I’ve now put all the indie games covered in the indie game roundups that are on Itch in a single Itch list and will add things to this going forward. This isn’t a perfect list, sometimes my posts covered an entire jam or collection of games. For cases like this, I kinda just included one or two games from the list. Not an ideal solution but oh well. Of course it’s missing anything that didn’t have an Itch.io release. It’s also missing all context for why I thought the games were interesting that I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I just think it’s a fun way to check out small, experimental indie games from a year or two ago since the memory on games feels like it’s extremely short lived and people move on extremely quickly unless it’s a massive hit. Search on Itch.io has also always been flawed. So I guess consider checking out the list, scrolling down a ton, and opening a random game?
There’s probably better ways of highlighting indie games that are older than a year but aren’t old enough to be considered “retro” and I think it would be fun to poke at that more. I think point-and-click adventures and interactive fiction seem to have a pretty long tail to them for maintaining interest after they come out, despite having smaller audiences, but who knows.
SNAKE Lucky Laugh, one of the games that’s already been delisted from Itch
The biggest bummer about going through the list was that there’s been a few games that have already been delisted even though I’ve only been doing this for a few years. It’s good stuff so it kinda stinks I wasn’t able to save them. I thought I should start submitting this stuff to MobyGames as I do these roundups but I tried to submit one just not and got hit with a message about how I hit the limit on pending new game submissions because it takes mods there months to look at anything. You’d think with Atari owning the site it would have a bigger budget to deal with this but I guess not. I have no interest in submitting anything to IGDB since it’s owned by Amazon and Backloggd, which uses the database, just feels like another harassment vector at times. So the only documentation of some of these games is just my half assed weekly posts, and nobody deserves that.
Every day I wake up and say “What a week.” But it’s Friday, which means it’s actually near the end of the week so that’s something I suppose. Being back in school while having a full time job means that lately it’s just been free and pay-what-you-want indies I’ve been playing. Nothing wrong with that of course, but if you’re wondering why a lot of the bigger commercial indies aren’t on here, that’s why. Six One Indie did a nice indie game showcase yesterday and that’s probably a better way to become more familiar with those. You could also always look at my list of indie game websites and plug them all into your RSS feed reader of choice.
The Play for Peace – Games for Palestine 2025 Charity Bundle (Itch.io) bundle sale ends in a few days. Foor $8 or more you can get tons of great games
There’s another anthlogy from the game dev collective I’m in! I didn’t work on this one but Locally Sourced Anthology II: The Timeline (Steam) is a collection of 5 games set in different points in time in different genres.
_ΩMEGA_POINT (Itch.io) is a Pay-What-You-Want walking simulator where you explore the last moments of a dying world in a mech.
Indiepocalypse #68 (Itch.io) is out. Check it out for a great collection of experimental indie games. Only one more month until we get to the nice number.
I’m just really fascinated by Mars Attracts (Steam) using the dormant Mars Attacks license to make a sim game. It’s nice to see that the user review for it have been positive too. What a weird thing to exist (complimentary).
Eclipsium (Steam) may not be for me because I’m not a big horror games person but I really like it looks. I just like a game that always has a hand sticking out in front.
Toward From (Itch.io) is a short experimental browser game that I think does some neat stuff connected to movement and was created for the Game Poems Community Showcase.
Matt Stark keeps creating really fun browser toys focused on building things and they’ve made another one. Mazegarden (Itch.io) is, as you would expect, a game focused on building maze gardens.
A new PUNKCAKE Délicieux game has arrived! Frontline: War of Echoes (Itch.io) is a capture the flag game where you play against recordings of yourself from previous runs.
Snarl (Itch.io) is a short point-and-click horror adventure set in a diner and available for Pay-What-You-Want. Be sure to check out the developer’s other adventures on their Itch page too if you’re a point-and-click adventure fan.
A Chirp in Space (Itch.io) is just a cute 3D puzzle platformer available for free!
