Month: June 2025

Indie Game Roundup (June 13, 2025)

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

Hey it’s another one of these things that I do every week. This one is a bit shorter. I doubt that there were less games this week, I think I was just too busy to notice them all, but feel free to let me know if I missed something that you or a friend worked on so I can include it next week. Even with it being a little shorter, it’s still plenty to keep you busy for a while.

two bears sitting by a fire, talking, and one saying how the moment they like most is the quiet time before bed

Fireside Feelings (Steam) is an online game where you sit around a fire with other people to tell stories and share your feelings. The idea reminds me a lot of Kind Words and it looks like they did some cross promotion with each other.

top down view of robots flying around a screen

Robo Attack (iOS app store) is a top down shooter game for iPad, iPhone, and iWatch. I thought this one was interesting since it’s by the developer of classic computer games like Halloween Harry and Flight of the Amazon Queen.

lots of little circles inside a big circle

Circlet (Itch.io) is a free arcade game where you have balls bouncing around and you try to avoid them with the line or circles you are controlling. It makes more sense in motion. Very fun little arcade game and the music kinda has a goth chiptune vibe to it.

A new Indiepocalypse is out, filled with experimental indie games.

I think it’s nice we still get games made with ZZT. BombPT (Itch.io) is a puzzle game made for a recent jam and is playable in the browser.

view of a cemetery statue at sunset, probably in the fall

Seasonala Cemetery (Steam/Itch.io) is a free game where you explore a cemetery as it changes with the seasons.

Thank you to Josh for recommending Tametsi on Steam. It’s a Minesweeper game from 2017 that uses odd level shapes and is just $3. I love Minesweeper-likes so this was a nice one to hear about. Always feel free to recommend games to me, even if they aren’t brand new.

That’s it for this week!

Poco thoughts

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Developer: Whalefall
Publisher: Micah Boursier
Year: 2025
Genre: Adventure

a tiny clown sitting next to a home made from garbage

Poco is a short and free point-and-click adventure game released earlier this year where you are the world’s tiniest clown and have been kicked out of a floating circus, only to find yourself in the undergrowth below and must find a way back. From looking at the Kickstarter, it was a university thesis project that needed some additional funds to cover some costs and get it into festivals.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this one. I didn’t know of it at all until it came out and people started posting it in various Discords, but it’s a very solid point-and-click adventure. I love the music and art. The art sorta reminds me of late 90s games with pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D models, although these are illustrated backgrounds and look very nice. The movement feels great, which may seem like a weird thing to say about an adventure game but so many point-and-click games don’t get it quite right.

The game starts with you failing some clown activities through the form of mini games before getting kicked out of the circus, and more fair versions of these come into play later. I get the feeling they’re a little divisive but I think the mini games in this are actually good. The fishing one in particular was nice, short, and satisfying to play.

Overall the game is very silly and whimsical, but some of the background design is very dark. For example, there’s a series of “rooms” where you can see the skeleton of the dead clown and also need to enter its rib cage. Yet, I would still describe the game as “cute.”

The game consists of inventory puzzles that weren’t difficult and felt fair, with the exception of a minor amount of annoying pixel hunting. Some of the puzzles had nice rewards too like a musical sequence. It’s just a nice, little point-and-click adventure that should only take you 1.5-2 hours to play and I recommend it if you want an adventure game you can play in one sitting.

Poco is available for free on Steam.

RIP AdventureGamers.com Forums I Guess

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

I didn’t realize it until someone said something in the basically dead AdventureGamers.com discord, but apparently the forums for the site are gone after being around for 25+ years. I haven’t posted there in a very long time, but it used to be a place I hung out a lot about 20 years ago when the genre was struggling commercially and in a very weird place. The site itself is still up and posting, I suppose they just decided the forums weren’t worth the cost anymore. The last time I checked, maybe about a year ago, it was still active. It certainly wasn’t as busy as it was a decade or two ago, but people were still posting there and doing their community playthroughs. It was definitely more active than the AdventureGamers discord and it doesn’t sound like the mods were aware that it was going to happen because they were in the middle of holding a vote for their next community playthrough.

