Alright, I think I’ve gotten back into the groove of posting on here after taking a break because of mental health reasons. Doing posts on here has actually helped with that so I guess I’ll keep it up.
Progress on the adventure game is going well. I think I’m “done” with my game in that it’s playable from start to finish and it’s basically all there. Now I get to just spend the next few weeks testing it for bugs and adding more jokes, and that seems nice. Overall this was a very good experience for me. I’ll finally have shipped a game in Adventure Game Studio, which I’ve wanted to do for at least a decade, and learned a lot in the process. Having a deadline made sure that happened. However, having a deadline is always a little bit stressful for me so I’ll probably take a couple of weeks off after it’s turned in so I can recover. I wouldn’t quite say I’m burnt out, but I think that if I jumped straight to another game I would be.
I’m looking forward to the break though, because I’m going to have a bit of time off in December and will be able to chill and also maybe stream some video games. Maybe some that I will cover in my GOTY awards on here! If you saw my previously grumpy post, I want to see more recognition of indie games, even ones that aren’t on Steam. I’m kinda of bitter about games only being seeing if they’re on there, so I have started putting together a GOTY list and also a For Your Consideration form. I only launched it an hour ago and I’m already discovering a lot of cool stuff I never knew about. I guess if you want to hear about cool things, just make a post saying “tell me about your art!” These won’t have any nominees listed, because that only pits people against each other. I would like to make certificates and send them to people, but depending on the volume of this, they may have to be digital or I’ll lose a lot of money. We’ll see. Not everyone will claim one so maybe it won’t be overwhelming.
I don’t remember if I posted about the other adventure game I was working on before I started work on the one I’ve been blogging about. It’s a sci-fi one made with stop motion animation using clay. I posted about it a few times on Cohost but I don’t know if I did anywhere else. I’d like to jump to that next after I take a short break. It already had a good amount of work done and should cruise along pretty quickly now that I know AGS pretty well. There’s also a stop motion FPS I had started work on and may jump to after that, even if it’s just a very tiny game. I had a lot of fun working on that too. The design doc was already done and so was a lot of the artwork. I have a stack of games I’d like to make but won’t talk about them until I start development on each one or else I don’t think it will happen.
Well, that’s it for this week. Hope you’re doing well!
Around this time every year every outlet starts talking about their games of the year, despite the year not even being over. People often get annoyed by The Game Awards since it’s the biggest and most obnoxious one, but I can ignore this one pretty easily since it’s big and dumb and never offered anything of value. The ones that get to me are from the outlets that talk about how much they love indie games but all the games seem to have a large-ish budget and are available on Steam. Places that offer really experimental, solo games like Itch.io and the interactive fiction competitions like IF Comp get ignored.
It just makes me wonder, where are all the indie game outlets run by perverts?
There’s probably a better way to word that, but why isn’t there more recognition of all the fucked up games people are making? Why aren’t they covering adult games and games with upsetting body horror? There’s smaller places like Weird Fucking Games and Adult Analysis Anthology that are doing good work, but nothing bigger seems like they can be bothered to look at that stuff. Why? Is it just a lack of curiosity? Surely an anonymous game collective like Domino Club dropping a free anthology of experimental games twice a year would be interesting to people who like indie games? Adult game Hardcoded (VERY NSFW Itchio link) just came out after years in development and was a big release in that community. It’s not just the fucked up games being ignored. There’s so many games coming out in every niche, even ones that have been declared dead like point-and-click adventures and text adventures that use parsers.
I don’t think this is the same thing as the tired discourse of “places are covering indie games” because they do. There’s a lot of great outlets that cover them and deserve the support. I just wish a lot of these places dug deeper and were more willing to cover experimental games that didn’t have the time or budget to be really polished. I love UFO 50 as much as the next person, but it’s not the only games anthology to come out this year, and they certainly didn’t invent the games anthology. I just feel like these game of the year awards from people who talk about how much they love indies turn someone even as dull as me into John Waters, and have me asking where are all the people talking about the indie games about people fucking and eating dog shit.
