Indie Game Roundup (Feb 27, 2026)

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It’s getting warmer here again, after it was warm last week and then got cold and snowed again. This will probably happen a few more times before the warm weather finally holds, but I’m looking forward to it.

If you like these roundups, maybe you’ll want some Girl Scout cookies? My oldest is selling Girl Scout cookies if folks in the US are interested. If you live in the metro Detroit or Ann Arbor area, I can deliver them too if you want.

Video Games

Steam Next Fest is this week and I absolutely do not have the time for this. Lots of folks have been writing about demos though including Indie Hell Zone, Thinky Games, and Jank. Probably a billion websites are covering the demos, those are just some that I saw in my feed.

a rabbit and a mouse sitting at a table waiting for a pear

The Midnight Cafe (Itch.io) is a cute arcade game for the browser where you are bunny at a cafe in the woods and retrieve food for animals placing their orders. I loved the collage art look for this game.

a cat with books looking surprised and 3 animals behind it with questions for "Imagine IF the game"

Imagine IF is a browser game made in Twine where you play through various scenarios as a librarian and learn about the history of intellectual freedom. I really appreciate that this game exists. Conservative attacks on libraries and book bans have never been at a higher rate and librarians are under more pressure than ever.

two cats wearing sunglasses and a guy and one character named Sandy is saying "This is not the time to play with balloons, Bob"

Cat President: 3rd-Rate Candidate is a visual novel where you are human campaign manager helping a cat running for president. You can choose between 6 cats to help in their campaign. I playtested this one! I thought it was very funny and you do not need to have played previous games in the series to understand this one. I’m just a fan of Oh, a Rock! Studios in general and all the silly games they make.

Pico8 Cookie is a remake of a game for the ZX Spectrum developed by Ultimate Play the Game (who later became Rare) and released in 1983. I never played the original but this is just a good arcade game! Because I’m an American, my brain shorts out when I read that developer name. Is there a pause? Is it read like Ultimate….Play the Game? UltimatePlayTheGame? Are you just supposed to say Ultimate?

The Queer Vampire Game Jam 2026 just wrapped up and you can check out visual novels, interactive fiction, and lots of other good stuff here.

two people in a space station and a woman named Barbara saying "Don't take it the wrong way! She's a dancer, see! And you're an astronaut."

Lithobreakers is continuing to put out games from their latest jam. TALK FAST, TYPE FASTER! is a screwball comedy typing browser game set in space. I really liked the collage art look they do in this one and it’s a really unique combination of inspirations. Also released by Lithobreakers is This Place is a Message, an interactive fiction prequel to the movie Event Horizon. I do not care for that movie but this game is good.

I don’t know anything about the game Cococommander but it reminds me a ton of the late 90s/early 00s Mac game Bugdom. It just has a similar energy as platformers for computers from that era, which is different than early 3D console game platformers in a subtle way I can’t explain.

Cookie Cutter RM2k3 Jam is, to my understanding, a game jam where people bought RPGMaker 2003 while it was on sale, downloaded a template, and started making stuff. I didn’t make time to play the games yet but a lot of folks I’m a fan of have made games for it and I’m excited to play them.

Not a new game but I just thought this was a good free Picross game for browsers.

top down view of a moose in a maze with a guy pointing a gun at it

I legally have to cover all moose related games so here is Simply Moose. It’s a Boulder Dash-like puzzle game from Poland that was originally made in 2002 I guess.

Playdate continues to put new games on their Catalog store all the time and here’s a roundup from them of their 5 latest games.

Swappy is a demo of a puzzle game made in PICO-8 where you get all the characters to their matching exits. It’s very easy to pickup and only took me about 20 minutes to play through the demo. I’m looking forward to more levels being created for it.

Tabletop RPGs

Roll +Bond Bundle is a bundle of mostly ttrpgs, with some video games too, raising money for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. EDIT: Also just informed that (see comments for this) the“Roll +Bundle” Bundle is part of the Roll +Bond Livestream that is also happening over the weekend, raising money for the same charity:

https://www.twitch.tv/rollplusbond

Hungry Out of Habit is a worldbuilding game by Adam Bell for 2-6 players with no GM where rulers of neighboring kingdoms taking turns describing and inventing the world they’re trying to control.