It was a weird place since it happened to be a very weird time for the genre. I had moved there from the Just Adventure forums (also gone), which were getting a bit too grognardy for me. My memories of the adventure game community at the time were that a lot of hope and pressure was placed on every notable game as “The One” that would make the genre commercially big again. So stuff like Broken Sword 3, a game that I think is perfectly fine, getting so much hype behind it because it was one of the bigger releases. I guess this is ignoring stuff like Professor Layton and the Ace Attorney series, which were far more popular but just didn’t seem to get as much attention in the community from what I recall? There was a massive thread at one point because The Moment of Silence, a game that was hyped up at that point and one that I ultimately didn’t care for, got a negative review in PC Gamer and attitude at the time was that critics just “hated” adventure games and that’s why they were getting negative reviews. This was ignoring that some of the better ones got better scores but that would destroy the narrative. Anyway, one or two critics had jumped in to try to explain things and it just turned into a lot of arguing before the thread was locked because it was a ridiculous argument in the first place.

Ultimately I ended up moving on to the Idle Thumbs forums because I don’t stay at communities longer than 5-10 years but the forums kept going until now, so it’s a little sad to see it gone. It’s a weird time for forums since people seem to mostly use Discord now, but that’s a company that controls everything and no one can see what any Discord community looks like until they join it, so that isn’t great either. The other community I was very active on during this time was the Shacknews chatty, where I recently learned that also imploded in the last year (possibly from management decisions, not sure) and looks to be essentially dead now. Oh well. At least Paper Cult Club, a ttrpg forum, launched this year and has been nice.

Billy Masters Was Right thoughts

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Developer: Postmodern Adventures
Publisher: Postmodern Adventures
Year: 2020
Genre: Adventure

Billy Masters Was Right is a short adventure game inspired by 80s films like The ‘Burbs and has an aesthetic inspired by Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, but does not use the same verb system as those games. This one does the standard left/right mouse button system you see in most adventures these days, with the left mouse button for using/picking up objects and the right mouse button to look at things. I’ve always been a fan of the big head character design of those games and it always makes me happy to see people make them. I even made one myself. It’s the first game I’ve played by Postmodern Adventures, who has made a bunch of adventure games this point and has moved onto making commercial games for a while now. It’s good stuff! All the puzzles felt very fair and while I have 80’s pop culture exhaustion at this point, I enjoyed it here and it fit with the style of game. It’s certainly not used as a “remember how much better the 80’s were?” and even has a little dig at Reagan. There’s one or two plot threads that maybe felt a little out of place to me, but it’s a nice little adventure game that will take you about 30-60 minutes to play through and I can’t complain about the Pay-What-You-Want price tag. I’ll have to play more games by Postmodern Adventures in the future.

Billy Masters Was Right is available as Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io

Blog Roundup (8-6-2025)

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

Fuck ICE. I have so much love to everyone pushing back on them in LA right now and hopefully one day ICE will be abolished.

Well, here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

Technology

A few days ago I posted a list of everything I follow in my RSS feed reader and it looks like some other folks were doing that too. Maybe you’ll find some new sites to follow through LunarLoony and reidrac. They’re better organized than my post too.

Andrew Plotkin has posted some data points connected to how AI data scrapers have been hitting his site. I don’t believe I’ve been getting hit like other folks but it’s been more than zero and I’m not happy about it.

Here’s a guide and thoughts about making your own personal archive of the web.

Video Games

The story of how the classic puzzle game Boulder Dash was created, with an interview with the creator.

The Lords of Midnight was a little before my time and I haven’t made the time to play it yet, but here’s an article about the history of the game and why it’s great.

I loved reading about this baseball series I never heard of, Diamond Mind Baseball.

The Imaginary Engine Review has an interview with SEQUENCEBREAK// curator Nilson Carroll. SEQUENCEBREAK// is an in-person exhibit of “artist’s games.”

Adam Le Doux wrote about making games in bookmarklets and how you can do it yourself.

Not Blog Posts

These aren’t blog posts but here’s some other things I liked:

I really vibed with this video titled there’s no such thing as a bad game.

Enjoy this list of Games By Trans People Before 2010. Trans game devs have always been here!

I just learned about this site about forklifts in video games.

That’s it for this week. Hope you had/are having a good weekend!

Saying Goodbye to a Loved One

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

Well I did warn you all that I think of this as a personal blog and not a games site so this one is a bit heavier.