At this point I think everyone knows about the Myst series. It was a gigantic success at release, becoming one of the best selling computer games of all time, and the sequels have done very well too, including the recent (and very good) remakes of Myst and Riven. What a lot of people don’t seem to know about is the MMO spinoff Myst Online. Back in 2003 there was a game called Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, set in the modern day where players create an avatar and explore various ages in 3D. While I was a big fan of the game, it sold below expectations. It was going to have an online component where people got to explore ages together, but it got shut down by the publisher Ubisoft very quickly after release. In 2007 it came back online as part of the games subscription service GameTap, even receiving new content, before shutting down again.
However, it went back online around 12 years ago and has run on a Cyan hosted server, remaining free to download (Myst Online website) and play, and relying on donations for server fees. In recent years it has even received new content that was created by the community. I wrote about one of these updates a year ago and the game has had some big bug fixes lately and a new content addition planned for the beginning of next month.
What I want to talk about in this post is how the community is still very active despite it being a MMO that has died multiple times. Last Saturday night I had the pleasure of playing the Myst universe’s version of Rock, Paper, Scissors called Ahyoheek. It uses a Beetle, Pen, and a Book instead. The Beetle beats Pen, Pen beats Book, and Book beats Beetle. The additional twist is that up to five people can play the game at once. For the last year, people have been meeting up at 11PM EST every Saturday night and meeting in the Competitive Myst Neighborhood to play Ahyoheek. The meetups were started by streamer BogusMeatFactory, although he doesn’t stream the meetups since they’re just folks casually hanging out, playing the game, and talking about their week.
People playing a round of Ahyoheek
I’ve known about the meetups for a while but never made the time to attend one until now. I can easily say it was a delight and I will be going to many more. It was so much fun to play a part of the game I’ve never really experienced, despite occasionally hopping on a few times most years since its revival because it’s a frequently empty game. A few of the folks who played in Ahyoheekwere actually pretty new to the MMO and only decided to check it out in the last year because they were Myst fans but never actually played this spinoff. I played a few rounds and then decided to just sit and hang out to talk to folks while playing, since the table only supports five players and the total turnout was 12 people. Conversations included Myst Online of course, but people also talked about other things like cooking or whatever else they were up to. It was just a pleasant time and it was nice seeing people hanging out in the world like you would expect from a MMO that was doing well and hasn’t been shut down multiple times.
It turns out that the Myst Online community actually does quite a few meetups and events. Every other week someone hosts a radio show inside of Myst Online called Radio Free D’Ni, a big meetup on the first Saturday of every month, tour groups of the game’s ages, and story times. These are all listed on The Guild of Messengers calendar page. I could probably be clever and make a reference to Myst about how the ending has not yet been written but it really is the case for a lot of MMOs. Asheron’s Call 2 was my first MMO and there are people making good progress bringing it back, with the first Asheron’s Call already having community servers. Even Sierra Online’s online community from the 90s is still going thanks to fans. Just because a game has shut down doesn’t mean it’s gone forever.
Photo from the end of the end at the most recent Ahyoheek meetup
I made a post on bluesky yesterday about having your own website or blog and it really blew up so now I’m fired up about websites and will probably be more annoying about them than usual. If you’re reading this then you probably have one but if you don’t? Go fix that. It’s a lot of fun and then I can read it and tell everyone about how cool it is!
Also did you know you could like posts on Bear Blogs? I didn’t realize that until just a few minutes ago. Haha, WHOOPS! So if you have one, just pretend I was liking every post until now, because that’s probably what I would be doing.
Anyway, here are some of the posts I enjoyed reading this week! If you enjoy these, subscribe to some RSS feeds and do your own link roundup. Google sucks now and this is how people will discover new sites.
Dev logs are great. You all need to post updates on your games on your own site instead of on a social media network that might not even be around in a few years.