Dungeon Pulp is a single player dice rolling dungeon crawler by Alfred Valley where you are an adventurer moving through a horrid acid-corrupted dungeon.

Street Wolves Case Files 001: The Ultimate Red Rumble Adventure is a new module for the synth wave inspired ttrpg Street Wolves, with half the proceeds going to humanitarian aid for Ukraine.

That’s it for today. Have a nice weekend!

Aerial_Knight’s DropShot thoughts

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Developer: Aerial_Knight
Publisher: Aerial_Knight
Year: 2026
Genre: FPS
System: Windows

Aerial_Knight’s DropShot is the newest game by Neil Jones, who goes by the handle of Aerial_Knight for his game dev work. It’s a first-person game where you fall through the sky, shooting bad guys and avoiding obstacles. Honestly, the intro screen describes the plot better than I ever could…

a purple man with sunglasses and text saying "What up doe! I'm Smoke Wallace! When I was a kid, I was bitten by a radioactive dragon. It turned my skin purple and gave me the power to shoot bullets from my fingertips. Then the dragon ate my family. Now I'm hitching rides with mercenaries who would take me out the first chance they get, but we're all hunting the same beasts and their eggs. None of them are getting in my way. I'm here for the dragons and I'm not stopping until they're gone."

It’s fantastic stuff. I love when games give you a wild premise on one screen and then immediately doing fun video game stuff after that. It reminds me a little of Death Ray Manta where the plot is simply “Death Ray Manta has lasers in his head. He blew up his house, now he lives in space instead.” and then you go shoot stuff in space.

The game reminds me a lot of AaAaAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. You fall through levels and get the highest grade score you can, by shooting enemies with your finger gun and collecting coins. You have a limited number of shots each level but can get more by picking up powerups. There’s also pickups you can get that give you other temporary weapons, but my understanding is that this has since been reworked in a patch so this post is already out of date as I write it.

first person view of someone falling and putting their finger at an orange sphere

The game technically only takes 2-2.5 hours to “beat.” But so much of the game is built around you rerunning levels and trying to beat your previous score that it feels silly saying that my initial run of mostly lower letter grades for completing levels is it, I’m going to go back and replay them to beat my scores as people frequently do in arcade games. There’s 50 levels and while most of the game follows the formula of you falling and shooting other enemies until you reach the end of the level, there’s the occasional boss battle or race level, where you try to catch a falling dragon egg before your opponent. If I had any real criticisms of the design, I suppose I wish it had a little more variety in the level design in the middle but the game moves so fast that I really can’t complain.

My only other real criticism is that the game could have used more polish, bug fixes, and felt better navigating menus with mouse and keyboard but again, it has probably been improved by the time you read this and while the game does say it’s meant to be played with a controller, I think it controlled very well with a mouse and keyboard. I just do not enjoy playing FPS with a controller so I remained stubborn and played with the keyboard and I thought that it felt great whipping around shooting guys with your finger gun while falling from the sky. Any gripes I have mentioned in this post are minor, I think the core of the game is very solid and I had a great time. Something I really appreciate about his games is that they all have an art style that is unique to him and looks gorgeous. The two screenshots I have in here don’t really do justice to how great the game looks in motion. I think it’s Aerial_Knight best game yet and I’m hoping it’s a big hit because I would also love to see it get a sequel, much like how his previous game Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield led to Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield, which I feel got overlooked but does some really interesting stuff with the runner game.

If you had trouble parsing all those rambling thoughts, I think it’s a lovely game and tribute to Neil’s friend Daniel Wilkins, who created the music for Never Yield and We Never Yield. I can’t recommend it enough and I’m excited to see what Aerial_Knight creates next.