Like what are we even doing here? Why are IF Comp and $109 Adventure Game Challenge allowing AI slop in their competitions? Doesn’t that defeat the whole point? I don’t think any game jam or competition should allow AI art. I have a billion other reasons why I’m against using that stuff to make games but it especially seems to go against the spirit of making something for a jam where things can be messier and more personal. If I’m following along with a jam and see a game that clearly uses it, I’m going to give it the lowest possible rating because it’s boring shit. Bruno has a much more elegant take on this and the use of AI in IF Comp but I mostly wanted to vent because….fucking why use it? The sooner this bubble bursts, the better. Every jam allowing it should be embarrassed.
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these but Bluesky suspending accounts over the mildest posts reminded me that blogs and personal websites are good and should have more attention, so here’s some posts I liked. Since it’s been a while and I kinda of a backlog on my rss feed reader, there’s some older posts in here and other things not on here just because I haven’t read them yet. Anyway, if you like any of these blogs then consider adding them to your RSS feed reader!
If you’ve been bored with how this site has fallen off with indie game coverage at the moment, I feel like Wraithkal has always done a great job and is always writing about games I never heard of like Woodo.
Atari Archive can make anything interesting, even the history of a 3D tic tac toe game.
Dinoberry Press wrote a retrospective on their ttrpg Dinocar, which I’m a massive fan of and loved playing with my kids.
Michael Coorlim has been uploading lots of BASIC programs to a Bear Blog. He’s also been doing an epistolary Let’s Play blog of the games Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas on another Bear Blog. Both are great.
Andrew Plotkin analyzed the Hugos and how they do their game award.
Game designer Farfama wrote about playing ICO. Obviously I am a fan of people blogging about games after playing them and making it more of an experience than just “another game to get through in the backlog.” Which is probably another reason I’m grumpy about the site Backloggd.
To be a fan of French DOS games is knowing that mechanically the game may not be the tightest thing, but it could be weird enough and take enough swings to be worth it. Some of my favorite games are French DOS games and include: Alone in the Dark, Little Big Adventure, Lost Eden, and The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble. I’m a huge fan of Coktel Vision so it was unfortunate that I mostly found Ween: The Prophecy to be a frustrating experience.
The game has a plot about you stopping an evil wizard, but it’s mostly an excuse for you to move to various rooms, in an almost puzzle room level-based format, and solve the various inventory puzzles before moving on to the next room. This is one of those games that quickly wraps up with a block of text when you beat the final puzzle. Unfortunately I frequently found these puzzles to rely heavily on moon logic or sometimes broken, which meant mostly doing trial and error and trying every item on everything, or just pulling up a walkthrough because I got tired of the sluggish response from every action. I took notes while playing and there’s many instances where I just did not understand what was happening in the game or instances of me trying an action, checking a walkthrough to see that I was doing the right action, but was just not trying it enough times for it to actually work. The entire game consists of these inventory puzzles so the game quickly became a huge slog to play. There are one or two points where there are multiple solutions, but those were the only clever bits in the game’s design.
Even worse than a game consisting of trial and error puzzles is that the game tells you that you had a bad idea, or that your character is getting frustrated, or something isn’t working. It’s aggressively hostile in a genre called Point-And-Click Adventure, where you often just want to click on something to get a description or to see what happens. Instead of either of those things happening though, you are just scolded. It’s immensely frustrating to play an adventure game where you are actually discouraged from clicking on things. I wasn’t even trying to solve a puzzle. It is just common practice to play around in an environment and click around but this is a game that does not want you to do that. I suppose to the game’s credit, I didn’t come across any softlocks.
It’s so frustrating that the game is so unfun to play because the parts surrounding it are nice. Like just about every other Coktel Vision game, I like the art and music. Charles Callet does a fantastic job on the soundtrack like he did on every other game he worked on. There’s also some really weird FMV in here that other people online seemed to find disturbing but I liked how weird it was. The weirdness is why I usually play French DOS games.
So unfortunately, I can’t really recommend this game. I generally love Coktel Vision’s games, even when the gameplay is a bit clunky like in Inca, because there’s usually a lot of really interesting stuff going on and the game has something to say. Ween: The Prophecy just does not have enough to justify playing through the game.
