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.
Wow, a roundup on Friday the 13th, the unluckiest blog post ever! Hope folks are doing alright. I’m listening to the Phil Collins album Face Value right now because my Plex said it’s the 45th anniversary of it coming out and I would just like to say that aside from one or two tracks, I remain firmly on the side of Peter Gabriel. If you enjoy these roundups, even all the rambling that comes at the beginning of these, consider giving a few bucks to game designer Rob Fearon, who immediately needs some aid for him and his kids. It would mean a lot to me since I’ve been playing his games for 20+ years. Alright, here’s some games.
New Video Games
No ICE in Minnesota is a bundle on Itch raising money for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. Even though ICE is supposedly winding down operations in Minneapolis (I’ll believe it when I see it), folks there will still going to need money and support for a long time to recover from the damage ICE as done. It features a ton of games you can buy for just $10 or more, including my 90s edutainment inspired ttrpg MindExplorer.
Relooted is an Africanfuturist heist game where you reclaim real African artifacts from Western museums. It’s fucking great. I’ve only played a little bit so far but everything about it just feels great to me. Incredibly smooth movement too. I can’t recommend it enough. There’s a demo if you want to try it out.
Gradient.horse is a browser game where you draw a horse and watch it run with other horses people have drawn. 10/10.
Jennifer Reitz has created a new version of her classic shareware game Boppin’, originally released in 1992. You can download it for free on her site.
It’s been a pretty busy week for point-and-click adventures. Shadows of the Afterland (Steam/Itch.io) is a a supernatural murder mystery featuring fully voiced characters. It just looks really nice! People in the adventure games community are sometimes a little bitter about the adventure games are dead trope that gets repeated in games articles once in a while, but sometimes it’s hard not to be when you have multiple adventure games coming out every week.
We also got Gobliins 6 this week on Steam/Itch.io. It’s another point-and-click adventure where you usually have a goal in a room/level that you need to achieve and switch between your goblins to solve the puzzles. I’ve been a fan of this series since I was a child so it’s wild to me that we got 5 and 6 in just a few years. One of the fun things about following along with this series is seeing the numbers of i’s that appear in the title of the game, which corresponds to the number of goblins you play as. Some some entries have 3 i’s, meaning you switch between three, others have two like this entry, and Goblins 3 just has the one goblin, but you play as other characters too. This one is a sequel to Gobliins 2, but you really don’t need to play previous entries to get caught up on lore. It’s just little guys doing goofy stuff. Muriel Tramis came back to help with this one too, which is always great to see. I’m a huge fan of hers and it would be great to see her working on more games.
I already mentioned in a previous week that point-and-click adventure Perfect Tides: Station to Station came out on Steam. Well now it’s on Itch.io. You should pick it up on either platform because it’s an incredible adventure game filled with new adventure games.
i miss the bugs is a collage game for browsers where you are a little bug walking around in nature. Even if I’m not a bug enthusiast, I thought this was a lovely game that I found very relaxing, and it made me look forward to Spring.
Doom Spiral is a new fast-paced FPS with really trippy visuals where you have jacked into a mainframe and need to escape while the level crumbles. I don’t think I can play this one just based on the gifs on the Itch page, but it seems like something a lot of other folks would be into.
I just got an email that ENCHAIN has entered Early Access on Steam. ENCHAIN is a first person shooter where you are a skeleton running around shooting other skeletons and using a grappling hook. I don’t even remember adding it to my wishlist but yes, it seems like something I would be into. It has a demo too that I’ll have to play.
And Hellscreen is a FPS that has just exited Early Access. You do the Doom-like thing of running around shooting demons, with the twist being that you have a rear view mirror to see enemies behind you, including some that can only be seen in the mirror. The wild thing about this release is that if I’m reading it correctly, it’s cheaper to buy the bundle that comes with Vaporwave Pinball? I liked that one a lot, so maybe consider getting the bundle even if you’re just a pinball person. Weirdly enough, I think I’ve hit a bug in Steam where I cannot buy that bundle apparently because I own Vaporwave Pinball, but if I put just Hellscreen in my cart, it tells me that it’s available at a cheaper price, which is the bundle that I cannot buy.
