off and the upscaled videos mostly look ok but occasionally you’ll get the thing in AI upscaled art where a frame will look off and you’ll see a nightmarish image for one frame. That said, it’s not a bad way to check out the game if you’re apathetic about playing the original DOS version, and the accessibility options are nice too. Electronic Arts also released the source code for the original game, which has been released as freeware, so people have made some nice source ports and mods for the game as well.
I’m posting this one a little early because today (Friday) is the Itch.io Creator’s Day, where the site isn’t taking a cut from sales. Luckily this week’s post is much smaller than last week’s. People are doing sales as well since it’s the Autumn Sale. Go pick up a game or two! If you like these roundups, consider supporting me on Ko-Fi or buy my games!
Solitomb (Itch.io) is a dungeon crawler based on the solitaire card game made in PICO-8. It’s playable for free in the browser but also has a downloadable version for sale to support the developer.
KidBlocks (Itch.io) is a very chill and minimalist train track building toy. I think it nails the look of wooden toy trains that a lot of us played with as kids and it was fun watching the scenes I built come to life with little people and trains moving around as I created loops of tracks and built houses. It’s just $1 too.
Meditation On Your Body (Itch.io) is a solo journaling game by the fanastic interactive fiction writer Norbez Jones. You draw tarot cards and reflect on parts of your body. Available as Pay-What-You-Want.
AdventWindows (Itch.io) is a new text adventure created by Andrew Plotkin for the Confounding Calendar 2024. The game has the clever design and great writing you would expect from one of his games. It’s free and playable in the browser. If you’ve never played a text adventure before, I think this one you could start with.
screenshot from thunk
Entries for the Videotome Jam (Itch.io) continue to come in. I really liked playing thunk and slime feet this week.
Fill in the [ ] CITY (Itch.io) is a Pay-What-You-Want city building ttrpg by Viditya Voleti. Sometimes you read a game at 10:30pm and go “ARGH I want to play this right now!” but you can’t because it’s 10:30pm and you simply cannot get the people together for that and even if you could you have to get up early for work tomorrow morning, come on, you don’t want to be tired all day at work. Just wait until you have a good time scheduled to play this. Chill out.
Anyway, that’s how I felt about Fill in the [] CITY.
Torasu (Itch.io) is a Pay-What-You-Want love letter to the NES version of Gyruss. That version of Gyruss rules and so does this.
SunkCost (Itch.io) is a ttrpg for 3-5 Freebooters and one Grotto Master set in Cardinal Basin, a fantasy world that suffered an apocalyptic flood. It’s currently early in development and available to download for free.
Sluggish Morss: The Table Top RPG (Itch.io) is a storytelling ttrpg based on the video game of the same name. This is perfect timing for me since I just started playing the dev’s game Judero and loving that. It’s currently having a launch sale where it’s available for £11.20 GBP and has a free quickstart version if you want to get a feel for what the game is like.
Games to Wishlist
Here’s a couple of games that seem neat and might be worth adding to your wishlist:
Rock Digger (Steam) is an upcoming resource management platformer game where you explore an alien planet, dig for resources, and try to find secrets. It has a demo if you want to try it out.
Mesektet (Steam) is an upcoming sci-fi point-and-click adventure by Point & Pixel Adventures where you explore an archaeological site and discover a greater mystery.
Midnight Scenes: The Highway is the first entry in a horror anthology series by Octavi Navarro, who also worked as an artist on Thimbleweed Park. There are currently five games in the series, with each one being completely standalone, but I would still recommend this one as a great place to start. The games feature gorgeous pixel art and all can be completed in one sitting, with some like this game only being 15 minutes long and later games in the series taking about 90 minutes to play through.
In Midnight Scenes: The Highway you play as a woman who is stranded on a road after her path is blocked by a downed power line and must explore the area to find a way around, but something creepy is lurking out there. This entry in the series is strongly inspired by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and revisiting it reminds me that later games pull back on this and do their own thing a bit more by transitioning to color, dropping opening narration, and feel more violent and arguable more monster focused too. This certainly isn’t a complaint about any of the games in the series. I think they’re all great. It’s just interesting to see how the series has evolvesd. I think adventure game fans who enjoy horror but don’t want to be frustrated will be into this game. It’s not a difficult game, with puzzles that are very straightforward but don’t feel like busy work, no death sequences, and it only being 15 minutes long. That might be a turnoff to some hardcore fans of the genre but I feel very comfortable recommending it to people that just want some creepy vibes for a bit.