I love reading blog posts that are just life updates from people I know, and they talk about what art they’ve been enjoying or what they’re up to. For example, these posts from Renkon and coffeentacos were really nice to read. If you’ve ever wanted to blog about that stuff and didn’t think people wouldn’t care, you’re wrong!
If you had a cohost account, you should repost your stuff! Here’s a nice pencil animation.
It’s not a blog but Unwinnable talks about the dying art of finding porn in the woods. I always heard about this but even in the 90s it never happened to me.
I also enjoyed some older posts that I saw folks sharing. This blog post talks about how it’s good to be frivolous on your blog, talking about whatever you like. I found it from someone I follow just reblogging it.
Molly White talks about an approach to social media that I think I’m currently doing, POSSE.
The Protagonish is a recently released adventure game by College Fun Games where the twist is that you control everyone in the story but the protagonist. You follow him around on his quest but whenever he interacts with another character, you control their actions and influence his journey.
Each playthrough of the game features the protagonist interacting with NPCs in four scenes, with each scene lasting about a minute or two. The playthroughs are about five minutes long and you’ll want to replay the game a few times to see how your actions can affect the story and see all the endings. The animation and voice acting in each scene were top notch and made the scenes pleasant to watch, even on repeat playthroughs.
If I did have any criticisms of the game, I wish it were longer. I think the concept works very well and it would have been interesting to see what a game like this would be like if a playthrough was at least twice as long. It took about 20 minutes for me to get through everything in the game and it felt like a satisfying experience, but I think it could have also been longer without wearing out its welcome. I don’t feel like that is a bad deal for a game that’s $4, but that’s very subjective and I personally don’t feel very comfortable about telling you how much entertainment per dollar you should be ok with since we all value this stuff differently.
That all said, I had a good time playing The Protagonish and would recommend it to others if you want to see a game experiment with the tropes of the adventure genre. I would love to see a sequel that expands on the ideas in this game.
The Protagonish is available for $3.99 on Itch.io and Steam.The review is based on a key sent from the developer.
It’s only been a week since I’ve done one of these and I already have a ton of games to talk about. I’m not going to act like the Spiderweb Software guy and tell ya’ll to stop making games and become doctors instead, or whatever the hell he was talking about, but I do wish I have more time in the day to play stuff. Just an endless supply of great art being made every week. Nice work. If you enjoy these posts, I would really appreciate if you could give a couple of dollars to SWANCHIME’s Ko-Fi. Their games have been featured in here a few times and they could really use the support. Also consider making your own indie game roundup! The more people doing these sorts of things and spreading the joy of independent art the better.
If I missed something you or a friend made, please tell me! Social media, email, or here as a comment, all are good. I just love knowing what people are making.
Video Games
The Zium Exposition (Itch.io) is described as a “Museum Exploration Game filled with artwork and installations from artists around the world, working in various mediums and styles”. It’s just an incredible space to explore and look at the beautiful art. The vibes are very good and it’s free. I loved it very much.
L.E.V.E. (Itch.io) is an arcade puzzle game by shrunken studios, which I think is a small collective of game developers, where you control little organisms eating stuff and the complexity increases with each level. Lots of fun, it’s free, and available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Death of the Reprobate (Steam) is the third in a trilogy of silly point-and-click adventures by Joe Richardson that use Renaissance paintings as the source for all the artwork in the game. I haven’t played this one yet but I’m a fan of his previous adventures.
Upcoming horror game THRESHOLD has a demo on Steam. I’m a baby so I don’t know if I’ll play it but it looks very cool.
PROXIMATE (Steam/Itch.io) is a short interactive fiction game about trying a new AI visor. I really love how you navigate the world in this game using its map, and the writing and voice acting are great too. The game strongly recommends using a controller to play but the mouse and keyboard controls felt good to me.
Star Dodger (Itch.io) is an arcade game created during the 0 hr game jam 2024 between 1:00 AM November 3, 2024 – 1:00 AM November 3, 2024, during the daylight savings switch.