Demiurges also left Early Access. It’s a turn-based strategy game like Heroes of Might and Magic but the combat mechanics are heavily influenced by Slay the Spire.
Null Space is a ttrpg where you are a crew of freelancers in space in the 24th century, doing jobs and trying to get by. It’s currently Itchfunding, which in this case means that the game is available but the more money it makes, the more they can put into it to improve the book.
And yes, Mewgenics was also this week I guess
Demos
The creators of adventure games like Machinarium and Chuchel have an upcoming game called Phonopolis that just released a demo. It looks nice in screenshots but you really need to watch a video to appreciate the art. Holy cannoli.
There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension is a beloved adventure game and it’s getting a spinoff, Crushed In Time, where you play as the Sherlock Holmes and Watson duo from that game.
Wishlist
Michael Brough has a new roguelike being made, 868-BACK! I’m assuming it will be one of the best roguelikes based on everything he’s made.
I’m also a big fan of resnijars and their games, so I think their roguelike platformer Crescent Break is worth a look.
Crowdfunding
It’s zine month in the ttrpg world, which means there’s tons of crowdfunding campaigns happening right now. Here’s just a few:
I Have Lived A Thousand Lives is a solo ttrpg where you play as someone capable of entering the worlds of their favorite books, movies, TV shows, albums, or other works of narrative art, slightly changing those works while wrestling with their emotions. Because I’m incapable of avoiding the Boss Baby vibes meme, I get a lot of Myst vibes from it because that’s the only thing I ever think about.
The Endtimes Trilogy is a collection of 3 ttrpgs about the end of the world, for 2-5 players. Adam Bell and Sashah Li are great. It looks like there’s also a special zine you get if you back enough ttrpg zines on BackerKit this month?
Coyote & Crow: Legends & Icons is a supplement for the game Coyote & Crow, a game that I have not played yet but I’ve heard is very good.
Blades ’68 is a supplement for the classic ttrpg Blades in the Dark, that bumps the timeline up to the 60s. If you scroll down the list of who is involved, you can see so, so many great people involved with this one.
Shores Of Night – Redux is a surreal cosmic horror ttrpg without all the weird ableist stuff like sanity systems that you sometimes see in other cosmic horror games. It’s got a quickstart document if you want to see what they’re going for.
I am so excited that a Spirit Swap solo ttrpg zine is being crowdfunded. In fact, I was so excited that I was apparently the first person to back it. I loved the original game and I am a massive fan of the designer for this ttrpg, so it was a no brainer.
That’s all I’ve got for this week. Consider adding this site to your RSS feed reader if it isn’t already in there. Feel free to email me about your game (see About page) if it doesn’t use GenAI. I just like to hear about what folks are working on. Also consider doing your own blog posts about things you are enjoying. There’s so many great pieces of art that kinda get drowned out because it’s a lot easier to dunk on crap instead, I’m guilty of this too.
The Phil Collins album Face Value finished playing while I wrote this so I put on some Peter Gabriel music to listen to. Apparently it’s his birthday too. Happy birthday Peter Gabriel. Consider playing his weird but good multimedia cd-roms (he also did Xplora and a voice in Myst 4).
I haven’t done one of these in a long time because I didn’t have time but I could still do these on a monthly basis or something. There’s just so many new websites that keep popping up even though a lot of people think the internet is just five websites these days. Maybe you’ll enjoy some of them and add them to your RSS feed reader of choice, or feel like giving a shoutout to a website you like.
Prismatic Wasteland has announced a new Blog Bandwagon, where ttrpg folks are encouraged to write about maps.
Wannabe Games just started a newsletter that you can add to your feed reader or subscribe to. The latest is about their newest Zine Month game and playtesting.
Technology
Bandcamp Friday just happened again two days ago, meaning I bought too much music again and posted about self hosting music. Someone has a much nicer and more elaborate blog post about their process. Mine is different and not in the cloud but I think it just shows how many ways it can be done.