Octavi also developed some other short horror games outside of this series that I would recommend, The Supper and The Librarian, that play very similarly to the Midnight Scenes series and can be completed in one sitting.
Midnight Scenes: The Highway is available on Itch.io and Steam.
Developer: Hypnotix, Inc. Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive Year: 1997 Genre: Arcade; Interactive Movie
By the end of the 90’s it was becoming clear that the world of FMV wasn’t going to be the next place for Hollywood to conquer, but that didn’t stop some companies from still giving it a shot. Soldier Boyz is a rail shooter based off a movie of the same name created for HBO, and brings back the cast from the film to shoot new scenes for the game two years later. A billionaire has hired a Vietnam vet and convicts who have been sentenced to life to rescue his daughter from terrorists in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the heroes of the story immediately come off as unlikable. When the Vietnam vet (played by Michael Dudikoff) proposes his plan to use prisoners from a youth detention center (who are all played by much older actors) to rescue the woman, the billionaire father expresses concern that kids are being sent to die. These concerns are immediately shrugged off by our hero, who then hosts interviews to assemble his team. It’s possible that the writing in the original movie was better, unlikely since it received universally negative reviews, but every character in this game who is not a white person is written to be a racist stereotype.
See that blurry mess to the right of the tree? That’s an enemy
I suppose some people would be able to move on from this intro if the game improved. The game doesn’t focus on the characters much after this and most of the FMV in the rest of the game is focused on shooting people in Vietnam and the player character reacting to it. However, the actual gameplay is awful as well. As critical as people were of games like Mad Dog McCree and Space Pirates, at least they were functional. The mouse went where you moved it, fired when you clicked the left mouse button, and you could see what was happening on the screen. Soldier Boyz is unable to even do this. I constantly fought with a lag on the mouse movements that made it difficult for me to shoot anyone. The game is a blurry mess too. The video quality is ridiculously poor and the scenes are disorienting. Nearly every time you shoot someone, the camera cuts to your character’s reaction and then cuts to another character. I’m not especially a fan of the wave of FMV rail shooters that we saw in the 90’s but this is the worst one.
I wouldn’t recommend the game to anyone but if you really must play it, it is playable in ScummVM. The engine used in this game was used for a few other games, although I know nothing about them other than Marvel Comics Spider-Man: The Sinister Six also being a poor game from the streams I saw of it.
There’s no reason to play this game and nothing interesting about it other than film director Darren Aronofsky helped shoot scenes for the game. It’s unfortunate that everything he shot is basically unwatchable but at least he would go on to better things (well, most of the time).
Soldier Boyz is no longer available for sale but it’s probably available on your abandonware site of choice.
Much like Friday’s indie game post, this is going to be a pretty massive post of blog posts that I enjoyed looking at this week. I’ll also sort this one into different categories and maybe you’ll find new things to add to your RSS feed reader. I’ve been using Inoreader, which has worked very well for me since I can also access my unread list from my phone. One day soon I’ll do a complete dump of all the RSS feeds I’m currently subscribed to so people can maybe find new things, or yell at me if I need to add their site. Always feel free to recommend blogs you enjoy following, or your own, in the comments.
Books/Writing
Bez is an interactive fiction writer I’m a fan of so it’s exciting to me that he’s going to start reviewing self-published books he finds on Itch.io. This week he reviews Memory Leak by M. Kirin.
Tot’s Character Compendium is a new blog that is focused entirely on the character creation process in various tabletop rpgs. This is always one of the most interesting parts of a ttrpg to me so I’m excited for this one. The first post covers character creation in the F.E.A.R. inspired game FIST – Ultra Edition.
Clayton has launched a monthly post series on his Ghost newsletter about various posts and stuff he’s into in tabletop rpgs. It’s not just blog posts but it highlights a few of those too.
Hark at Them! is a new blog focused on reviewing indie ttrpgs. This week they’ve reviewed Burnborough and Stealing Your Heart.
Aggregate Cognizance talks about how to have lying NPCs in your tabletop rpg.