Aerial_Knight’s DropShot is available on Steam, Epic Games Store, Playstation, Xbox, and Google Play.

Blog Roundup (February 22, 2026)

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A smaller one this week. A few days ago in the indie roundup I mentioned that it had been getting warmer but we’ll probably get another snowstorm or two before winter ends. Well, it’s snowing right now. Hopefully you discover a nice new site to add to your RSS feed reader. Discord continues to make bad decisions so I’ve been posting more on forums and enjoying that. I mostly hang out on DOS Game Club (DOS games), Paper Cult Club (ttrpgs), and No Escape (games crit/indie games). I know that Adventure Game Hotspot and IntFiction (interactive fiction) also have active forums that I should check more too. It’s just nice when communities own the platforms they run on.

Anyway, here’s some websites.

Video Games

New video game sites Jank and Mothership both have indie game roundups this week. Good stuff! Mothership has one of games you can finish in one sitting and Jank does a weekly one of new games.

I never played Doshin the Giant so it was nice reading about it here.

I really enjoyed the new game Aerial_Knight’s DropShot and hope to write about it soon, but this review is better than anything I’ll write about it anyway.

Lotus praises the indie game MOONROT on her new site.

The designer of Angeline Era has 6 Tips For Making Angeline Era-style Exploration

Music

If you live in the Ann Arbor area, consider adding Pulp to your RSS feed reader. It’s run the the Ann Arbor District Library and covers new music by local musicians all the time.

Poetry

Two of the poetry sites I follow released new issues this week. Beestung is a quarterly magazine for non-binary, genderqueer, and two-spirit writers and readers and has arrived with Issue #26. ALOCASIA is a journal of queer plant-based writing and just published Issue #17. Both are free but donations are encouraged.

Food

I like when blogs and personal sites post recipes, so enjoy this recipe for Raspberry Cheesecake Brownies.

That’s it for this week. Hope you continue to have a good weekend.

A Brief History of Gobliiins

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I was really excited that Gobliins 6 recently came out on Steam and Itch and wrote way too many words about why I love it on the No Escape forums. So I’m doing the normal thing and expanding on that post even more. If you haven’t played the Gobliiins series, it’s a weird French point-and-click adventure game in a series that started in 1991. The rest of this post will be about why I think the series is interesting and some of the quirks but the TLDR is: it’s good! You don’t need to play previous entries.

three goblins standing outside a house
Gobliiins screenshot from MobyGames

Anyway, it’s a series where you control a group of goblins that you switch between to solve puzzles. The entries vary on how many you play as at a time, and it’s technically an adventure game but they typically follow a level-based format where you have some specific goal and you solve puzzles to accomplish that goal before you move onto the next level. The original three games were created by Coktel Vision and designed by Pierre Gilhodes and Muriel Tramis. Muriel has a FASCINATING career. She’s known as the first Black woman video game designer and many of her games are focused on anti-colonialism or erotica. The Gobliiins series is not about either, but Pierre and Muriel did eventually do a game called The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, which has all the goofy humor of the Gobliiins games but is anti-colonialist. It’s a weird game but I love it. Most people in the US who know of these games probably know about them because Sierra bought Coktel Vision and published their games here. They even renamed the third game to Goblins Quest 3, to make it sound more like King’s Quest/Police Quest/Space Quest, which is so goofy to me since it’s this bonkers French game but there you go.

two goblins outside a castle. One is holding a bomb
Gobliins 2 screenshot from MobyGames

Eventually Coktel Vision was closed and Pierre and Muriel split off to do their own things. I don’t think they ever had a falling out because they mention each other a bit in interviews and he did art for her book. I think they were just tired of games. Then in 2009 Pierre got the rights to the IP and made Gobliiins 4, which is…..ehhh. The 3D art is not amazing and it takes a long time to really get going, but it’s there I guess. My understanding is that the game improves quite a bit in the second half of the game. You cannot buy this one anywhere today and it’s abandonware. Muriel got a special thanks in this and I think consulted a little but wasn’t really involved.

a goblin standing on a floating pirate ship
Goblins 3 screenshot from MobyGames

And then in 2023 he did a Kickstarter campaign to fund Gobliiins 5, which was made in Adventure Game Studio and has 2D art again. It’s great. It’s a return to form for the series and even with the janky setup (it’s split into four launchers because it was a solo project by an older guy learning a new game engine), it was a treat for fans. You can now get this on Steam and Itch.io. This repeated again two years later with another crowdfunding campaign for 6, which just came out this week. It was nice to see Muriel Tramis come back for this one to help with puzzle design and I hope this means she is back to making games again.