Video Games
First I’d like to give a shoutout to Jank and Mothership, two new video game websites that launched in the same week that I think are worth a follow.
Wilco Web has been working on a fan site for the Space Quest series, which involves including fan games and adventure games influenced by it. It turns out that there’s a lot of games inspired by Space Quest, including a ton I never heard of.
Lotus has a new website for indie games called Dialed Indie. Poke around and add it to your RSS feed reader.
Nicole Carpenter wrote an article for Aftermath about a report Dr. Jess Morrissette and Dr. Megan Condis wrote that gathered almost “3,000 print ads from the console wars era to analyze whether the popular narrative that “Sega was for rad teens and Nintendo was for babies” actually holds up.” You can read that for free here.
Sandy Duncan, founder of YoYo Games and why we have GameMaker Studio, recently passed away. Mike Daily wrote about his friend and posted lots of photos of him working on games stuff.
The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation recently placed a lot more rules restricting the usage of LLMs in writing games for IFComp (yay) and a judge wrote a lot more about that in a post titled LLM Slop Will Make Us Antisocial.
I Might as Well Explain the Joke is a very nice blog that goes into the history of cliched jokes and tropes. This time it’s about Underwater Basket Weaving.
The Gaming Like It’s 1930 jam wrapped up, featuring dozens of games, both tabletop and video games, made from materials that just entered the public domain.
The latest issue of the indie game compilation magazine, Indiepocalypse, is out today with issue 73. This features a combination of ttrpgs and video games. This month’s commissioned game looks very interesting and I’m happy to see a game by ttrpg designer Maria Mison in here too.
Anonymous game collective LITHOBREAKERS released a batch of new games with a focus on outer space. The really wild one that I haven’t had time to play yet but need to is a MUD? I think it’s fantastic to see a new one of those being made.
Dungeon crawling roguelike Roguecraft DX is available for the Amiga/Mega65/Game Boy Color. I’ve only played the original version of Roguecraft on the Amiga but I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a nice and approachable turn-based roguelike with multiple difficulty levels to choose from if you’re a fan of the genre but bad at them like I am. I don’t really know what the Mega65 (EDIT: I guess it’s a modern day version of this) is but if you can figure out the headaches of emulating Amiga games, I think it’s a very worthwhile platform to dig into. I think more people should make games for the Amiga because I like how the beeps and bloops sound.
JUNJI ITO PINBALL is a roleplaying experience in the forums for a product page on Itch where folks are roleplaying and posting about their experiences with a Junji Ito pinball table. It’s the best. Just read the PDF before participating and start reading some of the threads.
Welcome 2 The Machine is a brand new platformer game for the ZX Spectrum. Longtime readers will know that even though I’m an American born after this era, I have a weird fascination with this platform anyway and I think this one looks really neat. Those colors!
I keep forgetting to highlight new releases on the Playdate Catalog despite being an owner of the handheld and fan of it. I even made a little game with my kids for it. But I think the recent thread from Playdate on Mastodon does a better job highlighting how active the platform is.
DEMON DUST is a new survival horror dungeon crawler. I don’t know much about it really but I think there were some positive early impressions floating around. I just really like how grimy it looks and the UI is interesting.
Between the Scanlines is a fanzine launched in October 2023 and inspired by 90s anime and video game fanzines. This issue has features on Jerry Lawson, 2000AD games on microcomputer, and the early days of ID software.
Syl is a much better writer than I am and she just published a free zine recommending five indie games.
Satan, the Alien Vampire is a first-person game where you have five minutes to escape Satan, who happens to be an alien vampire, as it says in the title. Loved the art in this. I personally didn’t have an issue with the browser version but the Itch page says the downloadable version works better.
The Dark Rites of Arkham is a new lovecraftian point-and-click adventure by Postmodern Games on Steam and Itch.io. I think I’ve seen nothing but critical acclaim for all the adventures by Postmodern Games and I get excited for new adventure games made in Adventure Game Studio since it’s what I use.
I don’t know anything about Hermit & Pig, sorry. I just like the art. The rpg seems to have a lot of very positive reviews judging from the Steam page, like one from the AV Club.