We said goodbye to my aunt yesterday, after she suddenly passed away about two weeks ago. We were very close and she was basically a third grandmother to my kids, so we’ve all been struggling with that since then, and we will continue to miss her very much. I know it’s cliched but if you have loved ones in your life, please make an effort to talk to them regularly and make sure they know how much you love them.

I Don’t Think I’ve Walked This Stretch of Road Before thoughts

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Developer: -hexcavator-
Publisher: -hexcavator-
Year: 2022
Genre: Adventure

a person looking at a large floating crystal in the middle of the road

I Don’t Think I’ve Walked This Stretch of Road Before is a short narrative game, about 20 minutes long, where you walk down a road while ruminating on your thoughts. The gameplay is rather simple, you walk down a linear path, sometimes walking around objects or through buildings while looking at objects from your past and reading your thoughts, but I really appreciated what the game was saying about its subjects like mental health, trauma, and cycles that you can break when you have children. I think a much worse game would have gone in a darker and lazier direction with its focus and I appreciate the game because as careful as it was.

And on a more superficial note, I just think the graphics are neat. The game was built with Gamemaker: Studio, which is an engine that’s not really meant for 3D games, and the Itch page goes into the weirdness on doing something like that.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this one. Treating my blog as a journal of all the commercial (and sometimes freeware) games I’ve played means there’s sometimes really short entries like this. It’s just a nice short game and I would recommend it if you’re fine with paying $2 or more for a short walking sim (complimentary). I also recommend hexcavator’s other games. B-Sides is a nice point-and-click adventure and Stay Home Vol. 1 is a toy where you play around with objects in a room and I wish we got more of those.

I Don’t Think I’ve Walked This Stretch of Road Before is available on Itch.io

Indie Game Roundup (June 5, 2025)

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

I could argue that instead of buying a Nintendo Switch 2 game, you could buy all the games here, but these are two very different things and I may as well argue that you should buy $80 worth of books or Doctor Who audio dramas or prosciutto. Do you know how much prosciutto you can get for $80? Not that much if you buy the good stuff! Maybe I’m just bitter that I don’t have a Nintendo Switch 2 and can’t join the rest of you in taste testing the cartridges.

There’s also been a bunch of summer games fests happening this week. I have not followed these at all. Don’t care! I will let other people do the work in figuring out what I should be looking at.

This week’s shoutout is for Graceless Games. I’m a huge fan and think you should pick up some of their games on Itch.io

Anyway, here’s the games. As usual, if you worked on something that you’d like included, just let me know. I miss plenty of stuff.

I think everyone knows Deltrarune is out. It’s not for me but I’m happy for everyone else.

HardAF (Steam) is a Meatboy-like but the entire level is dark and you use the blood from your previous deaths to figure out where the obstacles are at. It’s good stuff. There’s a demo that I think people should check out.

As a child of the 90s that played a lot of multimedia cd-roms made by musicians, I get very excited about musicians making video games. We got two of them this week! Aesop Rock’s Black Hole Superette Experience (Steam) has you listening to his music while exploring a convenience store and The New Flesh (Steam) is a game where you explore a surreal space in a city while listening to upcoming songs by Red Vox. I haven’t played either so I can’t tell you if they’re as good as Peter Gabriel’s Eve, but both are free.

The Lego RPG Jam is a game jam where you write ttrpg systems inspired by your favorite Lego sets.

image of a sink in a green filter and text saying "I might get that familiar, frustrating sense while I'm just washing my hands..."

astoryinpieces keeps making great experimental and adult games for the Game Boy and she has another! Four of a Kind (Itch.io) is a horror anthology featuring 4 short stories.

side view of a pterodactyl shooting fireballs at a helicoptor

Gaurodan (dev site) is a shmup inspired by 80s arcade games where you fly around as a dinosaur and blow shit up. It’s free but the dev does take donations. This is an old game but it got an update and it’s new to me

stacks of dominos with text describing a combo

DOMINOID (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want puzzle game where you stack dominids and create combos.

a girl in a swamp on a boat with a net looking for bugs

Kabuto Park (Steam) looks like a very cute bug catching game and has a demo.

A weirdly specific thing I get excited about is using a yo-yo to fight enemies in video games. Don’t know why, just is. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo (Steam/Switch) is a top-down action game where you get to do that and even has a demo.

