Month: February 2025

Indie Game Roundup (Feb. 7, 2025)

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been dropping the ball a little bit on doing these on a weekly basis but I’m back to blow your minds. People still make games in the year 2025. Consider doing your own game roundup. The more people talking about weird, experimental games the better.

As required by law, I must post about the new Indiepocalypse (Itch.io) that came out today. This one has a FMV game, which is very exciting to me, and a brand new tabletop game by the great game designer tallywinkle.

Solo But Not Alone 5 (Itch.io) is a bundle of solo ttrpgs for charity. You can get 100+ games for just $10 or more.

image of white light coming out of a cave

Benign Land (Steam) is a short adventure game where you walk through dreamlike settings set in different times in Ireland. I haven’t played it yet but it sounds very interesting and the Steam reviews are positive.

The Becoming (Itch.io) is a short, free horror visual novel about an archaeologist revisiting a cave. It’s by Oma Keeling and playable in the browser. Be sure to read the content warnings first before playing.

gif of 5 games, including two driving games, a weird glitchy mess of b&w drawings, a giant robot shooting a laser, groups of yellow dots swimming around kind of like schools of fish

Stretchy Buoys Jam 2025 (Itch.io) is a collection of 5 interconnected games made during a game jam in Milwaukee, WI. I’m not familiar with the devs except for Tipsheda, who is great, but the games look fun and it’s all free.

Never Let Them See You Fart (Itch.io) is a free browser game where…..well, it basically says in the title.

Oracle (Itch.io) is a new template by Grim Baccaris for Twine for creating inspiration generators. I’ve made a few using Unity so this is really exciting to me since Twine makes a lot more sense for this kind of thing.

Growl (Itch.io) is one of the settings made for the Tiny World TTRPG Jam and folks, this is the ttrpg setting Gabriel Knight 2 fans have always been dreaming about.

a purple marble moving around platforms in the sky

Bubble Dreams 3D (Itch.io) is a free Monkey Ball-like game with a vaporwave aesthetic, available for download or playable in the browser. The Itch page and a few other folks said it’s like Marble Blast but I never played that one. But you do roll a ball around and grab stuff and it’s done very well.

Punch Nazis Story Generator (Itch.io) is a free story generator for punching Nazis. What more can you ask for.

person wearing a gas mask saying "may I incline my heart to speak with you, Penry?"

the Devil rais’d the storm (Itch.io) is a visual novel/adventure game about locating a radar signal deep in the canyons near your remote outpost. Available for just $2.

Project Wheelie (Itch.io) is just a prototype but it’s already a fun driving puzzle game and I hope we get more of it.

We Live in a Bubble (Itch.io) is an abstract arcade game.

The Gaming Like It’s 1929 (Itch.io) game jam has ended and now there’s a lot of cool games based on things that entered the public domain this year.

Wor Games (Itch.io) is a very good Wizard of Wor clone for browsers.

Time Remover (Itch.io) is an essay that you read by playing through an arcade game, but the full text is available on the dev’s site too.

PicoMix by NuSan (Steam) is a collection of the dev’s PICO-8 games made over 8 years. PICO-8 is just very cool and I’m happy to see people make an effort to compile their games.

a battleground of creatures facing off in a snowy land

Broken Alliance (Steam) is a Heroes of Might and Magic-like that has entered Early Access and is already looking pretty great.

Sometimes you just want some nice icons for the ttrpg you’re working on. This is a good pack (Itch.io) for folks working on sci-fi games.

I talk a lot about the anonymous game dev collective Domino Club, but there’s also a new one called LITHOBREAKERS who are making some really interesting experimental games too. They just put out a new collection of games that you can play for free on Itch.io

Detective Bobert and the Hunt for Zweck The Ripper (Itch.io) is a free adventure game where you play as a bubble detective.

I think Eternal Strands (Steam) is an indie game? It’s certainly bigger budget than the ones I usually talk about here but is a nice rpg available for $40 and it’s just nice to see games in the AA space. It has a pretty lengthy demo too and the full game can use your save game from that if you decide to pick it up.

two groups of columns of blocks with two magical people next to them

After being in development for quite a while, Spirit Swap (Steam) is out and it’s great! I think I saw a subtweet somewhere kinda dismissing it as just a Match 3 with some nice art but I really think there’s a lot more to it than that. I can be a grump about the Wholesome Games thing (just because of some marketing, I really like the games) but it really is a good game that I want to do a longer review on at some point because it does some really interesting stuff mechanically with the genre, the art looks fantastic in motion, and I think the writing and visual novel elements add some depth to the game as well so it’s not Just Another Match 3. I can be cynical about a lot of stuff but it really is a great game.

first person view of a sword pointing at a walking bug

FlyKnight (Steam) is another one I’ve enjoyed playing this week and looks like a huge surprise for a lot of people too, based on the number of reviews it has. I know people love it when you compare games to Dark Souls so I’ll just say it’s Indie Dark Souls without elaborating and leave it at that.