It’s also zine month for the indie ttrpg community so you’ll start seeing crowdfunding campaigns pop up in these roundups such as Aqua Tofana, a solo ttrpg about poisoning your husband.
That’s it for this week! If you found this useful, add it to your RSS feed reader and/or do your own roundup of things you like on your website or blog.
Outlaws is a FPS where you play as ex-Marshal James Anderson, looking to get revenge after outlaws murder your wife and kidnap your daughter. It was originally released in 1997 by Lucsarts and got a remaster from Nightdive. I felt compelled to check it out after The International House of Mojo did a negative review of it. Much like that reviewer, I remembered enjoying it. Was it really that bad? I had access to the remaster through Steam Family Sharing so I thought I would give it a shot and the TLDR is: meh. It’s not as bad as the review says, but also not as great as I remember either.
A fun little Monkey Island reference
I should probably talk about the good stuff first. The cutscenes and soundtrack are amazing. At this point in the life of Lucasarts, we were just starting to see them wind down on doing 2D animation in their games and cutscenes. Curse of Monkey Island also comes out in 1997, but I believe after this year they move fully into 3D and keep moving further into being a company that just makes Star Wars games. They still make quite a few good games after this point, I’m a huge fan of Grim Fandango (1998) and they continue making good Star Wars games, but to a certain fan we’re starting to reach the end of the line for the company. But Outlaws does an outstanding job using these cutscenes to tell the story between levels, and they look great. It’s probably the thing that keeps people thinking about the game. The soundtrack is great as well. It’s by Clint Bajakian and perfectly replicates the feel of classic westerns. I think anyone who is a fan of the game will tell you it’s the presentation that really wins them over.
The game itself feels very good to play. It’s built on the engine used for Dark Forces, so everything feels very solid. The weapon selection isn’t too bad either. It’s a little repetitive with the number of shotguns it offers you, but they did everything they could with the setting they had to work with. It’s built on a very solid foundation, so the game controls very well.
I think where the game starts to run into issues is the level design and mechanics of the game that it has to stick to due to the nature of it being a Western. The level designers did the best they could, but you can only do so much in a world design that still needs to be grounded in reality but plays like a fast-paced shooter. You’ll have very small towns or giant buildings like sawmills that you need to explore, but progress needs to be gated somehow and the only real option they have is from having locks and keys. They had a very limited number of design choices to choose from and it ultimately makes the game feel very repetitive. They tried to mix things up by having you on a moving train at one point, which I always love in FPS, and cliffs in another, which helps. The one level where it starts to get less grounded and you’re doing puzzles while sliding down streams in a lumber mill is my least favorite one, so maybe my theory is wrong. But Lucasarts had great level design in all of their other FPS, and the same folks worked on those, so that’s what I’m going to blame.
Due to it being a western you’re also just stuck fighting the same types of enemies repeatedly. Some may have shotguns or rifles, but there’s not a whole lot they could have done. There’s a boss enemy at the end of each level which is generally just a stronger person with a gun who may shoot faster, but I think those are still neat. They also have you shoot at big spiders at a few points which I absolutely hated as a kid. It’s still an odd thing. But that’s what I mean about them only being able to do so much, it’s a western so you’re shooting at various guys with guns and that’s it. The Mojo review mentions the enemies being very dumb and yeah, they are. They mostly stand there or pace back and forth, and sometimes shoot in the wrong direction, which was odd even at the time of the original release. Since the game was released in the 90’s, there was at least some awareness that the tropes in westerns could be very racist, so they avoid most of that, but not always! The brief moments where they run into those are not great. Most people don’t read manuals but I didn’t really care for the descriptions of some of the boss enemies either.
I think the remastered bits are perfectly fine. The new art for the enemies is built on the concept art and generally fits in ok with the rest of the 2D art in the game. The original game uses prerendered sprites of 3D models which I think can be charming, but I can’t imagine anyone new to the game preferring that over the remastered artwork. Luckily you can just enable and disable whatever you want, so it’s hard to see anyone getting mad over the new artwork. It also remaps the keys to fit in more with the control schemes of modern FPS, but I think there’s mods for the original game that can do this too? The only real part of the remaster that I got excited about was all the bonus materials showing concept art and other behind the scenes materials. It’s nice to see all of this here and preserved. If there’s a reason why you would pick this version up over the old one on GOG, it’s probably this.