3 goblins standing by a dragon skeleton
Gobliiins 4 screenshot from MyAbandonware

So what are the quirks with the series? Well, every entry in the series has a different number of i’s in the title based on the number of goblins you rotate between. So Gobliiins 1 has you switching between 3 characters, Gobliins 2 has two goblins, and Goblins 3 just has the one but you occasionally have other characters you play as anyway. Gobliiins 4 and 5 are sequels to the first game and have you playing as the three characters from the first game again and Gobliins 6 is a direct sequel to 2, where you play as the two characters from that one. Despite all this weird lore stuff, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just people walking around doing puzzles and goofy slapstick stuff happens.

three goblins at a birthday party
Gobliiins 5 screenshot from Steam

If I were to recommend a game in the series to folks, I’d probably say to start with 3 or 5, depending on if you want something old school or not. It’s very hard to recommend 1 because it’s the only one with health meters where you lose health every time your characters get hit, which is when all the funny stuff happens, and uses a password system. The health system gets dropped with the second game and from here on, the goblins can get beat up as much as you want. The puzzle design gets better with each entry too, which 3 having much better puzzles than 2. The other weird quirk with the old ones is that people generally prefer the floppy disk versions over the cd-rom ones, because the music changed and people don’t care for it as much (I think it’s fine either way). You can pick up the original trilogy on GOG, which features both the floppy disk and cd-rom versions of the games.

screenshot from gobliins 6 showing a variety of characters in a bar
Gobliins 6

Anyway, this is way too many words about a weird series of French games but I like my weird French DOS games so there you go.

Indie Game Roundup (Feb 20, 2026)

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It’s finally starting to warm up here in the metro Detroit area and even as someone who actually loves winter and snow, it’s been a nice break from the cold. Whenever we get the first one of these during the season, my attitude usually shifts into “ok, let’s get this winter thing done with and move into spring weather.” Unfortunately that’s not how that works and we’ll probably get a surprise snow storm or two over the next month. Ah well. This week I’m highlighting this page to help folks in Minnesota with housing, and any donations would be nice. Consider sharing these posts with friends and adding the site to your RSS feed reader because they take a while to write lol. If you like today’s post, feel free to leave a comment about something nice in your life lately or let me know about your game, as long as it doesn’t use AI in any way. You can always send me an email (see About page) if you prefer to say hi or tell me about your game that way.

first person view of a finger gun pointing at an object while the person falls

First I would like to mention Aerial_Knight’s DropShot, which I’ve already picked up and played through. It’s amazing. Like if someone made Aaaaaaaaa – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity a FPS. You fall through the sky and shoot other people and dragons. Love it, love it, love it. Also on Playstation and Xbox.

a person riding on an animal with long legs

I think I’ve mentioned Sylvie‘s games on here a few times, I’m a big fan, and now you can download all of them up through 2024 in a collection for free here. It’s a lot of games but the download is fairly small and the page itself gives recommendations for where to start.

I forgot to mention it last week but the creator of Bitsy made a tool for writing interactive fiction for calculators using Twine.

