Developer: Grace Bruxner, Thomas Bowker Publisher: worm club, SUPERHOT PRESENTS Year: 2018 Genre: Adventure System: Mac
Frog Detective 1: The Haunted Island is a short first-person adventure game where you are a detective who is also a frog and need to investigate reports of a ghost haunting the island. My oldest has been playing the series on her own and her younger sister wanted to see them so we just played through the first one together. I’m glad I got to revisit it because I liked it more than I remembered and my daughter loved it. I had always liked the game but I had some small gripes about the game that were much more minor than I remembered.
The gameplay is very simple. You walk around and talk to various characters on the island, asking them about the ghost, other folks, and if they need help with anything. You continue doing this and helping them with their needs and it eventually leads you to the end of the mystery and game. The puzzles are very simple and there’s no fail states, which may frustrate some experienced adventure gamers, but the focus of the game is on the humor and art and I think that makes it a great intro to adventure games for folks.
The gripes that I had with the game before still remain but are much more minor than I remember. The puzzle solving is a bit repetitive since it’s mostly dialog puzzles you solve by going from person to person but again, I think it’s mostly fine since it’s not meant to be a challenging game anyway. The other issue I have is that the humor does start to feel repetitive towards the end as well, but the game is very short (45-60 minutes) that once I had started to feel that way, the game was getting to wrap up anyway. It was also much easier to overlook since I played it with my 6 year old and she was having a great time walking around and talking to everyone.
I have to imagine that anyone who is reading this already knows about the series and has either played it or never will, but maybe this recommendation will slightly nudge you towards checking it out or replaying the game.
I was looking through the notes app on my mac and just saw this big list of games in one doc. I’m not sure why. Given the amount of student games on here, these may have been notes I took of the indie games conference thing that Lawrence Tech University in Southfield was doing at the time. It was by no means a big event but it’s been 7 years (the notes are from April 21, 2019), so I thought I would dump this all here with any commentary I have, and a games historian can stumble across this in 10 years and pick out the interesting bits. I don’t think this will be of interest to many folks but I think it’s good to have it available anyway. The titles of the games are in bold and my commentary is in unbolded text.
Some of these folks are still making games, some not, and it looks like a few of the students here ended up going into the games industry so that’s lovely to see too. Not going to name them because that feels like doxing to me even if they’re success stories, but I still love to see people doing well.
MageQuit is a multiplayer game where you duel each other as little wizards. A very fun game. I believe at the time this was in Early Access since the release date on Steam is October. I think it did well judging from the number of Steam reviews and it getting releases on consoles. It’s two brothers who make up the studio, I’m not sure if they’re still in Michigan, and at the time of this writing they’re working on a new game, MageQuit Dungeons.
Another cool one. They created a visual novel about dragons called Golden Treasure (Steam/Itch.io) that I would recommend. I think there were attempts to make a follow up to this but judging from the last news posting being in 2023, I don’t think this will happen. Hopefully I’m wrong.
Pretty sure this one was a student game. I know I played it but don’t really remember my feelings on it. But since my memory is a bit crap in general, I don’t think that should reflect on the game. Given that it’s a twin stick shooter and looks nice, I should play it again.
Another student game. The way I remember the game dev program at Lawrence Tech working is that all the students would split off into groups and make games. From looking at the credits for this one, maybe they could do solo projects as well?
Oh hey, this one is still in development! RAD, which changed its name to RAD-venture after Double Fine’s RAD was announced, is a collect-a-thon. I backed the Kickstarter for this….last year? Maybe the year before? It’s one of those games where it will come out eventually but I haven’t followed it closely enough to know when. But the early builds I’ve played, including the ones from this time seven years ago, have all been great. It doesn’t seem like there’s a demo currently available but you can play the student game version here. The student game version was not through Lawrence Tech.
I remember playing this one! This one was a student game that I remember liking. I haven’t heard from Spencer in a while but I know they made a lot of other lovely games and interactive fiction that you should check out on Itch.
BroBots! Another one that wasn’t by student, I remember liking this one quite a bit. It’s kind of a twin-stick shooter co-op game. I think the studio planned on doing more but I don’t believe that happened. I do remember it originally being $2, it’s the only game I’ve bought on GameJolt, but at some point they made it pay-what-you-want for everyone to enjoy.
Oh hey, one I actually remember playing. It’s an arcade space sim that was made by a large-ish team. I still have a little pin from this one. The teams were encouraged to make little things to give away at their table, I assume to give them experience tabling for cons, so I have various stickers and pins from some of these games. Maybe I can update this post later with photos of some of them.