I guess where I come down on Outlaws is that the game and remaster are fine. I think the other FPS by Lucasarts such as Dark Forces and Jedi Knight are much better due to how much more freedom they had in their design, but I wouldn’t call it a bad game either. I know that’s just a huge ringing endorsement for this game. I would have a very hard time telling people they should pay $30 for this, but if you ever see it on a deep discount and you have nostalgia for the original game then yeah, maybe you would enjoy revisiting the game. Sometimes you just shrug after playing a game and go “that was alright.”
Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster is available on PC (Steam, GOG), PlayStation (PS4, PS5), and Xbox (One, Series X|S).
We made it through January. What a year. If you enjoy these roundups, please consider donating to people in Minnesota, who are struggling in the fight against fascists. A donation to help folks with rent would help them a lot
To all the rocks that bear me is a game where you explore Coruña both during the day and night. As a sicko for FMV, it was great playing a game that documents a place through an interactive medium and would love to see more of this.
Fuck Ice is an arcade game for browsers where you tell ice to fuck off. Something a lot of us need right now.
Second Hand Computer is a toy that lets you make and play text games. I’ve only played Swords of Freeport in this collection but I feel that even that alone is worth the price. People that grew up with these sorts of games (old people, me) will probably really enjoy this collection.
Screenshot of it’s easy and it gets easier
I’m not actually sure what vextro is, but it looks like they had a game jam and now there’s 4 experimental games and writing by folks I like.
The Ocean Welcomes You is a murder mystery/horror interactive fiction game for browsers with inspirations like the visual novel Umineko When They Cry, the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and the TV show Poker Face. I’m a big fan of the VIDEOTOME game engine and love seeing works like this being made for it.
The 48-word RPG Jam also wrapped up and now there are hundreds of minimalist ttrpgs for you to check out.
MeowGun: Hell Denizen is a new fast paced FPS that has just entered Early Access on Steam. You play as a catgirl and run around shooting demons, zombies, and other monsters in an aesthetic heavily inspired by the Quake 2 era of FPS. There’s a demo available if you want to give it a try.
Adam Saltsman continues doing great work by making little games in PICO-8. KOLYDR is an arcade game for browsers where you fly a little ship around into blue circles to make explosions and get points. It’s a really lovely arcade game that I should play on something better than a macbook keyboard.
Lost Cave is a pay-what-you-want fan sequel to the classic arcade game Bubble Bobble on the Commodore 64, featuring 100 new levels.
Earth Must Die is a new comedy point-and-click adventure on Steam by the creators of Ben There, Dan That. The clever gimmick behind this one is that your character doesn’t want to touch anything himself and must make minions and other folks do everything for you.
Chromatic Conundrum is a first person adventure game where you solve puzzles by manipulating light and mixing colors. It has a colorblind mode as well. Recommended if you liked doing puzzles in games like Antichamber and Portal and want a shorter experience based on light-based puzzles.
Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator is, and it sounds weird to say this, what it says on the tin. You are a space warlord, and you trade babies on a stock market like interface. It’s by the folks at Strange Scaffold, who have made a variety of wonderful games including the previous game in this series, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. I also just really like the art in these games.
ABIDE is the new stop-motion game in development by the folks that made Judero. This one is a horror game and actually reminds me of the 90s experimental game The Dark Eye. It’s currently in crowdfunding and think you should give it a look.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! If you haven’t already, consider adding this site to your RSS feed and sharing with a friend.
Generally not a fan of linking to MLive but they have a post up about how multiple parents of Ypsilanti students were taken by immigration enforcement on Tuesday. So if you live in the area, be aware and get involved if you can. Despite what mainstream outlets are reporting, they have not pulled out of Minneapolis either and the fight continues. Abolish ICE is the bare minimum of what needs to happen.