Prismatic Wasteland recommends some gift ideas for ttrpg fans that aren’t just dice.
The Fail Forward blog talks about death in ttrpgs and lethal-lite rules.
Not sure if this should go under technology but Katherine Morayati talks about the dead internet company Kozmo in her postcardposting series.
The creator of classic Macintosh games like Glypha and Glider talks about the need for having media offline and local on Engineers Need Art.
Anil Dash goes into the many reasons why you shouldn’t use Substack and provides alternatives and platforms to move to. I fully agree btw. They show their ass every month in various awful ways and no one should use them.
Stuffed Wombat talks about the concept of Density Decay in video games.
Indie Games
Indie Tsushin is a site focused on indie games and developers from Japan. This week I’m highlighting their review of the visual novel/adventure game Monstrous Park.
Freya talks about continuing to work on the Videotome series of game engines.
It’s not really a blog but Gamers with Glasses talks about some of the games from Steam Next Fest.
I Am a Rat is a blog that recommends a game on Itch or IFDB nearly every day. I am linking to their latest review, Wirewalk, but they’re all good.
The Kinsie talks about the horrible PC Accelerator and digs deep into a feature in the first issue about Quake 2 killers.
The Good Old Days reviews the 1988 ZX Spectrum action adventure game Where Time Stood Still.
Other Topics
Videodante talks about Francis Bacon and creating art in horrible times.
Joe Siegler, most famous for his work at 3D Realms, reviews various albums and tv shows on his personal blog and I liked his review of Pink Floyd’s album The Division Bell. I’m not even a fan of the album but I love hearing people talk about why they love music. Personal blogs are just cool!
Nuxx.net talks about signage they made about 10 years ago for not riding muddy dirt trails in SE Michigan, how it has taken off elsewhere, and the files for it for people to make their own since it’s Creative Commons.
Alex posts fond memories of his dog Lacy as well as some photos of a good dog.
Here’s some things on the World Wide Web that aren’t blogs but are still good.
Firehose3D presents Bluesky posts in a way that looks like some kind of Johnny Mnemonic intro crawl.
IMG_0001: “Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.”
Lately I’ve had some nostalgia for early YouTube where people didn’t have the algorithm figured out and video were a lot less polished, so this has been a lot of fun to play with.
I really liked this review of adventure game Phoenix Springs
A new issue of beestung is out! beestung is a quarterly micro-magazine of non-binary writers.
Adventure Game Hotspot has published an interview with Mikael Nyqvist, the creator of the Carol Reed series. I’ve been fascinated with this series for a long time because it’s now at 20 games but the games are only published through his site. He just has no interest in using Steam and Itch and I kinda love it.
Reactor talks about how it’s a really good time to be loud about the books you love.
Oh god, you actually read to the end of this? I promise that next week will be smaller. This got a bit out of control.
Well, this is a big one this week. I don’t know what happened. Due to the volume of releases this week, I tried to split things up into genre so it doesn’t get overwhelming. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. As usual, please let me know what you’ve been playing and enjoying lately, or something you or a friend has been working on! Replies here are fine but DMs and emails are welcome too! If you enjoyed this week’s post, share it with friends, buy one of these games, and tell folks about a weird obscure thing you love.
Before we jump into the games, LudoNarraCon is taking submissions right now if you are working on an interactive fiction or adventure game. Alright, here’s some recent indie games that I think are neat.
Video Games
Action
Bug Castle (Itch.io) is a slick twin stick shooter made for the TIC-80 virtual machine for the 20 Second Game Jam. Free and playable in the browser.
Cowgummi (Itch.io) is a short browser game where you are a purple cow that rolls around, knocking other cows off your meadow. The best game with purple cows that I’ve played all year. It even has merch!
Loser Lane (Site) is a game protesting Ontario removing Toronto’s bike lanes.
Adventure/Interactive Fiction
Chiaroscuro (Itch.io) is a short experimental text adventure game inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure available as Pay-What-You-Want. I like when text adventures insert small amounts of graphics or sound for immersion and thought the use of sound in this one was really good. I’d also recommend this one to people who haven’t played a text adventure before.
Great God Grove (Steam) is an adventure game about stopping the end of the world since the gods are too busy squabbling to do it.
