Once again I am starting one of these posts with “what a week.” Solidarity with Minnesota. I try to do one GoFundMe or whatever in each one of these because I just do the roundup posts for fun but ICE is just kidnapping multiple children a day so here are two GoFundMes to help with legal fees and food for families in Minneapolis here and here. It would mean a lot if you could send a few dollars to whatever one has less money at the time you’re reading this. Anyway, Minneapolis is winning and will defeat ICE and one day ICE will be crushed everywhere else. Help people around you if you can.

There isn’t really a good way to transition to talking about video games after that, sorry, but maybe you’ll find something to distract you from things or be compelled to post about things you’ve been excited about on your own blog.

Video Games

I guess I’ll start with some self promotion. The British Game Generator is a silly thing in development that spits out ideas for video games inspired by 80’s British computer games. Even though I didn’t grow up with that era of games and live in the US, I’m a big fan of a lot of them, especially Llamasoft. They have a very unique feel to me that I have a hard time describing but I feel is quirky and charming in a way that is unique to that scene.

Speaking of British games, Go-Go BunnyGun is a new game for the ZX Spectrum available for Pay-What-You-Want. Itch.io is home to so many good ZX Spectrum games and this looks like a lovely arcade shooter. It was highly recommended by Davey Sloan on Bluesky, who has also made quite a few ZX Spectrum games you should check out.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is now on Steam. It’s a point-and-click adventure where you are a woman named Mara and must deal with all of the issues of being a young adult and features non-linear exploration and branching narratives. I was a big fan of the original game because of its art and how accurately it depicted being a teen in the early 00s, even the awkward and painful parts, so I’m looking forward to how this will recreate the experience of being a young adult in the same awkward and embarrassing ways I did. While it is a sequel, the game is designed so you don’t have to play the original game first. That said, I highly recommend that one too.

Folks should check out the indie game collective Cutie Collective and see all the games they’re making.

SEBI 16 is a collection of sixteen games of various genres made in PICO-8. I’m a fan of PicoMix and CorgiSpace, so it’s fun seeing more PICO-8 compilations coming out.

Karous is a rerelease of a shoot ’em up originally released back in 2007 for the Dreamcast. Don’t know anything about it, it just seems neat and I think it’s interesting that it is a port of a Dreamcast game that is almost 20 years old but also well after the console “died.”

TR-49 (Steam/iOS) is a narrative deduction game by the fine folks at Inkle. I’ve been a fan of all of their interactive fiction games so it’s fun seeing them do a game in the deduction subgenre that’s been picking up in popularity in the adventure game genre. People like mysteries! According to their founder on Bluesky, it’s been their biggest launch in the company’s history. As an adventure game fan, it’s always nice that I can post about multiple games in the genre coming out in the same week and they’re being critically well received and selling well. People are still going to do the lazy “adventure games are dead” narrative but it feels like a golden age for the genre.

Tabletop Games

I’ve posted about the mech tragedy ttrpg Dragon Reactor before but now you can pre-order the print version on the Dinoberry Games website. Even if that one doesn’t seem to be for you, take a look around their site, read some blog posts, and see what else they’ve made. I’m personally a big fan of their games Sprouts and Dinocar.

Breathing Techniques Against Monsters is a lyric game about dealing with negative thoughts via breathing exercises and intended to help you with your anxiety and stress. Available for Pay-What-You-Want.

Demos

Uncle Lee’s Cookbook is an upcoming point-and-click adventure where you play as the teen Ines as she tries to save the world caused by the fallout of her Uncle Lee’s experiements. There’s a demo playable in the browser on Itch.io.

Wishlist

Oh!Ware looks like a very neat Mancala roguelike to me. I don’t think I’ve seen Mancala in any video game form before outside of pure recreations of the game itself.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. If you’ve got a game you’re working on and it doesn’t use AI, feel free to send me an email about it. See the About page here for contact info. I just like to hear about what folks are working on. Or feel free to send an email or post in the comments to say hi. That’s fine too.