lil’ Henry and Penny’s Big Adventure Pack is a collection of three short point-and-click adventure games where you play as two children named Henry and Penny. I saw someone sharing a post about this one and it looked really cute since the games were developed with, or at least voiced by, the designer’s kids. The games themselves are traditional adventure games, they use a modified version of the Scumm verb bar that only has four verbs, and you doing your typical adventure game stuff where you pick up items and use them elsewhere. The game has a nice option to make them more playable for young kids by having the player character read the verb when you click on it.
Where the games really stood out for me was in how charming the voice acting and art was. The kids were a lot of fun to listen to and my kids (6 and 8 years old) loved playing too since they thought Henry and Penny were funny. The games outside of the voice acting are good of course, but it was their voice acting that made my kids excited about the games and willing to try out the verbs on everything to see what they would say. The cartoon art is cute too and reminded me a bit of early AGS games, which I mean as a compliment.
Each game increases in difficulty and length but overall the entire collection will take about an hour to play through. The first one is the shortest and just has you playing as the boy Henry, but the two after that have you switching between the two kids to solve puzzles, which I guess means it’s a Gobliins-like? I can’t speak for how much this collection may appeal to people without kids but I found them to be a great collection to play with mine. I’m currently working on a Playdate game with my kids and it’s fun seeing other parents including their kids in game dev and making silly stuff together.
lil’ Henry and Penny’s Big Adventure Pack is available on Steam.
For some reason I got a little crabby yesterday that people were only recommending indie games on Steam yesterday, which is kinda silly, but it did lead to me doing a recommendation thread on Bluesky of games on sale on Itch that I enjoy. It’s a flawed thread because I didn’t recommend any ttrpgs but I’m going to list the recommendations here as well because they’re good and worth a look. Some aren’t even on Steam and others give you a Steam key. It’s not that I hate Steam, even if I do have issues with it, I just get frustrated by people not being curious about what else it outside of it.
First I want to recommend Indiepocalypse, a monthly anthology zine featuring many experimental indie games every month! I’ve mentioned it on a blog a billion times but I’m going to keep doing it because I think they’re doing amazing work curating indie games that I would never find otherwise.
Liberation is a space sim inspired by early classic like Elite and shows like Blake’s 7, and has a great sense of humor. It’s very easy to pick up and play too, which is often the issue I bump into with a lot of modern open world space sims.
Minerva’s Labyrinth is a first-person turn based dungeon crawler with nice pixel art and great combat system. Again, I’ve mentioned this one a few times before (probably a pattern you’ll see in this post quite a bit) but I’ll keep doing it until it somehow becomes a smash hit that pulls in millions of dollars for the dev.
Inspector Waffles is a point-and-click adventure where you play as a cat detective investigating a murder. I really like the way this game uses clues to question folks at crime scenes. The Game Boy Color prequel is also on Itch. I don’t know if you get the rom if you buy that one on Steam but you do on Itch. I also recently learned that one got ported to the Playdate.
Manglepaw is a first person adventure game with art inspired by early 90’s 3D art. I love the game looks. It’s also available in Indiepocalypse #26
Cyclopean: The Great Abyss is a rpg inspired by early crpg classics like Ultima, with an overworld map when you explore the world and first-person dungeon crawling when you enter a dungeon. The dev has made a few rpgs at this point and they’re all on sale right now. Islands of the Caliph is another one I enjoyed.
Snoik! is just a very good Snake-like game for the Playdate, with a neat mechanic where you can weave in and out of the snake by switching layers. Itch has a lot of great games for the Playdate for sale.
If you like VVVVVV or Super Hexagon, consider checking out Terry’s Other Games, a compilation of various smaller games Terry Cavanagh has made. Comes with a Steam key
CorgiSpace is a very nice collection of 13 PICO-8 games by Adam Saltsman and published by Finji, each offering a unique mechanic. The Itch version also gives you the .p8 files to run in whatever you use for PICO-8 files.
Melon Head is an incredibly weird point-and-click adventure game featuring stellar EGA-inspired artwork. I love it
Hylics is another weird one. It’s a rpg and it’s doing kind of a stop motion aesthetic thing for the art that I really like. It got a sequel and that’s on sale as well.
VIDEOVERSE is a visual novel inspired by early internet forums and the Miiverse stuff on the Wii U. Comes with a Steam key. I’ve found that it’s been a very good introductory VN for a few folks.
The Crimson Diamond is a point-and-click adventure inspired by the Sierra classic The Colonel’s Bequest. I love that it uses a text parser and the artwork is fantastic.
Cosmic Void has made many great adventure games but I will recommend Devil’s Hideout, a very creepy first person adventure.