CODENAME: ICEMAN is an adventure game designed by Jim Walls and published by Sierra in 1989. Often considered their worst adventure game, the game starts off ok enough with you spending time on a beach and eventually getting your mission details, but then you board a submarine. You spend half the game on this submarine, fighting with awful controls, little plot development, and doing incredibly tedious tasks. Eventually you leave the sub and do some puzzles that don’t make a whole lot of sense and the game ends with a frustrating mini game. There’s fan games for many games in the Sierra catalog but not this one.
Not until today.
KIDNAME:ICEBOY (Itch.io) is an incredible tribute and parody of CODENAME:ICEMAN where you play as the child version of the protagonist from the original game as he goes to the US Navy’s Submarine Camp. I won’t spoil the game because I strongly recommend it to everyone who’s vaguely familiar with the original game, but I think it does an excellent job emulating Jim Walls’ unique adventure game style and is one of the funniest adventure games I’ve seen in a while if you’re familiar with his games too.
Loco Motive (Steam/GOG/Nintendo Switch) is a new comedy point-and-click adventure where you must solve a murder on a train. I haven’t played this version yet but I loved the game jam version and this has been receiving great reviews so far.
inkjam just wrapped up! ink is a scripting language used for narrative games and this is a jam hosted every year on itch for the language. You can check out all 19 entries on Itch.io
Maybe that’s all we need (Itch.io) is a short (15 minutes) about a masochistic gay woman created for the Videotome jam. Read the CWs first since it’s a NSFW game.
Miniatures (Steam/Itch.io) is a collection of short stories, about 30-40 minutes total, each with their own unique art style. Gamers With Glasses liked it.
Monkey Island Manual Game (Itch.io) is just a nice tribute to The Secret of Monkey Island made in Bitsy where you explore the island and read snippets of the game’s manual.
I think I covered this game last week but THRESHOLD (Steam) is now out. I’ll play this game someday when I’m not being a baby about horror but it seems like reviews have been very positive and I love how it looks.
Playdate
Hausbau (Itch.io) is a free game for the Playdate where you build modernist cityscapes by placing tiles. I haven’t played it yet but I really like how it looks and the game promises jazzy tunes.
One-Armed Space Bandit (Itch.io) is a remake of the slot machine game from Space Quest 1. Unlike that version, this has multiple difficulty levels if you want to die less or more times than you would playing the game. It kinda reminds me of the Macintosh version of Space Quest because of the art. Anyway, it’s a great port and the crank is used well in this game. If you like this, check out their King’s Quest 1 Redux project.
Puzzle
Domino Grove (Itch.io) is a wonderful and free browser game where you domino blocks with trees on them and get points by placing similar dominos next to it until you fill up the screen. I thought this was a fun mechanic for the puzzle game, and thought the art direction and sounds made this a very relaxing puzzle game.
InfluxRedux (Steam) is a remake of a 2013 game where you roll a ball through a variety of different environments and puzzles.
Meal Plan (Itch.io) is a free puzzle game where you find the common element in two 7-item sets. It was created for the Win32 jam so it has some glorious windows in it.
Robot Detour (Steam/Itch.io) is a very cute puzzle game where you play as a little robot delivering batteries to robot friends. I’ve only played the demo so far but the puzzles felt fair but gradually increased in challenge with unique mechanics being introduced to keep it from feeling stale, and the art and music made the game a relaxing experience.
Racing
Thalamus has become a favorite publisher of mine by publishing a variety of games for retro consoles and computers, and games inspired by classic 80s games. Their latest release, Nitro (Itch.io), is a racing game for Game Boy Color. You can play it in the browser or buy it for $1.
RPG
Cybil (Site) is a free 20ish hour long rpg inspired by Might & Magic 3. It was made with megazeux, a game engine from the 90s that I believe is a sequel to ZZT?
Dungeon Clawler (Steam) is a roguelike deckbuilder that uses a claw machine to get items. I haven’t played it because claw machines make me angry but Indie Games+ liked it.
Strategy
Rogue Command (Steam) is a RTS with roguelike elements that has just entered early access. I haven’t played it yet but I thought it would be worth mentioning since it feels like RTS are fairly rare these days and so far it has positive reviews on Steam.
Visual Novel
INTERSTATE 35 (Steam) is a visual novel that follows a young woman returning to her hometown in Texas after a nuclear disaster.