Ween: The Prophecy is not available for sale anywhere but is probably on your favorite abandonware site and playable through ScummVM.
I just did my regular playthrough of Super Castlevania IV for the Halloween season. This used to be a yearly tradition for me but it’s been a while since I’ve play it so it was nice to revisit it. This time I did it through the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, which includes a lot of the early games. I suspect that anything I say in this post has been repeated a billion times better by other folks but it’s still a lovely game. It’s always been one of my favorites in the series, with some of my favorite bits of it being the directional whipping and the jazzy soundtrack. Neither seems to really come up in later entries and that’s a shame. I know Mode 7 effects only make sense on a SNES but you know what? Later games should have had those too.
I’ve always been fascinated by this being a loose remake of the first game but still being labeled the fourth game of the series. It feels like something we probably wouldn’t see today with a lot of this stuff being more standardized. At the very least it feels different from how the industry does remakes today.
Screenshot taken from MobyGames. The background in this level rotates.
If I did have any complaints about the game, it’s that I personally feel like it starts to become a slog once you get to the castle. The game moves so quickly up until then and it has a wonderful variety of environments but then you get to the castle and the variety seems to drop and there’s a big difficulty spike. It remains this way for a few levels and then I think the level design becomes a lot more interesting again towards the end. It’s still a fantastic game though and the one I probably go to if I want to recommend a level-Castlevania game, partially because I haven’t played that many that aren’t on a Nintendo console.
Super Castlevania IV is part of the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, available on Switch, XBox, Playstation 4, and Windows.
Developer: Oh, a Rock! Studios Publisher: Oh, a Rock! Studios Year: 2022 Genre: Adventure System: Windows
Photo from Itch.io page
The Lost Oregon City Gold is an adventure game where a dad and his two daughters stumble across an old letter from an ancestor with clues pointing them to $25,000 in lost gold. It’s up to you to explore Oregon and find it. Most of the game is played in a first person view where you click on arrows to navigate various spaces in Oregon, made up of photos, and talking to people or solving puzzles that will point you to the next clue in your treasure hunt. Occasionally you make choices in dialog but they’re pretty low stakes decisions and there are parts where you can answer questions about Oregon’s history that you learn by playing the game. I suppose that technically this makes the game an edutainment title, but that might be a stretch.
As you can see, it’s not a very serious game. Photos of people, played by the devs and family and friends, are used for all of the characters and the plot itself is very silly. It all works for me though. Something I really like about the games by Oh, a Rock! Studios is that they all feel like a group of folks having lots of fun making games for each other but without all the inside jokes so they’re still very approachable for folks outside the group. They’re all just like a nice, relaxing, and goofy hangout session and would also recommend Internet Court and The Awkward Steve Duology for the same vibe. They don’t take themselves seriously but the games aren’t doing any sort of ironically bad FMV either.
The Lost Oregon City Gold is available on Steam and Itch.io for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse is platformer where you play a Mickey Mouse and must save Pluto after he’s been kidnapped by Emperor Pete (Spoiler: The whole thing is a dream). You do all your standard platforming stuff while going through a variety of environments. The main gimmick in this one is that you get a new type of power in each new area. I had played this one a long time ago and thought it would be fun to revisit and…..eh…..it’s fine. I thought I would have enjoyed it more since I have such a soft spot for this era of Capcom games but I often found myself getting frustrated by how finnicky the controls felt to me and the hit boxes on some of the bosses, which ended up being my least favorite part of the game. I was surprised by all of this because I remember it being a fairly short game back in the day, which must have warped in my mind to it being easy. Although I probably did play it on easy mode back in the day instead of at a harder difficulty.
Anyway, sometimes you revisit a game from your childhood and it ends up being merely ok. At least all the art and music is great and what I would expect from an early 90s Capcom game. The game eventually got a rerelease on the GBA where you can also play as Minnie and I believe this version also adds some mini games, but I don’t think there’s any way to play the game today.