Spirit Swap combines visual novels with match 3 puzzle games. I think it brings some great innovations to the match 3 genre and I love the art and soundtrack in this game as well
I can’t recommend the Midnight Scenes series enough. It’s an anthology series of horror point and click adventures and each one can be played in a single sitting.
Super Video Golf is a solid golf game with tons of features and an early 90s 3D aesthetic I really enjoy. I hate real life golf for many reasons but like a good video game about golf. Comes with a Steam key.
There is not a game in recent memory that does the Super Mario Bros 3 style platformer better than Kitsune Tails.
Rainbow Laser Disco Dungeon is a kinda sorta Berzerk like, at least in how you move from room to room, twin stick shooter combined with a rhythm game. Comes with a Steam key too!
co-open is a very nice first person adventure game about a child’s first time going grocery shopping alone.
Again, some of these are repeats from the recent Itch recommendation thread but they’re worth another shoutout.
I suspect that if you’re reading this post then it’s likely that you already have a website but if not, consider making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website. Or maybe your site or blog has been inactive for a bit, think about doing some more posts on there. Even a little thing on Neocities works. It’s just nice to have a home base on the internet that you don’t have to deal with social media mods or randos popping into every post, and if something goes wrong with your host, you just move it elsewhere.
I also just like following personal blogs on bear blog with my RSS feed reader. More people should consider getting back into RSS, where it’s much easier to see posts on your favorite websites instead of expecting it to pass in your feed on social media and frequently missing stuff because you weren’t refreshing Instagram/Bluesky/Mastodon/whatever at the right time. I suspect mailing lists are probably also very valuable to game devs trying to promote stuff but I can’t really vouch for that one.
I think it’s also just fun to see what old posts still get traffic. My most popular posts on here are very old ones about how to play the late 90s MMO Asheron’s Call today, ttrpgs based on video games, and the late 90s Microsoft puzzle game Pandora’s Box. It’s more useful and permanent than an unwieldy thread of posts on bluesky or mastodon too, where you would have to refresh it for anyone to even come across it again.
Anyway, that concludes my regular “Make a website” post. Obviously a lot of bias comes from being a little older and preferring how I probably misremember The Old Internet, but it’s also just nice to push back on the internet becoming smaller and I value communication through comments on posts and emails more than getting likes and retweets.
Many Nights a Whisper is a short (about 60 minutes) third-person archery game where you play as the Dreamer, an archer who must make an incredibly long shot into a massive chalice to grant the wishes made by people in your community. During the day you can make practice shots into closer chalices to get better at archery and at night you listen to the anonymous wishes from people and choose to accept them or not. You repeat this cycle for a few days as your mentor makes your bow stronger, until it’s the big day where you have one chance to make your big shot.
I finally picked this one up because I had seen it on a few End-of-Year lists and I’m glad I did. I can’t really say anything more insightful than what a much better writer at an outlet like Rock, Paper, Shotgun can but it’s a lovely game. The game does a very nice job of mixing lighthearted wishes with heavier ones, and never feels like it’s punishing or judging you for the wishes you choose to keep or leave. In some ways it kind of reminds me of a solo tabletop rpg where it will prompt you for your thoughts and make you think about your choices, but never gives you a definitive “you have chosen wisely” statement. I was surprised that the game has a final shot that you only have one attempt at and need to replay the game to try again. Obviously I made it because I am a Real Gamer (I hope my sarcasm is clear here) but even if you do, to continue the solo ttrpg comparison, the game does not do an extended epilogue telling you about the wishes you accepted and what happens. It leaves this all to you to think about and I think that’s part of why this game works so well for me.
I appreciate that all the actions seem to have some heft to them too. Cutting a braid to accept a wish requires you to hold down a button for a second or two before letting go to cut it. When you’re practicing to shoot arrows, the longer shots take a few seconds to fully pull back on the bow and let go, with you watching the arrow fly through the air for a while to see if it hits its target. It all helps make that final shot a lot more tense, when you need to pull back on the bow all the way and make sure everything is all lined up before letting go.
It’s easy for me to recommend Many Nights a Whisper. It’s a very short adventure game/interactive fiction that can be experienced in under an hour, longer if you want to replay it, and very affordable at $3.
Many Nights a Whisper is available on Steam and Itch.io
I have a very minor cold today which of course means that I’m acting like I am incapable of doing anything and just being miserable all around. The good news is that in a few more days I’ll have a few weeks off work. The bad news is that this means they are some of the slowest days of my life. I am hoping this means I’ll get to play a lot of neat stuff during all that time off and maybe make a tiny game. I actually recommend the post Small Christmas/Winter Indie Games on Syl’s Blog, but here are some more games for you to play after you’re done checking out those.
