Started making a silly little thing last night and put it on Itch. It’s just a goofy little generator for making ideas for games inspired by 80’s British computer games. Like it says on the page description, I’m poking fun at them but I do have a sincere love for that era of games (well maybe not Dizzy) and I like making my little generators so I thought to try making one in Twine. It’s obviously very early in development and I’m planning on making it look nicer as well as continuing to build on it so it can generate more ideas, but wanted to get it out there before I get distracted by something else. I’ll eventually put it here too because I like the idea of all my games also being hosted here in case something were to happen to Itch.
Month: January 2026
Indie Game Roundup (January 18, 2026)
It really does feel like I start half of these with a variation of “man, what a week” but jeeeezus. This one is two days later than I’d like because I wasn’t feeling great but I clearly wasn’t feeling that bad because I went and made a Gubble website yesterday. Anyway, if you enjoy these posts, donations (if possible) to any of these Minnesota based groups would be nice.
Adventure
Pathologic 3 is now out on Steam. You play as a medical doctor who has 12 days to save a town from a mysterious plague. I still haven’t played any of these games because I’ve had difficulty finding the time to play a very stressful video game when I’m also in a good headspace, but I’ve heard all 3 are very good and you do not need to play previous entries to do later ones.
Abyssal is a browser game created in PICO-8 inspired by the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive Ecco the Dolphin. You explore the water and use sonar to locate gems.
WHODUNNIT is a pay-what-you-want/free visual novel on Itch.io and Steam where you must investigate who you hooked up with last night. The first episode is available now.
Laugh Track is a dark comedy horror visual novel where you are the lead writer for a sitcom. Available for free on Steam and Itch.io.
Arcade
Froggo is a new-ish (a few months old) arcade game for the Apple II that is influenced by both Frogger and Crossy Road. It’s available for free on the dev site, along with the source code and a link to play it in the browser.
Books
Game Poems is a new online literary magazine dedicated to exploring the artistic and poetic potential of short-form video games by publishing new games directly in a playable format. Visibility with short poetic games made in Twine and Bitsy is so difficult so I think it’s fantastic this exists. It’s free and I’m really looking forward to seeing more issues. Books probably isn’t the correct category for this but at the same time it reminds me a lot of literary anthologies so maybe it is?
Technically not a game itself but reading is good! Mages & Modems is a memoir involving tales of growing up with emerging technologies in the 80’s and 90’s. You can get a digital copy on Itch.io but the page has a link to where you can get physical copies if you prefer that.
Bundles
There’s a bundle running on Itch.io for the next 14 days to raise funds for disaster relief in Jamaica. For $6 or more you can get 100+ games. I’m personally a big fan of co-open.
Game Jams
Wonderville did their monthly 2 hour game jam and I want to give a shoutout to drip for doing their first solo game. It’s a VN about being a tattoo artist. You can check out the rest of the games here.
News
IGF announced their nominees. The IGF is probably the only award thing I care about because it’s not just nominating the big indie games that get mainstream press coverage and I discover new things from it every year. I’ve been following it since 2002, where games like Bad Milk and Pencil Whipped were very excited to a very young me who didn’t know experimental games existed.
Platformer
Big Hops (Steam/Switch/PS5) looks like a very cute 3D platformer where you explore a large 3D world as a frog and do frog things like jumping around and using your tongue to catch stuff.
Puzzle
Space Corgi 2 is a puzzle game created by Adam Saltsman in PICO-8 where you control two dogs that must get to their dog bed and overcome obstacles. I was a big fan of Adam’s CorgiSpace and I’m happy to see him continuing to make tiny PICO-8 games.
I’ve been very into enclose.horse, a browser puzzle game where you need to enclose a horse in the largest possible space with a limited amount of walls. You only get one attempt at each puzzle.
RPG
Sunless Isle: Keep of the Mad Magus is a first person dungeon crawler where you explore three levels and fight monsters all while maintaining your health, sanity, and lantern oil. A prototype was created for a game jam a few years ago but it just got reworked and completed. It’s available for Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io.