Enjoy this browser toy for generating random walks in Toronto.

rover moving across a moon

MOONROT (Steam/Itch.io) is a short horror game about piloting a rover across a moon. I really like the developer’s game Frogsong, which is kinda the polar opposite of this, but I get excited when I see people do very different things.

first person view of a monster in a dungeon

Horripilant (Steam) is a horror dungeon crawler/idle game? I was literally griping on Discord about how Vermis I is a very good book but also makes me sad that it’s not a real game, and then this pops up in my feed and the dev says it’s an influence. Did I manifest the game and rewrite reality? Probably

brightly colored art of horses on a race track

I know nothing about Horsey Game but people seem very excited for it so I will link to it here and let you have at it.

top down view of a table with monsters standing next to cards

The Killing Stone is a nice looking one that has entered Early Access. It’s a card battler with 17th century occult stuff. I just think it looks cool and it’s by the folks that made The Magic Circle.

top down vector graphics view of a luge doing down a slide

LUGE 2026 is a browser game where you have 3 attempts at a daily run that gets ranked against other players.

a picross board in progress of being filled

Walfie’s Nonograms is a free Picross-like for the Game Boy. I am a Picross sicko and will happily take more. This one happens to have very charming art and music too. I guess this type of game is actually called a nonogram.

Speaking of which, we also got CiniCross this week, which combines nonograms with dungeon crawling and roguelites. There’s a demo if you want to try it out.

Palpus X Annihilation is an Alien Shooter-like that just came out. That’s probably only going to mean something to a handful of people but they will probably be excited. This one also has a demo.

An Abyss of Dreams is a first-person cosmic horror point-and-click adventure set in Quebec and the entire game is voiced in French. I don’t think I see games set there very often. I think I heard about this one through Adventure Game Hotspot. Has a demo.

a pixel art switchboard

Cold Calling is an alternate history Cold War comedy where you operate a switchboard and features some adventure game elements as well.

Rex is a pay-what-you-want platformer that is apparently a remake of a ZX Spectrum game. From looking at their Itch profile, it looks like they have done a lot of remakes of ZX Spectrum games. I really appreciate folks that do free remakes of older games and help keep the memory of them alive. I played stuff like this endlessly in my high school years on sites like Retro Remakes.

Finally, in the crowdfunding world this Kickstarter for a bundle of ttrpg zines looks nice and I’m very, very excited for All Will Rise, a game where you take a billionaire to court for destroying a river.

That’s it for this week. I hope you find something new to enjoy and have a lovely weekend.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion thoughts

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Developer: Tribute Games Inc.
Publisher: Dotemu
Year: 2025
Genre: Beat ’em Up
System: Windows

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a beat ’em up where up to four players select Marvel super heroes and go through levels beating bad guys up until they get to Annihilus, who they also beat up. I played through this one with my kids and it was surprisingly good? Not that I had low expectations for it, but it’s probably one of the best ones I’ve played in a long time, partially because I haven’t played Streets of Rage 4 yet. I don’t think there’s a whole lot to say about these. It’s a pretty straightforward game where each player picks two characters they can switch between on the fly, walk through levels, and punch guys. But it all feels really good and never felt unfair to me like some of the early games in the genre. Really nice pixel art and animations too.

Black Panther, Jean Grey, Venom, and Spider-Man all beating up symbiotes
Image taken from Steam store

It’s a game I would have lost my mind over if I was a kid. I grew up as a big Marvel fan and fell off about 15 years ago, which means some of the stuff in the game was wild. Did you know that at some point (maybe currently?) The Punisher is the current version of Ghost Rider and he’s now in space? Was this done because every police officer chud uses a Punisher skull logo? They did a good job putting some oddballs into the game.

Anyway, good stuff. It’s the best Marvel beat ’em up that’s been made so far, and yes, I’m including the X-Men arcade game in this.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is available for Linux, Windows, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S

Round 2 of the TTRPG Blog Awards The Bloggies Has Started

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I’ve mentioned it before but The Bloggies is a very, very low stakes and silly competition that some folks in the indie ttrpg community do where they take some of the best blog posts that have been nominated by that community and pit them against each other in a vote. No one takes it seriously and it’s just a fun excuse to revist blog posts. I’ve been having fun following along and now you can too. Check out all the links, read the ones that sound interesting to you, and vote if you feel like it.