The remake of Little Big Adventure (Steam) is now available. I’ve always been a fan of the series and I’m looking forward to a version of the game with better controls. I enjoyed the playtest they did for the game a while ago, but you don’t have to take my word for it, a demo is also available.
Inspector Waffles Early Days (Steam/Itch/GOG) is a top-down adventure game prequel to the point-and-click adventure game Inspector Waffles. You can even buy the game for the Game Boy.
Sorry We’re Closed (Steam) is a horror game inspired by 90s classics like Resident Evil, with an aesthetic inspired by them too. Again, I’m a big baby so I don’t know if I’ll play it but Rock, Paper, Shotgun liked it and there’s a demo for it as well.
I WILL STRIKE YOU DOWN (Itch.io) is a short horror interactive fiction by SWANCHIME about being a girl in love with a girl who is dead, and then not being a girl any longer.
SCAVENGER (Itch.io) is a short erotic visual novel by Oma Keeling about the birth of a machine god.
Oktrollberfest is a game jam about creating trollgames. You can check them out on Itch.io. Many (all?) of them were made with ZZT.
Grid Ranger (Steam/Itch.io) is a shmup with 80’s inspired vector graphics. I played the demo a while back and thought it was a very challenging but fun arcade game.
The Playdate community at Uncrank’d have a bundle of games and an upcoming showcase. You can find the links on Mastodon.
Mister Jack (Itch.io) is a retro-looking point-and-click adventure about Jack the Ripper that was made for Scream Jam 2024. Free and playable in the browser.
Dust Settlers (Itch.io) is a browser game made in PICO-8 where you arrange Tetris blocks to restore a planet.
Remember desktop pets? Doguru (Itch.io) is a modern one of those featuring really cute artwork and it’s free!
Dungeons of Blood and Dream (Steam) is a roguelike dungeon crawler. I haven’t played it yet but I love dungeon crawlers and aesthetically it looks like it’s just for me! Gamers with Glasses seemed to like it.
Bullet Runner (Steam) is an arcade bullet hell game about fighting a clone army that a friend helped with and in my opinion I think it looks pretty neat!
Tricky Madness (Steam) is a snowboarding game inspired by the beloved SSX Tricky and that sounds like a really lovely thing I could use right now. It has just entered early access.
At a couple points this year I took a break from doing the indie game roundups because I had more important things to focus on like my baby, but I still maintained a list of things I played and other games that just looked cool to me. Here’s some of those games:
Frontiers of the Mind (Itch.io) is a free horror game resembling a multimedia cd-rom that is about a fictional tv show from the 90s called Maze Masters. There is nothing more laser targeted towards my interests than this so of course I loved it. I highly recommend just looking up hints once you get through everything you find, so you can find all the hidden material too.
Pantsmo’s Pantaloon Adventure (Itch.io) is a mod of the classic shareware game Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure but adds pants to Cosmo. That’s it! It’s great. A classic game has finally been fixed.
Seeking Stardust (Itch.io) is a free browser puzzle game where you try to last out in space as long as you can, with the game generating a new level every day.
tramstertram (Itch.io) is a free minimalist Amsterdam-inspired town builder with trams playable in the browser. It’s an incredibly chill game and the low poly graphics are very nice too.
Tabletop RPGs
Fast Food (Itch.io) is a free LARP for 4-10 players about ordering food before your board game night.
dan qui dam published a history of solo tabletop rpgs on Itch. Holy shit yes, this rules.
Speaking of solo ttrpgs, Jude’s World (Itch.io) is a solo journaling game about reconnecting with your estranged parents, inspired by 90s tv shows like The Fresh Prince and Clarissa Explains It All.
Poetry and Other Art
The last few weeks have kinda been nightmare fuel and some folks have made art as a response to it all.
I Love Being Trans (Itch.io) is a beautiful stack made in the Hypercard-like tool Decker by erysden, creator of the previously covered fps BITCH HELL.
Eat Shit and Die, Fascists (Itch.io) is a collection of poetry in response to the recent election.