TTRPGs
Swords Without Master is currently running a Kickstarter. It’s blown past its goal and still has quite a few days left but I think it’s worth a look. It was a game that was previously in Worlds Without Master Issue 3 for years but is finally getting an expanded standalone version. It’s a fantasy game where a DM and 2-4 players, who are rogues, tell a story in a few hours using two Tone Dice. I’m happy to see it doing well and Epidiah Ravachol is just a fantastic game desiger.
New in Town is a solo ttrpg inspired by Animal Crossing about arriving in town and reminding yourself of all the possibilities that can bring. I got to playtest the game and thought it was lovely. In fact, I will steal the blurb of myself on Itch. “Playtested the upcoming solo ttrpg New In Town by @cutestpatoot.itch.io and I’m looking forward to the final version. I think it’s great at recreating the feel of starting a new town in Animal Crossing and it’s just a nice, chill game. Will probably play it again with my kids, who are big AC fans.” You can find a digital copy on Itch.io and a print zine on Plus One Exp.
CLINCH is a 1v1 dueling dice game inspired by films like The Princess Bride and A Knight’s Tale. You are two dueling sword fighters who must do whatever it takes to win. Available on Itch.io
Wishlist
Sparrow Warfare is an upcoming mahjong-inspired deckbuilder where you lead a bird army to freedom. If you are interested in trying it out now, there is a playtest you can join.
That does it for this week. If you’ve got a game you want to post about and you don’t use AI, feel free to send me an email about it (see the About page for contact info). Don’t need to send me a key for it either. I just like to hear about stuff folks are working on.
Welp, Started a Gubble Fan Site
I should probably be working on my weekly indie game roundup post, maybe tomorrow, but instead I started a fansite for the 90s puzzle game Gubble. I thought of doing some kind of very specific fansite for a relatively obscure game for a long time now, at one point I wanted to do one for Pyst, but the Critical Distance fansite jam finally nudged me into starting one. It’s obviously a work in progress. Lots of pages aren’t done yet and I’ll continue adding more to the ones that I’ve already made. It turns out there’s lots I have to say about Gubble. But I’m going to keep it incredibly minimalist. It’s been fun toying with something only using extremely basic HTML and a tiny bit of CSS, and I’m going to keep it that way. Maybe you’ll consider making a fansite too?
Touched Grass and Volunteered at the Library Today
I won’t post about it every time I do it but occasionally I volunteer at my local library and I did it again today. I started doing it because I thought it would be good to get some experience at a library while in grad school but while I remain on the fence about continuing that, I think I’ll keep volunteering at the library as long as I don’t have a job at one. It’s just been a good way to interact with people since I normally spend the day in my basement programming for work, and it turns out that people are usually nice to you when you are helping them do something for free. Today there was a thing for local groups to have tables and that’s where I learned (getting real local to Metro Detroit here) there was a local amateur radio club as well as a YIMBY group. While I don’t have any radio experience, it’s very cool to see and maybe I’ll try to listen? Quite a few gardening and pollinator groups too. I sometimes help out with my local environmental restoration group too because of course that’s something I’d like to see, but it’s also just good exercise and a way to learn about plants.
Anyway, if you’re able to, consider volunteering for a local thing. You get to meet neighbors and at least for me it’s generally been a good time. I suspect there’s quite a bit more frustration when it’s helping a political group, those are important too, but if you don’t have the energy for that, even just doing….something…can be nice. When I got home I looked at Blue Sky and immediately took psychic damage so if you want another reason, it keeps you from looking at your phone for a bit too.
Indie Game Roundup (January 9, 2026)
First roundup of the new year! If you enjoy these, share with a friend and consider giving to the GoFundMe for Renee Good’s wife and son after she was murdered by ICE earlier this week. Also if you’re still on X/Twitter, get some help. Why are you on the child porn generator site? Jesus Christ. Ok, here’s some games.
Booze Elroy (Itch.io) is a Pac-Man clone with a billion customizable options to choose from. Even if it was just Pac-Man it would be a good clone of that, but it adds so many options you can enable that change the game quite a bit and I think it’s fantastic. I really can’t recommend grabbing this one enough, it’s pay-what-you-want, before a big site like Kotaku or PC Gamer covers it and gets the game pulled like they always do.