Developer: Living Books Publisher: Brøderbund Software, Inc. Year: 1992 Genre: Edutainment System: Macintosh
Yeah, that’s right. I’m reviewing a multimedia cd-rom. Just Grandma and Me is an interactive storybook based on the Little Critter book of the same name. You go through 12 screens of a book about Little Critter going to the beach with his grandma, which the game reads to you, and then you click on things to see funny little animations until you decide to go to the next page. There’s not a whole lot to it but it must work because my kids like it and I liked it when I first played it as a child too.
Screenshot taken from MobyGames
The first time I played it was when I was 6 years old and in my 1st grade classroom (if you want to know how old I was, it was September, 1993). The teacher put the cd-rom into the classroom’s Macintosh and I was blown away. Little Critter was talking and telling us which buttons we could push, and then started dancing to music. I had never seen a game do this before. This was my first time seeing a cd-rom as well, since we did have a PC (and Amiga before that) at home but they didn’t have cd-rom drives. I was so charmed by the story reading itself to me and all the funny animations that happened from clicking on stuff. Our family did eventually get a cd-rom drive about a month or two later and it came bundled with this game, which I played a lot along with later titles in the Living Books series.
A cd-rom is going to be a little less magical in 2026 (to some folks, not me!) but I think it still holds up, or at least my kids like it. The animations are still charming and it’s got a lot of funny little bits that happen when you click on stuff. Obviously it’s not a thing you’re still going to charge $30 or whatever for, but interactive storybooks are still a thing that kids enjoy and that’s what this is. Later releases of the game include a minigame or two as well as the ability to play in other languages. Plus with it having ScummVM support, you can play it on basically everything.
Fun fact: While he had plenty of success with his books, Mercer Meyer has a long history in computer games too. While most of his games are related to his Little Critter books, he did a few before this, including a text adventure.
Living Books: Just Grandma and Me is available on Steam and mobile platforms.
Developer: Humongous Entertainment Publisher: Humongous Entertainment Year: 1997 Genre: Adventure System: Windows
Something that’s been a lot of fun as my kids continue to grow has been revisiting games from my childhood. The most recent one has been Spy Fox in “Dry Cereal,” a point-and-click adventure by Humongous Entertainment. In the first Spy Fox game you play as a spy (who happens to be a fox, as it says on the tin) that rescue the world’s cows and stop William the Kid (a goat) from stealing the world’s supply of milk. Like everything else by Humongous Entertainment, this was a delight to revisit with my kids.
The game features the great art and animation you would expect from the studio. Everything still looks great today and the only real bummer about the current state of HE releases is that I do think they would look better at an even higher resolution. But at the same time I feel like that risks being twisted into something awful and we get an AI upscaling everything, so I’ll happily settle for how they look from the 90’s.
It’s also been fun seeing how carefully HE rolled out adventure games for children of all ages. Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, and Fatty Bear were created for very young kids, 3-8 year olds, Pajama Sam is advertised for that age group too but I would argue is for an age range that is one year old, and Spy Fox is for 5-10 year olds. It’s just a tad bit more difficult than the rest of their adventures but roughly follows the same format and there being a core goal you complete through adventure game solving, one or two mini games you can play on the side, and possibly a real time sequence. I personally think the timed reaction sequences aren’t great and would remove them, but I think the rest of the game works.
The puzzles are trickier than what you would see in Putt-Putt and makes the game take longer to complete, but I don’t think it’s anything impossible for older kids. I think the only bit during the puzzle solving that doesn’t work for me is that Spy Fox has a limited inventory space for gadgets and to try other gadgets, you need to return to your HQ to swap out what you have for other gadgets. It’s a slog. I get why this approach was taken, the alternative is to just get everything and the HQ becomes a lot less interesting after that, but I maybe would have had other reasons to return to HQ and just let them have it all. Other than that though, I think the puzzles are interesting and it’s kinda fun that they start to introduce the idea of note taking to kids in this game.
Anyway, it’s a good game. I don’t know if I would recommend it to grownups to play by yourself but my kids loved it and I had fun playing it with them.