Pinup (NSFW! Itch.io) is an adult M/M fairy bondage visual novel. I liked their previous game Off the Cuff and this one is Pay-What-You-Want and playable in the browser.
Stellifier (Steam) is an idol drama game about an older group making a comeback from retirement, featuring a GxB/BxB/non-binary romance. I haven’t played this one yet but I really liked their game Sifting Thyme. It’s also exciting to me that this studio continues to make VNs since they’re local to me.
Tabletop Games
Bloodsuckers (Itch.io) is a new-ish tabletop rpg available as Pay-What-You-Want where you play as a vampire. It just got a one-shot that starts in a bodega (Itch.io). Since we all know these do not exist outside of Brooklyn, we can finally roleplay the fantasy of being in a bodega.
Crux (Itch.io) is a solo tabletop rpg about overcoming challenges and climbing a mountain. The Itch.io page also links to where you can get a print version of the game.
The Deep Water Jam (Itch.io) is a currently running game jam about making tabletop rpgs about water.
Folklore Jam 2024 (Itch.io) was a game jam where people would write an analogue game that incorporates elements from a folklore or a place where they belong. The jam has ended and you can check out all 39 entries on Itch.io.
MeatCastle GameWare Annual #2 (Itch.io) is a zine collecting TTRPGs, articles, Mothership 1e add-ons, and more published in the second year of Missives from the MeatCastle. The digital version is available as Pay-What-You-Want but there is also a print version available for pre-order.
Polymath (Itch.io) is a new font for dice. It looks nice, it’s free, and has a really nice license.
Solovember (Itch.io) is a currently running game jam where people create solo tabletop rpgs. There’s 8 days left but it already has a lot of entries.
Wicked Tales (Itch.io) is a solo tabletop rpg available as pay-what-you-want where you play as a villain and hopefully not be stopped by the heroes.
Writing
None of these are games, but they’re all on Itch and I thought they were beautiful so I’m including them anyway.
Andromeda Zine (NSFW? Itch.io) is about Andromeda from Greek mythology and how they’re sometimes portrayed with a penis in medieval art. It’s available for Pay-What-You-Want.
Cartomancy Anthology was an incredibly influential games anthology for me from two years ago so it makes me happy to see that they just released an art book (Itch.io) for it that I can nerd over.
Sonia Sulaiman has two zines about Palestinian folklore and folk religion in the Paranormal Palestine series. Both are available on her Itch.io page and available as Pay-What-You-Want.
WORLD IS A FUCK (Itch.io) is a zine by Oma Keeling featuring adult sci-fi short fiction and illustrations.
Crowdfunding
There’s also a lot of games currently crowdfunding that I think are worth a look.
Michael Brough is crowdfunding a new game! 868-BACK is currently crowdfunding on Backerkit and it will probably be pretty great, as all his games are.
Legends of Castile (Kickstarter) is a point-and-click adventure set in 19th century Spain, about a village girl who investigates folk legends in order to become a nun.
The Time We Have (Backerkit) is a two-player storytelling card game about brothers in the zombie apocalypse and the final days before one of them turns.
I mentioned Nochi earlier in this post and they’re also crowdfunding their next game. This one is a port of their game Somnium Eleven (Kickstarter) from mobile to PC.
Demos and Upcoming Games
Car Pack Capital (Steam) looks like a fascinating sim game to me. You try to wipe out a city and make it as unwalkable as possible to sell more cars and parking spaces. So basically the most evil sim game since Dungeon Keeper. It’s a really interesting concept but may be too depressing for me to play.
Cart Life is back? Maybe? It has an Itch page where you can download a demo anyway.
According to the dev on Bluesky, horror visual novel Grizzly Man (Steam) should be arriving sometime by the end of the year.
The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker 2 (Steam) is an upcoming FMV game by D’Avekki. There isn’t much to see yet but I liked the first game. I can’t tell if this one drops the text parser, but the first game used one in really interesting ways.
Kathy Rain (Steam) returns in a new point-and-click adventure. I liked the first game and the art in this looks great. The Steam page also has a demo for folks to check out.
I am a big fan of Cosmic Void’s point-and-click adventure games and I’m happy to see them making a cyberpunk game with Neon Hearts City (Steam/Itch.io). The page also has a demo.