We just got Indiepocalypse #72 on Itch. Each issue features a collection of tabletop and experimental video games, as well as a game commissioned for the issue. You can buy physical copies of the compilations here.
Gardenloom (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want collaborative tool for building a tarotesque oracle deck for 1+ players. It’s still being worked on so give a try and give some feedback. TTRPG designers always appreciate playtesters.
Celestial Coffee Quest (Itch.io) is a short point-and-click adventure available as Pay-What-You-Want. It’s by Wavey Games, who made the great adventure Melon Head, so it’s nice to see a new free adventure game from them. I really love the retro EGA aesthetic that all of their games have too and just how odd and goofy the games can get.
Bimbo (Itch.io) is a static site generator by Izzy! I’m a big believer that people should make their own websites, even on something like Neocities, so I full support this. No it’s not a video game but social media sucks, people should have their own homebase where crappy moderators can’t limit what you say, and it’s my blog so I can put whatever I want in here.
Solo But Not Alone 6 (Itch.io) just went live. It’s a charity bundle featuring 90 single player tabletop rpgs for just $10. All proceeds go to mental health charity Take This.
The Procession of Horses in Motion (Itch.io) is an experimental short software film that runs about 6 minutes long and I think is worth watching. The term software film is being used because it really is a program that you run and watch, with no interactivity, and is explicit in that it’s not a game in any sense. I’m still including it though. Does this make it a cousin of demoscene stuff and the non-interactive demos that you would see released for video games in the early 90s? Anyway, I really like it and think you should check out the other works of INFINITE TEARS too.
Another jam for Decker just wrapped up on Itch. Decker is a Hypercard-inspired tool for making little apps and games for browsers and now there’s 37 new things made with Decker for you to check out.
And finally, every December Tom Hall, of Commander Keen/Wolfenstein 3D/Anachronox fame, runs a game jam where he makes lots of assets for folks to use and an optional ARG to participate in. It’s a lot of fun and great games are made for it each year. That jam just wrapped up and now there are 94 games for you to play. He’s a massive PICO-8 fan so the assets are built for that but the jam welcomes games made with other engines too.
That does it for this week. If you’ve got a game you want to post about and you don’t use AI, feel free to send me an email about it (see the About page for contact info). Don’t need to send me a key for it either. I just like to hear about stuff folks are working on.
Books I Enjoyed in Fall/Winter 2025
Looks like I did a post on stuff I liked reading in the Summer, so here’s another one. Books? They’re good! I’m not listing everything I read because I decided to log even the chapter books I read to my kids on Storygraph, and it would be incredibly tedious for people to look at that. I don’t have amazing taste in books by any means but maybe you’ll find a new book or two to check out from your local library. This list is not ranked by any means, just the order I read them last year and the links generally go to Bookshop.org or another place where you can buy it.
Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant – This memoir by Curtis Chin is about growing up as a gay man in a family that owned a Chinese restaurant in Detroit during the 80’s, a very difficult time for the city. On a related note, it was nice to hear that Detroit is now hitting historically low crime rates.
Hardcore Gaming 101 Digest Vol. 8: The Bride of Retro Horror – Hardcore Gaming 101 has put out a lot of good books on retro games. This one was a follow up to a previous digest on horror games, which I would also recommend if that’s your thing. The link goes to Itch.io but I think there’s print versions of all their books on Amazon.
Peter & Ernesto: The Lost Sloths – Graham Annable, who I know from the Puzzle Agent games but has done lots of animation and won an Oscar, has put out a few Peter & Ernesto books. They’re comics about two sloths, very cute and I like reading them with my kids. The link goes to his site where you can buy a signed copy.
The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds – A book about the band KLF. Can’t recommend it enough if you’re a fan and maybe even if you don’t listen to them but are a big music history nerd. I think this was recommended to me by Ste Pickford on Bluesky, which I would suppose would make sense because I don’t know if there’s many Americans recommending me books about the KLF. That said, I actually did listen to the audiobook for this through my local library using the Hoopla app, so there’s dozens of us in the US that like KLF.