New Releases
Ken Griffey Jr.’s Horrible Tower (Glorious Trainwrecks) is an incredibly difficult platformer where you try to ascend the floors of a tower while Ken Griffey Jr. taunts you. I am absolutely terrible at these kinds of platformers where you repeatedly try levels until you beat them, but this is a good one of those and it’s free.
Robo Attack 3D (Crazy Games link?) is a free browser game where you save astronauts and shoot robots in a Vampire Survivors-ish inspired game. It’s by John Passfield, who has made games like Halloween Harry, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, and Flight of the Amazon Queen. It’s just a fun little arcade game! I have never heard of the site Crazy Games before in my life!
The 2025 PICO-8 Advent Calendar (Lexolaffle site) is an advent calendar where you get a new game made in PICO-8 every day. I just love playing little PICO-8 games and it’s fun seeing folks like Tom Hall (of Commander Keen/Anachronox fame) making stuff for it too.
Angeline Era (Steam/Itch.io) is a new game by the developers of Sephonie and Anodyne. I’m so excited for this one! I love how it looks and I will always get excited about bump combat, which is literally when you bump into enemies to damage them. There’s a demo if you want to try it out.
Rainbows Are Carnivores (Itch.io) is a short gay fishing game by Robert Yang that you can play for free in your browser. It’s great, as Robert’s games always are, but I think the most fascinating part about the game is actually the blog post about its inspirations and the making of it that you should read after you play the game.
Southeast Asia Games Onward 2025 is a nice showcase of games that you can check out on Steam and Itch.io. They have different games being featured so be sure to look at both!
Light Up The Town (Steam) is a cozy Christmas game where you are a ferret and hang up lights in your town. I watched decafjedi stream it and it looks incredibly cute and relaxing.
The TTRPG Bookmark Jam just wrapped up on Itch.io. It’s a jam where people made a ttrpg (or ttrpg related thing) that fits on a bookmark.
Blendo Games released their second game this year after already putting out Skin Deep earlier in 2025 after a few years in development. Antibody One (Itch.io) is a short shooter where you explore the inside of a human body and it’s only $1.
Sales
I wanted to give a shoutout to the Resnijars XMAS Extravaganza Sale!! on Itch.io because I am a fan of their games and this bundle is an affordable way to get them all. If you like 90s looking first person adventure games then I think Manglepaw is worth a look.
Crowdfunding
Chess Joker (Backerkit) is a tabletop game by Asmadi Games that combines Chess with cards that have effects on the game.
That’s it for today. Hoping to do a few more this week to get any/all holiday games out there. I hope you find something new to play! Feel free to message/email me about anything you’re working on if it’s not using AI.
There’s a trend happening on bluesky that came from The Game Awards discourse where someone said if you post “play more indie games” then you need to also post 50 indie game recommendations. I assume this was because the person was tired of the performative posts just vaguely gesturing at indie games. But it worked. People have actually been posting indie game recommendations. However, because I cannot be a normal person, I got annoyed that people were only linking to games on Steam. I posted a list of 50 recommendations on Bluesky but thought I would do the list here as well, where it’s a lot more readable and I can add some nice screenshots. There’s probably a fun theme I could have done instead like 50 Amiga or ZX Spectrum games, or adventure games, but here’s a batch of 50 games I liked and maybe you’ll feel compelled to do a post recommending indie games.
Landlord Quest – Short point-and-click adventure game where you can see a landlord eat shit. Buying on Itch gives you files to run in ScummVM on everything
DOSember Game Jam – Did you know a game jam just wrapped up where we got 39 brand new games for DOS? So many great games here
SANTA SACK – Tom Hall, of Commander Keen/Doom/Anachronox fame, does so much for the PICO-8 community on Itch, organizes game jams, and makes a Christmas game ever year. This one is an arcade game where you catch presents and avoid coal.
The Round-about Orchard – Julia Minamata, creator of the amazing adventure game The Crimson Diamond, made a fan game for Over The Garden Wall along with people that worked on the show.
Minerva Labyrinth – Just a really good first person dungeon crawler!
Egg by Terry Cavanagh – The best platformer where you play as an egg. Eat shit Dizzy
Everything by DOMINO CLUB – An anonymous game dev collective. No one is doing more interesting experimental games than them
Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation – An incredibly interesting take on the 4X genre, like an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist take on Civilization
Eulogy for Nonno – Very funny short adventure game where you delivery flowers to a home and are mistaken for a long lost cousin and must escape
Maura & Ash – Nice, short queer point-and-click adventure set in space and runs in DOS
FALLSTRUKTUR – Free first-person platformer where you must make your way down a giant structure. Very challenging
The Chambers Beneath – Challenging but easy to pick up roguelike for DOS, available for pay-what-you-want
Neon Hearts City – Cyberpunk point-and-click detective adventure with nice pixel art. I actually wrote more about this one here.