Spy Fox in “Dry Cereal” is available on Steam, Switch, PS4, and mobile platforms but ScummVM support means you can play it on basically everything.
Once again I am starting one of these posts with “what a week.” Solidarity with Minnesota. I try to do one GoFundMe or whatever in each one of these because I just do the roundup posts for fun but ICE is just kidnapping multiple children a day so here are two GoFundMes to help with legal fees and food for families in Minneapolis here and here. It would mean a lot if you could send a few dollars to whatever one has less money at the time you’re reading this. Anyway, Minneapolis is winning and will defeat ICE and one day ICE will be crushed everywhere else. Help people around you if you can.
There isn’t really a good way to transition to talking about video games after that, sorry, but maybe you’ll find something to distract you from things or be compelled to post about things you’ve been excited about on your own blog.
Video Games
I guess I’ll start with some self promotion. The British Game Generator is a silly thing in development that spits out ideas for video games inspired by 80’s British computer games. Even though I didn’t grow up with that era of games and live in the US, I’m a big fan of a lot of them, especially Llamasoft. They have a very unique feel to me that I have a hard time describing but I feel is quirky and charming in a way that is unique to that scene.
Speaking of British games, Go-Go BunnyGun is a new game for the ZX Spectrum available for Pay-What-You-Want. Itch.io is home to so many good ZX Spectrum games and this looks like a lovely arcade shooter. It was highly recommended by Davey Sloan on Bluesky, who has also made quite a few ZX Spectrum games you should check out.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station is now on Steam. It’s a point-and-click adventure where you are a woman named Mara and must deal with all of the issues of being a young adult and features non-linear exploration and branching narratives. I was a big fan of the original game because of its art and how accurately it depicted being a teen in the early 00s, even the awkward and painful parts, so I’m looking forward to how this will recreate the experience of being a young adult in the same awkward and embarrassing ways I did. While it is a sequel, the game is designed so you don’t have to play the original game first. That said, I highly recommend that one too.
Folks should check out the indie game collective Cutie Collective and see all the games they’re making.
SEBI 16 is a collection of sixteen games of various genres made in PICO-8. I’m a fan of PicoMix and CorgiSpace, so it’s fun seeing more PICO-8 compilations coming out.
Karous is a rerelease of a shoot ’em up originally released back in 2007 for the Dreamcast. Don’t know anything about it, it just seems neat and I think it’s interesting that it is a port of a Dreamcast game that is almost 20 years old but also well after the console “died.”
TR-49 (Steam/iOS) is a narrative deduction game by the fine folks at Inkle. I’ve been a fan of all of their interactive fiction games so it’s fun seeing them do a game in the deduction subgenre that’s been picking up in popularity in the adventure game genre. People like mysteries! According to their founder on Bluesky, it’s been their biggest launch in the company’s history. As an adventure game fan, it’s always nice that I can post about multiple games in the genre coming out in the same week and they’re being critically well received and selling well. People are still going to do the lazy “adventure games are dead” narrative but it feels like a golden age for the genre.
Tabletop Games
I’ve posted about the mech tragedy ttrpg Dragon Reactor before but now you can pre-order the print version on the Dinoberry Games website. Even if that one doesn’t seem to be for you, take a look around their site, read some blog posts, and see what else they’ve made. I’m personally a big fan of their games Sprouts and Dinocar.
Breathing Techniques Against Monsters is a lyric game about dealing with negative thoughts via breathing exercises and intended to help you with your anxiety and stress. Available for Pay-What-You-Want.
Demos
Uncle Lee’s Cookbook is an upcoming point-and-click adventure where you play as the teen Ines as she tries to save the world caused by the fallout of her Uncle Lee’s experiements. There’s a demo playable in the browser on Itch.io.
Wishlist
Oh!Ware looks like a very neat Mancala roguelike to me. I don’t think I’ve seen Mancala in any video game form before outside of pure recreations of the game itself.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. If you’ve got a game you’re working on and it doesn’t use AI, feel free to send me an email about it. See the About page here for contact info. I just like to hear about what folks are working on. Or feel free to send an email or post in the comments to say hi. That’s fine too.