Here are the categories:

Advice: tinyurl.com/y6z7b5tn

Critique: tinyurl.com/4x8erzrr

Gameable: tinyurl.com/bpaz4bcb

Theory: tinyurl.com/2s3fwehe

Meta: tinyurl.com/ymnbudv2

Some Nice Places to Find Abandonware Games

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I just realized I had a lot of sources I cycle between for abandonware games and thought it should be something to share, since this is just a blog and not a real games website, and I can post whatever I want. Abandonware, software that is no longer easily available because it is not sold anywhere by the publisher, is frequently a thing in games unfortunately and it doesn’t help that a lot of people just define it as “well this thing is old, so I can put it up for download even if it’s still for sale” which isn’t how preservation works! Anyway, here’s some sites I like that put care into what they upload, update them to work on modern versions of Windows, and take down the downloads if they get rereleased.

The Collection Chamber is the one I look at the most. It’s updated on a monthly basis and has a wide variety of stuff, with a focus on 90s games for Windows that you cannot easily run in DOSBox. It has so many games from the multimedia era that I find fascinating.

Zomb’s Lair has not been updated in a long time but hosts a lot of 90s computer games packaged for modern Windows as well. One of the most interesting ones to me is VNC: Virtual Nightclub, which was apparently an adventure game by the folks that made Burn: Cycle and was sold only through the Sci-Fi Channel phone line, so it was incredibly hard to find anything about it for a long time. I need to do a longer writeup on it sometime. It’s not “good” but it’s a fascinating time capsule of how we viewed the internet and virtual reality at the time.

Mr. Abandonware has organized a collection on the Internet Archive of DOS games packaged to run on modern windows, and it includes a lot of major games. lt’s kind of wild how many games that were commercial and critical hits just aren’t available for sale anywhere.

SentienceSnakes164 has a collection on the Internet Archive as well of games packaged to run on modern versions of Windows. This is more focused on 00s era games, mostly licensed ones that have been pulled from sale, but there’s some oddballs like early Monolith stuff and lesser known FPS like KISS: Psycho Circus.

There’s probably another post in me where I highlight freeware remakes of retro games, but I do want to give a shoutout to this one of Lode Runner: The Mad Monks’ Revenge. This was a game by Sierra that I really liked at the time and this remake adds likes of nice quality of life features.

Finally, MyAbandonware is a fascinating site to watch. It’s just constantly uploading stuff I never heard of. While it’s not focused on updating games to work on modern versions of Windows, they occasionally provide an update. This isn’t a criticism, no one could reasonably update all the games this site uploads.

That’s all I’ve got for this post. Feel free to add others in the comments as long as they aren’t uploading games that are still being sold.

Blog Roundup (February 15, 2026)

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I wasn’t going to do these on a weekly basis again but there ended up being a bunch of interesting posts and the list got long very quickly. Consider adding the ones you like to your RSS feed reader. I use Inoreader but there’s lots of good ones. Or add links to things you like on your own website.

The Bathysphere is a weekly video game newsletter featuring short essays and links to other games and writing. I keep thinking it’s new but at issue 44 it means it’s almost a year old at this point.

The devs at Nice Gear Games now have a blog if you want to see what they’re up to.

The yearly ttrpg blog awards The Bloggies have nominees, if you want to read a billion good posts about ttrpgs.

I forgot to include this in my indie game roundup, I’ll do it next week, but the creator of Bitsy has now made a tool for writing interactive fiction for Casio calculators using Twine.

Two years ago Cabel Sasser gave a really good talk about preserving a mural at McDonalds before it was going to get destroyed and now he has a blog post expanding on it. It has a link to the talk, which I highly recommend.

Andrew Plotkin wrote about the combat system with the troll in Zork 1.

Syl has a nice roundup of video games, interactive fiction, and ttrpgs played in January.

Robert Yang wrote a blog post about the future of games festivals and non-commercial games culture since the oldest games non-profit in the world, Freeplay in Australia, is running into financial trouble. I also like that it is also wants to preserve some of the discourse happening around it on Bluesky, since games discourse can happen so quickly and then be forgotten.