Root Bear – An arcade game for the Playdate where you pour root beer for bears. My kids love it!
Atuel – A free surreal documentary game about the environment with beautiful art. Wrote more about it here.
Billy Masters Was Right – A pay-what-you-want point and click adventure with Maniac Mansion-inspired art and a story inspired by The Burbs. Wrote more here.
You Are Generative AI – Twine game where you are a Generative AI consuming power and being useless
CorgiSpace – An excellent collection of PICO-8 games by Adam Saltsman
Mixed Feelings – A ttrpg with mechanics based around making playlists
Type Help – An excellent deduction adventure game made in Twine
Spirit Swap – A Match 3 combined with a queer visual novel. I like the spells/powers you can use during the Match 3 part too. Fantastic soundtrack. Wrote more here.
A Short Hike – Everyone knows this one but my oldest loves it so much
The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival – Same author as A Short Hike. You must play this in October. It’s a small Halloween MMO and I had so much fun playing it with my kids
Frogsong – Very cute action adventure game where you play as a frog
Kitsune Tails – Amazing Super Mario Bros 3-like platformer!
Dragonsweeper – Took over my life at the beginning of the year. Great combination of dungeon crawling and Minesweeper
KIDNAME: ICEBOY – Incredible parody of Sierra’s Codename:Iceman and other games by Jim Walls
Stair Quest – Another great parody of Sierra games. An intentionally frustrating game where you navigate stairs. Also has a Winter Edition of the game
Alone on a Journey – Trilogy of solo ttrpgs focused on exploration that were influential to me. Wrote more here.
VIDEOVERSE – Beautiful visual novel inspired by the Wii online community stuff
Enclosure 3-D – Remake of an adventure game inspired Sierra classics and the 3D engine presents that retro art style in a really interesting way
Midnight Scenes – Looooove the Midnight Scenes series. Anthology horror series with each game being playable in one sitting. Wrote more here.
He Fucked the Girl Out Me – Short visual novel about being a sex worker and trauma for the Game Boy. Wrote more here.
Hunger – Another influential solo ttrpgs where you are a vampire. Uses a really neat blackjack-inspired mechanic. Also has a companion game called Thirst. More about it here.
Dinocar – Very cute ttrpg where you build a city for dinosaurs driving cars. Loved playing it with my kids
Parsely – If you are a text adventure fan and want a similar experience with friends, check this out. One player is the “parser” and the rest say commands to solve the adventure
Songs for the Dusk – Great Forged in the Dark ttrpg where the players try to build a better future
Co-open – Really nice game about a child’s first time buying groceries on their own
Cartomancy Anthology – Another influential one. An anthology of games inspired by tarot cards
I hope this helps you find something new on Itch.io!
I’m finally free from school for the next few weeks which means you’ll probably see these posts more often. Since it’s been a while, this will probably be a longer one but there’s a few things I had to get out there now, so you’ll probably see a bunch of these over the next few days. Maybe play an indie game from Itch tonight instead of watching a bad awards show. If you enjoy today’s post, consider signing No Games For Genocide.
New Releases
The fifth Madvent Calendar is available for free on Itch.io. Every day a new short game with a PSX aesthetic becomes available for you to play! If you somehow get through all the games in this, I highly recommend checking out previous years.
Did you know that Raymond Briggs’ children’s book The Snowman had a game for the ZX Spectrum in 1984? I’m not British so I didn’t! Well, now it has a remake for the PC that is available on Itch.io as Pay-What-You-Want.
‘A Normal Lost Phone’, ‘Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story’ & ‘Alt-Frequencies’ are getting delisted on Steam on January 30th 2026. I don’t know what that means for the games on Itch.io, but if you want to pick them up before then, they’re all on sale for less than a dollar. I only played A Normal Lost Phone out of these but liked that one.
Phobos Down (dev site) looks like a neat little low-poly twin sticker shooter on Steam and Itch where you shoot bugs.
The Krampus Case (Itch.io) is a free interactive fiction game made in Twine where you find out who kidnapped Santa. You’ve got 25 actions you can take but only 20 days so choose your actions wisely.
Random Dungeon Generator (Itch.io) is just a fun little browser toy that generates new dungeon ideas for you.