We Will Get Through This (Itch.io) is a vent by ToulouTouMou that was also created right after the election.
Street Lamp Lover (Itch.io) is an interactive poem playable in the browser with a unique presentation and nice music.
I’m running out of time before Cohost completely shuts down, so here’s another big batch of pictures from the CompStoreVisuals. I guess I do have the archive of the account so they aren’t gone gone even after the site shuts down, but it’s still a good excuse to repost them to somewhere more permanent.
These aren’t really sorted in any order and I’d like to resume posting photos of computer stores at some point, I just have to make time to find more. Some of it is nostalgia but I’m also just fascinated by forms of retail that don’t exist anymore. I walked through a mall last weekend and while it was very busy (there’s another nearby that’s struggling), it was still weird to walk through Macy’s and think about how department stores like that and Sears were just things people went to all the time for everything instead of online. The unfortunate thing about being into a thing that barely exists is that it just gets harder to find stuff, especially with search engines getting worse. The big reason why I’m doing these reposts is because a lot of it just doesn’t seem to exist on the web anymore outside of the account, or it does and I just can’t find it.
Cashier training at CompUSA
Photo of a Compaq Works store in Houston from the book Retail and Restaurant Spaces: An International Portfolio of 41 Designers (1999). I believe I got this one from checking out a book on the Internet Archive. Even if you aren’t into this extremely specific subject, it’s fascinating to look at old books covering retail and restaurants in general and seeing the trends in design.
Windows Vista launch party at a CompUSA store on January 29, 2007 in Houston, Texas
CompUSA Honolulu, Hawaii 2006
Forgot where I found this but I believe it was from a Black Friday sale
The front of a Gateway Country store, created by the Gateway computer company, and were around from the mid 90s to the mid 00s.
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I’ve mentioned previously on here that things were quiet because of stress from everything in the world so I won’t go into that here. I just learned that I can actually talk about the point-and-click adventure I’ve been working on though, so lets focus on that instead.
I am making a free point-and-click adventure called Dr. Chase’s Adventure for the Ann Arbor District Library. It is for the city’s bicentennial and is part of a mini anthology along with two other games. I am so happy I got to help organize this project and I’m very proud of this game. Dr. Chase is a local Ann Arbor figure who is kinda sorta the Dr. Oz of his time, meaning a “doctor” who is also a scam artist. He was an incredibly weird guy who found success selling his book of recipes until he had the feeling he was going to die soon and sold everything, including his printing press. It turns out he was completely fine and tried to make a comeback and failed. My game is more focused on the beginning of his journey and is about how he’s trying to help a patient with her in-grown toenail, and the game will use his real recipes as puzzle solutions. You can read more about the man here and his recipe book here. Here’s a very short video of the game:
I believe the game should be coming out in December. I’ve learned so much from doing this project and it should mean you’ll see more adventure games from me in the future. I may or may not have mentioned that I’ve been working on an adventure game using clay on here, I definitely did on social media, but that should move pretty quickly once this game is shipped since I now know how to use Adventure Game Studio. The game itself is already designed and the art for a few rooms has been completed as well, so I’m hoping it won’t take too long for that one to ship either.
In addition to these two games, I’m hoping to compile all my indie game roundups for 2003 in a format that’s much more readable. This will be a free PDF. I just think it would be a fun thing to have on Itch and maybe bring more attention on games I enjoyed playing that year.
I also liked writing a review of Deja Vu yesterday so expect more games reviews to pop up on here. I have a ton of reviews of FMV games from a book I thought about writing, but I may as well just put them on here and I can always compile them later like the Digital Antiquarian or whatever. I also want to move reviews from Backloggd to here because I don’t enjoy using that site and want it someone more permanent anyway. It’s also just nice to compile my thoughts on a thing after playing it.
Finally, the last thing I want to post here are the remaining pictures from the CompStoreVisuals account on Cohost before that permanently shuts down. It’s all on Mastodon too but again, I want it all on something more permanent.