Vagabond: A Memoir – Tim Curry wrote a memoir! And it’s good! I listened to the audiobook for this one. I cannot imagine how difficult it was for him to read this after becoming disabled from a stroke, but it was nice to hear his voice. I also actually thought it was fun that he wouldn’t talk about any relationships he has been in other than Miss Piggy during Muppet Treasure Island. I was also very surprised that he briefly mentions video game work. Mostly just to say that he doesn’t understand them but thought acting in front of a green screen was fun. But still, didn’t expect to hear him say the words “Red Alert 3”
Spread Me – I read a bunch of books by Sarah Gailey and this novella was another good one. Basically The Thing but more horny.
More Bugs – Em Reed of DOMINO CLUB fame (idk man, had to work in a Domino Club reference in this post) also has a book. I think I referred to it as erotic body horror on social media along with Spread me, which is not entirely accurate, but there’s still body stuff. Very surreal but I think it also captures the weirdness of living in a small town in the midwest. This review sucks but the book is very good! It’s not actually like Gregg Araki’s Nowhere (a film I love) and I think there’s way more empathy for the characters, but it did remind me of it. I got the ebook for this one but a print version is available.
Anyway, books are good! Make a goal to read at least a couple this year.
Remove your links to X/Twitter
I know that 9/10 it’s just people forgetting to update their Itch pages but if you have a link on there going to Twitter, now would be a very good time to remove it especially since it’s gone from “the nazi bar” to “the nazi bar generating CSAM content.” Dunno, if you still need X, the CSAM site where no one can view your posts without being logged in and the algorithm is constantly fucking with everything anyway, to promote your stuff then that seems like a skill issue. I also think Discords should ban links to X like they would with 4Chan and other places like that.
I know some people technically have accounts that they haven’t posted to in years but I don’t think it’s a bad idea to just outright delete those either.
BioMenace Remastered thoughts
Developer: Rigel Gameworks
Publisher: Rigel Gameworks
Year: 2025
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows
BioMenace Remastered is a very recent rerelease of the shareware classic BioMenace, which adds lots of graphics customization options and updates, and a brand new 4th episode of levels. You play as Snake Logan, a man with a mullet and mustache who must stop an evil scientist from destroying the world or something like that. It’s not the most important plot. All you need to know is that you are a guy with a sweet mullet who needs to rescue a hostage on each level and then leave. Sometimes you fight a boss. And it’s great. It’s not even a game I had much nostalgia for, my memories of the game at release were my dad struggling to get the shareware to work on our computer for some reason. The game holds up surprisingly well though, especially compared to some of the other shareware games from that era that I have nostalgia for but may be harder for me to recommend to others.
There’s not really much more to say about the actual gameplay. It’s all very straightforward but I think it feels good running around and shooting at monsters. There’s a demo on Steam so if you find it enjoyable, the rest of the game is more of that. I mentioned before that I really liked the Crystal Caves remaster and even though this is by different devs, this feels like it builds on that and the Secret Agent remaster by offering even more graphics customization options as well as the extra episode and level builder that seems to be expected from these. If you want to play with the original graphics you certainly can, but the game’s new modern mode looked great to me and I actually stuck with that for most of the time. It even lets you enable and disabled various bits so if you want to play with the original art but in widescreen mode, you can! I believe these devs did a Duke Nukem remaster or rerelease for the Evercade that may have similar options, but I don’t own one so I can’t speak for that.
The additional episode 4 is great. It introduces a lot of new little level design tricks that keep it feeling fresh the entire time and the levels are a bit larger in scope so it takes more time to play through than the original three episodes. There’s a fun little cameo by someone from another shareware game that made me so happy when I saw it.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say about this one. I think the game holds up and this seems like the ideal way of remastering these old shareware platformers. I hope it does well and we keep getting more of them. I know they exist for Crystal Caves, Secret Agent, and Monsters Bash (these being all by Emberheart), with one for Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure on the way, but I’ll keep playing more of them if they’re as good as the ones we’ve already got.
BioMenace Remastered is available on Steam