Every year, Tom Hall of Commander Keen/Doom/Anachronox fame makes a little Christmas-themed PICO-8 game and organizes a game jam for the community. This year his game is SANTA SACK (Itch.io), a game where you are Santa and extend your arm back and forth to collect falling toys and avoid coal. Tom is the best and it’s fun that someone who made games in my childhood that I loved is still noodling with smaller arcade games and helps organize things for the community.
I assume everyone reading this already knows about HORSES (Itch.io/GOG/Humble), the game that got banned by Steam despite being pretty tame. Not going to get into the bad faith takes on how Steam can do what they want or how it’s a good game, much smarter people have discussed it. I’ve been a hater of Steam’s moderation both on the store and community for a very long time. It’s why I do these posts, because so many indie sites and streamers will just not look at anything that’s not on Steam, even if they have Indie in their name. Anyway, good game, go check it out.
Game Manual Jam 25 is a jam on Itch.io where people make manuals for games that do not exist.
Finji has released CorgiSpace (Itch.io/Steam), a collection of games made in PICO-8. If you’ve been playing the PICO-8 games by Adam that I’ve been posting in here, you already know they are a good time. This contains some of those with fixes as well as new ones. Not that everything needs to be commercialized, but I do enjoy seeing people making commercial games with smaller engines like this. There is also a game jam to promote the game and encourage people to make small, experimental games.
That’s it for today. I’ll try to knock a few of these out over the next week so apologies for the spam in your RSS feed reader if you’ve got the site in there. If you’ve got a game that doesn’t use AI, feel free to send me an email about it with a link to your Steam/Itch/whatever page. Or you can just say hi. That’s fine too.
Despite the Industry moving on from DOS decades ago, Itch.io has an incredibly active community of folks making games for DOS, that folks to play on their retro computers and emulators. DOSember, the annual streaming event on Twitch where people play DOS games, just wrapped up their first DOS game jam on Itch.io. The jam received 39 submissions, which I think is a fantastic number of new games for something the games industry and tech world decided was “dead” decades ago. There’s a lot of fantastic stuff in there for you all to play with. They’re all free but if a game is taking donations, consider tossing a dollar or two to the games you like and consider streaming them.
Europa Panic
If that wasn’t enough, there’s been DOS games being published on Itch before that. THP put together a list of DOS games made for jams I hosted and there’s so many good games in here. There’s a few paid games as well that I think are worth supporting. THP also made this free DOS demo disc, like in the old days of shareware. Go check the list and demo disc out!
Did you know the original version of SkiFree isn’t actually a DOS game? It’s true!
Finally, there’s plenty more for you to check out on Itch. Poke around the site and check out tags such as the msdos and DOS tags and games like The Aching and Hibernated 1. You’ll find many more DOS games to play and enjoy!
Developer: katbrush Publisher: katbrush Year: 2025 Genre: Adventure System: Windows
Landlord Quest is a short point-and-click adventure game where you play as a landlord who must do a task for one of your tenants but as expected in a comedy adventure game, this goes off the rails very quickly. It features multiple endings, with an extended ending if you do all the goals and max out your Landlord Score, but all of them are “good” unless you like landlords for some reason. It’s always a little goofy to try to write a longer review for any game that’s 30-45 minutes long but I wanted to write some kind of log since I thought it was a fun adventure game and always appreciate when a point-and-click adventure takes an anti-capitalist stance. It’s definitely not a pro-landlord game.
It features all the stuff you would want in a comedy adventure like good jokes, puzzles that are fair, and a mini game as well. The only criticism I have is that some of the inventory items are used in an odd way for the 9-verb scumm interface, with you generally clicking on the item itself and then the object you want to use it on and not clicking the Use verb first, but once you figure it out then it’s not a big deal.
The art is very nice too. The verb panel has the aesthetic of early Windows and I was really impressed with the animation, especially for a solo dev project. It’s good stuff! Sometimes it’s nice to just play through a short adventure game in one sitting and watch a landlord eat shit. It’s only $2 too! Other than the content warning of a possible violent suicide depiction not being for some folks, I feel very comfortable recommending it to adventure game fans who want a short comedy adventure. It’s available on Steam but if you buy it on Itch.io then you get the files to run it in ScummVM, making it playable on basically every platform.
Today I remodeled the Cool Site Zone part of the site, where I had a giant wall of buttons linking to various sites, and made it a more traditional list of links. The buttons are still there, but now have a lot more context so it’s a bit more useful and hopefully less overwhelming. The more traditional links part of the site is still very outdated and I’ll be continuing to work so it matches more closely to what I have in my RSS feed reader so if you thought I followed your site and don’t see it there, that’s probably why. But I’m making this post so maybe folks can let me know that do in fact have a little 88×31 button I can add to my page.