And finally Lone Archivist has a post on how to make more affordable miniatures for your tabletop skirmish game.

That’s it for this time. Hope you found something cool. With Discord making lots of bad decisions lately I’m also spending more times on blogs now and have been mostly hanging out on DOS Game Club, where it’s ZZT month, No Escape has launched a forum, and Paper Cult Club continues being a great place for ttrpg discussion.

Myst (2020) thoughts

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Developer: Cyan Worlds
Publisher: Cyan Worlds
Year: 2020
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

view of a trail leading up to a library

Since I’m doing a post in place of a log every time I complete a game, this means I’ve finally come across Myst after replaying it with a friend. I could have sworn I’ve done something more “reviewish” since I basically mention Myst in every other blog post I do, but I guess not? Maybe this site started after I played the remake. So this is going to be less of a formal Review and even more rambly than I usually do since everyone knows I love Myst and will recommend it to everyone anyway. The remake is great, go play it and immediately go into the options to turn on the FMV because it beats the 3D models. The rest of this isn’t spoilery but won’t make sense to anyone that hasn’t played it.

I just replayed the game with a friend over Discord, they had never played Myst before, and this gave me an opportunity to finally play the Rime age that was added last year. The Rime age was originally added to realMyst and appeared in realMyst Masterpiece Edition as well, but did not ship with this Myst remake. Previously it was a very tiny age that you get after you complete the game, something that’s just a nice little treat and you can play through in 15-20 minutes. It’s been heavily reworked and expanded to add more backstory and build on the relationships between characters in the game. Something that’s fun about it is how much closer it is to the style of puzzle design you see in Riven, where everything feels like it’s part of a real world. As much as I love Myst, sometimes the puzzles and even some Ages feel more like puzzles or places just built because they look cool and a fun place to walk around in. By the time they got to Riven they had started to think a lot more about what a fictional world with its own rules would be like to walk around in. The new Rime age was a delight to explore and with development of new games slowing down at Cyan because of financial issues and the industry as a whole collapsing, I treasure every new bit of world design we get from Cyan.

It was also fun to see that my friend enjoyed it in our playthrough. I think. Or they were just being very polite. I think the design of the game largely holds up. The only Age that I kinda lose interest in is Selenic, where the maze goes on quite a bit longer past the point of “ok, I get it.” I think the Mechanical Age is what I have in mind when I think about the worlds that are built around looking neat rather than a real place that people could live in like later Myst games. Playing this over Discord really does highlight how much the adventure game genre is meant to be played with friends. Even when neither person knows what to do next, it helps to have someone to bounce ideas off of or just to have someone to talk to while dealing with the tedium of trying various bits. Most of the time when I played adventure games with this friend, it’s usually pretty awful FMV heavy adventures during the holiday season, so it was nice to play something that I consider to be good. It’s also one of the very few genres that can be played over Discord, where one person controls everything and the other player can sit and talk and take notes if they want.

At this point, this is the version of the game that I would recommend to others. I think the optional subtitles go a long way to helping with the sound puzzles that a lot of people struggle with, especially if you’re a bit tone deaf like I am. It also still feels very snappy, which isn’t lost from the move away from nodes in a Hypercard game. I think you kinda need to turn on the FMV, an option in the menu, because the default 3D models aren’t great and the FMV acting is charming to me. Even though this post is more of a ramble of thoughts and not really a review, I do think the soundtrack also deserves a shoutout. It’s wild that they were hesitant about adding a soundtrack until the publisher pressured them, and immediately realized it added so much to the game.

Finally, I should probably add that Cyan allowed the Video Game History Foundation to scan and archive everything they had and that’s all available here. It’s an incredible collection of Behind the Scenes materials and it’s wild how much they preserved, even company picnics!

Anyway, Myst is great and Cyan is my favorite developer.

Myst is available on Steam/GOG/basically every other platform for Windows and Mac.