This month’s game in the Adventure Game Club discord is Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True so I have finally played through that for the first time after it sitting in my backlog for forever. It’s the first MacVenture by ICOM and man, weird game. I’ll mention the stuff I was frustrated with but it’s difficult to get too mad at the game when it’s one of the first point-and-click adventures ever, it’s short, and the Macintosh art really holds up!
The premise of the game is that you wake up in a toilet stall and must find out who you are, what happened to you, and why. In addition to that, you have also been injected with something and have a limited amount of time to find a cure. That’s really all there is to it! You walk around a city and various buildings, occasionally taking a taxi to different regions to do some more exploration, but luckily it’s a pretty small world, since you will need to restart a few times from softlocks and optimizing your path because of the time limit. The time limit is also the source of most of my frustration with the game. It’s not that aggressive of a time limit but every single action takes time off, making it feel like you’re being punished for basic actions in any adventure game like examining objects. That’s right, even looking at an object means time is removed and I have to reload to get that time back. I’m generally a hater of time limits in adventure games anyway because to me, part of the appeal is an adventure game is that I usually have a world to explore and now the game wants me to focus instead on creating an optimal path instead of focusing on the world building. Oh well.
Eventually you do find a cure and can explore more freely. Even without the time limit though, the game still feels a bit tedious because of the verb system. I honestly don’t mind it that much, but there’s parts where it feels like a slog, such as having to pay the cab driver in quarters. But this is where you can tell it’s an early graphic adventure and they’re trying to figure out how to adapt that.
Another part of the game I really disliked is the occasional racist joke and frequent fatphobic jokes. The game cannot get enough of making fat jokes and it really sucks!
What did I actually like about the game? Well, the art is great. Black and white art on the Macintosh is incredibly charming to me and what you see here is great. The versions on the Apple IIGS and NES with color art aren’t bad either. I guess it just comes down to what you like more. The puzzles aren’t usually that difficult either, it’s just a time limit you fight with and busy work with the verbs. It’s also short! That sounds like I’m making fun of the game but I do like short games.
Eventually I want to play the rest of the Macventures. I’ve poked at Uninvited and Shadowgate before and knew of the time limit in the latter, but I guess every Macventure has a time limit? Come on man, just let me vibe and look at the great art.
So who would I recommend this to? I guess adventure game history nerds? It’s not actually painful, especially if you are ok with peeking at a walkthrough, the art is great, and parts of the writing are charming too.
Deja Vu: A Nightmares Comes True is available on Steam and includes the Macintosh and Apple IIGS versions.
As I mentioned in my indie game roundup, I took a break from posting because of…y’know, and I guess I’m back at it because it takes my mind off things and brings me joy. If you enjoy these, subscribe to some blogs with a RSS feed reader (I use Inoreader) and start your own blog! Doesn’t have to be anything big, could just be with Zonelets or Bear Blog. We can at least make the web feel less small in 2025.
Collection Chamber is a great abandonware blog. Every month they upload five games that have been updated to work on modern operating systems.
Rob talks about two side blogs he’s started. Tatwatch is one focused on b-movies and Videogames is focused on video games. All three blogs are great and in my RSS feed reader.
Ephemeral Enigmas wrote about the 1983 Intellivision game Dracula. I’ve really enjoyed this blog for retro games writing, often focusing on console games I’ve never heard of.
Good Old Days also writes about old games I’ve never heard of. This time they have a review of the Atari ST game Simulcra.
Final Fantasy VIII Is the Best is active again. Please follow this one if you’re remotely interested in lots of blog posts defending a game that gets a lot of criticism even from fans of the series.
Prismatic Wasteland did a thread of posts on Bluesky about people writing on vampires in tabletop rpgs if you’re looking for more ttrpg writing in your RSS feed reader.
It’s not a blog post, I just like when cool people interview other cool people. Emily Price talks to Joe Richardson, creator of adventure games like The Procession to Calvary.
It’s not new but this seems like a nice guide to getting into making pixel art.