[MEMORY_LEAK]
Had to double check with the dev who was working on this. It’s still alive and in development. It’s a turn based rpg inspired by Paper Mario. All I had in my notes were a twitter link but the dev has moved to Bluesky years ago at this point. No Bluesky account for this game but they do have one for their other game in development, Admit One.
Oh hey, one I really know. Steven co-founded local indie game collective Locally Sourced with me so yes, I know he’s still around making stuff. WaveCrash!! eventually got a release on Steam if you only want to play games on that platform. He’s currently working on a puzzle game.
I don’t know if this one is still being actively developed but if you poke around the page you can see the developer has done a bit and I know he’s very active with local Warhammer and other tabletop communities.
Stardust Hyperdrive
This was a top down arcade game for the Android. It doesn’t seem like it’s available anymore which is too bad because I remember liking it. I never had an Android device so I was always hoping it would get ported to other stuff but I don’t think it did. You can already read more about the game on the dev’s site, where it also lists the soundtrack. I also made a MobyGames page for it.
Hey, I remember this one. It’s a top-down runner-like arcade game where you dodge asteroids and lasers being shot at your ship from the ships chasing you. Josh is still involved with the local game dev scene, I think through IGDA Detroit.
Great game (also on Itch) and it eventually led to other projects like Cellular Harvest. Nate now works at New Blood, where he works on games like Gloomwood. This one wasn’t a student project. The showcase/convention also had commercial games and projects by non-students there.
I’m not actually sure if this one is still in development, doing game dev as a hobby while also being a parent is tricky, but I really liked what is there. He’s also made other games on his solo Itch page.
There was also a System Shock mod at this thing from a non-student. I’m not sure how that happened but I love it. I tracked down the mod and it’s called Lazarus Decλy. My notes had a link to a Facebook page but that’s no longer active.
Student game Misadventure
There’s some others that weren’t in my notes but I found through some digging on Itch. Some more student games at the showcase include:
Misadventure is a short platformer where you are on a pirate ship. I remember it doing some fun physics stuff and the team just being very happy that folks were checking out their game they made.
Isa’s Edda is a 3D platformer I know I did not play, but some of the same folks went on to make a first person adventure game Farewell Call that I remember liking.
Saviour is a cool one where you are navigating a space in pitch black and relying entirely on sound.
Prison of the Damned is a first-person puzzle student game that I remember being at the showcase but did not have time to play.
I do remember really liking Crime and Nunishment, a top-down game where you are a nun shooting at nuns. It had a really cool art style that slightly reminds me of the 90s fps ZPC. I have a sticker from their booth.
Crime and NunishmentAesthetisphereVaporstride
Another pair of projects that I didn’t have in my notes but suddenly remembered were the pair of first-person vaporwave. My memory is that it started as one but then had creative differences and split off into their own projects. So here are A E S T H E T I S P H E R E and Vaporstride for you to play and enjoy.
Anyway, those are my notes. Like I said, this is probably going to be boring to most folks but I wanted to document it anyway. Feel free to correct me if I’m misremembering this stuff or left any games out. These are my memories of a games event from a long time ago. I just thought it might be good to preserve this stuff somewhere. A long time ago I made this Itch collection of local student games and some of them may have been in this showcase as well.
It’s Friday the 13th, the most cursed day for indie games. A lot of people are weird about hobbyist game devs and I would just like to say, you all rock and are making some of the best games. Please keep putting cool stuff on Itch.io and elsewhere, and making things with weird little game engines. Here’s some of those games and also some by people that somehow manage to do it full time. It’s going to be a long one since I didn’t do one last week so I’m splitting it into smaller categories. I’ll try to do another one of these posts soon because there’s a bunch I still plan to write about, but just don’t have the time today. If you enjoy these posts, maybe consider playing one of my games. Most of them are free.
Adventure
Choicebeat #16 is the latest issue of the free zine for adventure games, visual novels, and interactive fiction.
Apologies in advance for this one because I don’t actually know what it is but saw it recommended by folks and it has FMV so this is one where I’m just going to copy the description and you can decide if it’s interesting or not. kevin’s PLAYING in berlin (Steam/Itch.io) is an IGF Nuovo Award finalist consisting of three games. In Ke Vin, evin asked 200+ questions around the Berlin Wall in a language of the body without verbs. The audio was recorded in Kyiv. In What if Ginger is a Religion unlock a brand new language with a unique writing system. You’ve Received XX Messages in a Language Unknown Even to Its Speaker is an emotional ASMR game.
You Are Elon Musk (Twine) is a simulator created in Twine where you play as Elon Musk and see how much you can do for the world with his obscene amounts of wealth. It’s the sequel to You Are Jeff Bezos and even more depressing than that was, but also very funny. It’s got quite a few endings in it and I haven’t even found any secret endings yet.