I’m just kidding. That’s going to be the thing people compare it to, but it’s because the game does have a slower and more methodical combat system where you can get wrecked if you aren’t carefully planning your moves, and the game has you resting at campfires. Because I’m a parent with three kids, I haven’t really played much of those games except for some Demons Souls on the PS3, back before they were born, so I don’t know what this game has that is inspired by those, but I think that the game only being a few hours long makes it a great game to play over a week. I did some co-op, since it supports up to 4 players, and had a blast. It’s only $6 too!

isometric view of a space station

Citizen Sleeper 2 (Steam) is out. I think everyone reading this already knows that but I’m including it anyway since it’s a new release. Absolutely loved the original and just haven’t gotten around to this one yet. I will someday, hopefully soon, and I’m sure I’ll love it.

isometric view of people in a monastery

The Stone of Madness (Steam) is a real-time tactical stealth game set in an 18th-century Spanish Monastery. I don’t know a whole lot about this game and just copied the description from the Steam store, but I saw a few people raving about it and what a rare setting for a video game. That art looks incredible too! If you’re interested, there’s a demo on the Steam page.

I’ve also seen a lot of folks praise Keep Driving (Steam), which is a rpg about doing a roadtrip in the early 00s.

That’s it for this week. Feel free to comment with what you’ve been enjoying lately!

Blog Roundup (2025-2-5)

~ mpklamerus ~ 3 Comments

I actually thought about doing one final roundup but then someone said they liked these so I’m being pulled back in. I might do them on a regular basis but have smaller posts so it feels less like a job and more like I’m just posting again, which is why I like having a blog.

As usual, if you enjoy these then add the site to your RSS feed reader. Social media networks come and go but RSS will never die! I use Inoreader and that is easy and free to use, and syncs across all your devices. If it ever gets bought by a billionaire I can just export all my feeds to something else. If you have a blog, do your own roundups. Search engines suck now from all the AI slop and people do look at these roundups if you want to help people discover interesting writing.

Here are this week’s links

Florence Smith Nicholls has a great post about archaeology in games.

Aura wrote a guide to submitting your games to MobyGames. Consider doing this if you aren’t already. I’ll admit to being vain enough that I like seeing my name pop up under more titles. But I think it’s also good for games preservation to have all these little indie games documented. I think there’s a bigger post in me about why I think you should do this over IGDB, which is used for Twitch and Backloggd, but it mostly comes down to: If you’re concerned that people are going to review bomb your experimental, queer indie game, no one uses the rating functionality anymore on MobyGames. Everyone that still looks at MobyGames is old now, which includes myself, and no longer has the energy to care. Still seems to be a thing on Backloggd though, which is a site that can fall into the ocean.

Misty De Méo wrote an article for Indie Tsushin way back in December that I don’t think I ever mentioned. This one is about 1994 Mac stray dog survival game Rodem the Wild.

Misty also wrote a post cd-rom preservation on The Future is Now.

Interactive fiction author Robb Sherwin has been doing a lot of fun game reviews on their blog. The most recent is NHL ’96.

Jay Tholen of Hypnospace Outlaw fame wrote about making games in the early 2000’s.

Dungeonsweeper has been one of my favorite games lately and Josh Grams has a fun post breaking down the thought process that goes into playing a round of the game.

Issue 2 of the Spooky Tomb Of Videogames is here. Highly recommended if you like my indie game roundups, because I basically copied the original form of those and did a worse job. If you want to know how much talking about small indie games matters, I originally found out about the game 3D Don’t Die Mr. Robot from Rob. Fell in love with the game and started talking about how great it was, which then led to my friend Ben picking up the game, getting really into it, and talking about it on his adventure games podcast Quest Quest (where else would you talk about an arcade game?). It’s like a little chain reaction, much like the ones you set off in 3D Don’t Die Mr. Robot.

After Yochai was basically harassed off Bluesky for pointless ttrpg discourse, he made a post about how it’s time to bring back forums. I think everyone who knows me is not surprised at all that I endorse this post. But like I said earlier, social media networks come and go and can get bought by shitty billionaires, and I think forums are a tiny bit safer. Or at least, having a lot of little sites is probably better for a healthy internet than 3 big websites, and I don’t trust Bluesky at all, sorry.

Amiga Boing Boing is ending its blog by the end of the year and is looking for a new person to run it. Are you an Amiga nerd with lots of time? Maybe you should consider taking over.

Chuck Jordan posted a recipe for vegetarian chili that looks very nice. I like when game developers post recipes because then I can say I’m a fan of their work on Curse of Monkey Island, Sam & Max season 3, and vegetarian chili recipe. I don’t think I have any recipes on me that I made up but if you do, consider sharing it.

Well, that does it for this week. I suppose that wasn’t so bad. I guess don’t have to do a big organized thing every week like Critical Distance does. Unless people started giving me as much money as their patreon pulls in. Man, that would be nice.