Name Change Simulator (Itch.io) is a free visual novel all about getting rid of your deadname.

Anyway, that’s it for this week. Hope you found something nice to play!

Current State of the RSS Feed Reader as of June, 2025

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

Something I’ve thought about posting for a while is a list of everything I follow in my RSS feed reader and now that I’ve seen exactly one person asking for most feeds to follow, that is enough for me to put together a list on Google Sheets. I’m still using Inoreader even though AI crap is starting to creep in since it seems to be the best one for my needs but maybe I’ll switch. I think RSS is the best way to follow sites since I don’t have to constantly check social media to make sure I don’t miss anything.

There are some massive warnings and caveats about this list:

  • Look, I know it’s a mess but it’s my trash heap and I can live in it whatever way I want. That said, I’m going to clean it up and divide it better.
  • I’ve divided it into different topics but websites are more than one thing and a lot of these could be categorized better.
  • I also totally half assed that description field once I saw how big it was getting.
  • Don’t be offended if I left your site out. There’s already been a few sites I added this morning that I was a fan of but realized I had only been looking at them when I saw their posts on social media, which is something I’m trying to pull away from. I welcome more sites so please link to yours here in the comments or as a reply on wherever you saw this posted.

With all that said, I hope you find this giant list useful and add some things to add to your RSS feed reader. If you’re looking for more websites, I also have my Cool Site Zone

Doctor Who Season Finale Thoughts

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I’m so sorry but I’m still thinking about that season finale of Doctor Who and have to put down my thoughts so they will leave my brain. Obviously this will have tons of spoilers so beware. It’s also very rambly.

Well ok, that was a weird and frustrating one. For the most part I really loved this season of Doctor Who. I would even go as far as to say that it’s probably the best season the show has had in a long time. I even really liked the first episode of the finale and lots of parts of the second episode too. I don’t think it’s RTD’s worst finale, he’s had other ones that I think were stinkers, but man oh man, parts of this were very frustrating. A lot of that frustration is maybe unfair. Ncuti has left the show and I wanted him on for many years. He was fantastic and I would have no problem if he had stayed on for another 10 seasons. To some extent I feel that way about everyone that stars in the show, but he was great. There’s also the aspect of the fandom being total chuds. I guess every fandom can be bad but it seemed to really stand out that parts of the fandom were basically rooting for the show to fail and kept pointing out the ratings. This never made a whole lot of sense because as far as I can tell, people were also streaming the show instead of watching it live so yes, of course tv ratings are going to be off. That’s kind how that works. Didn’t really make things less frustrating.

It doesn’t help that the regeneration itself seemed to be pandering to those people and stunt casting to boost the chances of Disney picking it up or whatever the logic was. I’m sure she’ll be great, she’s a fantastic actress, but we just had a stunt regeneration two years ago so it’s tiring to see it again. It sounds like the show is still happening whether Disney picks it up or not and there will just be a delay if they don’t. This is also going to kill me if we have to wait two years to see what happens next, because I’m still a fan and need to know. Everyone keeps being coy about how the credits don’t actually introduce her as The Doctor, so maybe the Doctor immediately changes their face to someone else and Jeff Minter is actually the next Doctor, but I’m going to contradict myself and say that if she is the next Doctor, she should stay on for 8 years. If someone is the Doctor, I want them to stay on for a very long time! I know this comes at the expense at whatever actor comes along next and also kicks ass but I want someone to beat Tom Baker’s record.

I’m also not going to dig into it but that finale had some really weird gender role stuff too that I didn’t care for and it just feeling like a very rushed episode.

So what did I actually like about it? Well, quite a bit actually. It was great to see Jodie come back. She’s great and I’m looking forward to her audio dramas with Big Finish. Ncuti was great as usual and some of his best acting was in this. I don’t see him doing audio drama stuff but I thought that about Eccleston and was wrong there. The two Ranis were also great and it’s too bad we’ll probably never see one of them again. I know Doctor Who can write itself out of anything but…well, it doesn’t seem super likely. A lot of people hate what they did with Omega but I don’t really mind. It’s fine.

Anyway, lots of people were yelling about how RTD has killed the show and I don’t think that’s true. I’ve actually really enjoyed most of his run so far, which has surprised me since I was so ready for him to leave during his original run, but I also wish it wasn’t looking backward so much.