The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse has not been rereleased and is available on your favorite emulation site.
After taking a break from these for a while, I’m finally doing another one. I don’t know if I’ll go back to the weekly format I was doing because that was a lot, but I missed doing them. I think Blaugust kinda burned me out a little and I had a lot going on anyway. I couldn’t think of a clever bit where I go on about it being a quiet week and ignoring Silksong, but pretend I did I guess. It’s probably not a game I’ll play for a long time since I haven’t really played the first one much but I’m glad it’s doing so well. Don’t really have a spicy take on the reception of that.
This post is going to be weird since I was missing so many weeks and there’s been a ton of bundles I’ve missed and just generally out of the loop on things, so there will probably be some really weird obscure things listed in here and also missing some bigger games, but I think that happens quite a bit with these anyway since I mostly just play adventure games. Speaking of, there’s a ton of those in this post.
IF Comp just started for its 31st year, and you can play and vote on this year’s entries. It’s wild to think about how this started 31 years ago, when Interactive Fiction was “dead” after Infocom was shut down. I think Legend Entertainment was just pulling away from text adventures at this point but there was still some commercial IF coming out. It’s always weird thinking about the time spans of adventure game companies and how companies like Wadjet Eye have been making commercial adventure games for a longer period than Infocom and Lucasarts. Time is weird!
Speaking of adventure games, it was fun seeing two of them coming out on the same day as the new Hollow Knight. The GTA 6 of Indie Games thing was always silly because not everyone is going to play the same genre! Like I generally play more casual stuff and Silksong is probably too hard for me. Casebook 1899 – The Leipzig Murders (Steam/Fireflower Games) is a point-and-click adventure set in late 19th-century Leipzig, Germany where you are a detective solving murders.
The other adventure game I was excited about on Silksong day was Maura & Ash (Itch.io), a free point-and-click adventure that runs in DOS! It’s just a really solid sci-fi adventure game and it’s fun to see that there’s a new engine for making adventure games and can build for DOS!
Another one I’ve been excited for is Neyyah (Steam), which came out earlier this week. It’s a Myst-like with prerendered graphics and the amount of FMV in the trailer made me happy too. This one has been in development for quite a while.
I get excited about seeing old games being rereleased on Itch.io too. One of those is Dr. Blob’s Organism (Itch.io), an arcade game from 2003. I remember enjoying this one and it’s available as Pay-What-You-Want.
Checkout Blitz: The Shopping Dead (Steam) is an arcade game where you complete shopping lists while fighting off zombies. I remember playing a demo for this one a year ago and having a good time. It’s also got a co-op mode.
I’m a huge fan of Octavi Navarro’s games and I’m always happy to see another one. The Supper: New Blood (Steam/Itch.io/GOG) is a horror point-and-click adventure featuring great pixel art. I don’t believe it’s a direct sequel to The Supper (Steam/Itch.io), but that one is very good, free, and short so I recommend playing that anyway.
Yet another point-and-click adventure game to come out last month was Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken (Steam), a horror game by the developer of Don’t Escape: 4 Days to Survive. This one leans more in a survival horror direction and has some very nice isometric pixel art.
There’s a new batch of LITHOBREAKERS games on Itch.io! Sorta like DOMINO CLUB, it’s a collective of anonymous game devs and no one knows who worked on each one, except me because I know everything.
I haven’t played it but Blast Rush LS (Steam/Switch) looks like a fun shmup with lots of explosions.
Death to a Merry Car (Itch.io) is a short visual novel you can play in the browser by the creator of Rodeo Clown.
Carnival (Steam) is a horror point-and-click adventure released last month. I don’t know a whole lot about it but Buried Treasure seemed to really like it.
And finally, I’m a fan of Howdy Riceball’s Game Boy games and they just made another one, it’s a cute puzzle game called Polar Peril and you can play it for free on Itch.io.
That’s it for this week. Again, apologies if I missed something you made. I was out of the loop for a while as I was on vacation and also busy with school stuff.