Back in the Swamp (Steam) is a first-person point-and-click adventure set in a post-apocalyptic swamp. I haven’t played it yet but I like the art and it reminds me of 00’s-era adventure games, which I actually mean here as a compliment. It’s got a demo too.
Game Jams
Skellywave
The CGA Jam wrapped up on Itch, where folks made games for DOS using the CGA standard. While it was a set of colors people hated at the time, I think it can look really nice at times. There’s 9 brand new DOS games for you to play here.
The Trans Joy Jam (Itch.io) was about creating brighter futures for trans folks
Fake Game Magazine jam (Itch.io) is, as you would expect, a jam where people make free game magazines.
Platformer
Haunted Lands (Steam) is an EGA-era looking platformer inspired by the classic DOS game Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion and the rest of that trilogy, which was created by some ID Software folks. I was a huge fan of that series and this looks to build on that with even more gore and more playable characters. If you want to get a feel for it, you can try some previous games/prototypes on the Itch page.
Moss Moss (Itch.io) is a nice non-violent metroidvania made in PICO-8 where your goal is to cover every surface in moss and discover secrets. I really liked the mechanic of covering everything in moss to unlock new areas. Playable in the browser.
Return to Dark Castle (Steam) is a rerelease of a game that came out on Mac only about 10-15 years ago, but now for Windows and Linux as well. It’s the sequel to a classic Macintosh game from the 80s, which I used to play the Amiga port of with my dad. I remember it being very hard and from the Steam description, that still seems to be the case.
Puzzle
Swappy (Itch.io) is a demo for a puzzle game made in PICO-8 where you must get each character to their goal and swap characters around to get through obstacles. It’s hard to explain but is easy to pick up if you try out the browser demo. I liked it and hope we get more levels.
RPG
Mowguelike (Itch.io) is a roguelike for browsers where the main mechanic is using your lawnmower to mow grass in every level, as well as using that lawnmower to fight enemies.
Hoop Dungeon (Steam) is a basketball turn-based tactical roguelike game and I think that is a really interesting premise. It’s just entered Early Access and there’s a demo available if you want to try it out. The same developer made Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation (Steam), a postcolonial 4X game, and I highly recommend that one to Civilization fans.
TTRPG
places to be is a free (Itch.io) systems neutral location creator zine using a 1d20 and 1d6.
Other Bits
A new indiepocalypse (Itch.io) is here, featuring a collection of experimental indie games. I can highly recommend the fmv typing game how to walk out the door.
Demos
SALANN (Steam/Itch.io) is a first-person rpg with a nice 1-bit aesthetic where you explore a decaying city.
Wishlist
I was told about Gonzalo the Chicken – Episode I (Steam), a low poly 3D platformer where you are a chicken and throw your explosive friend at enemies. You can watch the trailer for it here.
Super Robot Survivors (Steam) is a new Survivors-like by the creator of classic games like Halloween Harry and Flight of the Amazon Queen.
That’s it for this week! Hope you found something new to play. Feel free to mention your games to me in the comments/email/DMs if it doesn’t use AI. I also live for comments on what you’ve been playing lately. Have a nice weekend!
Developer: Codeglue Publisher: Codeglue Year: 2016 Genre: Arcade System: Windows
Rocket Riot is an arcade game where you fly around an arena in a jetpack shooting at other enemies with rockets until you beat them all. Originally released for the X-Box 360 in the summer of 2009, I wanted to revisit the game and slowly played through the single player campaign in the Steam release. There isn’t much to say about this one. You essentially do the same thing in different level layouts, with the occasional mini boss thrown in and they sometimes mix it up by having different level types, like running a football across a level for points, but for the most part you are doing the same thing, shooting other guys with rockets, most levels. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, I play arcade games all the time where you just do the same thing repeatedly, but once you play the first set of levels you kinda know what the rest of the game is like and it doesn’t really increase the difficulty over time.
It’s too bad about that because the core of the game plays very well. It feels good flying around and flinging rockets around, and the game has a nice retro aesthetic. I suppose the game itself is retro now since it was a 2009 release, but what I mean is that it has an art style that has 2D art but with 3D blocks flying around when things explode. It looks good in motion. It’s very strongly influenced by 80s British computer games too with cassette loading screens between levels and music that feels like it was slightly influenced by that era.
Another frustration with the release on Steam is that it’s missing multiplayer, which is arguably half the game. The gameplay is a very good fit for it and works well on the X360 release, but is missing from the PC version. Even a local multiplayer feature would have been appreciated.
Anyway, the game is fine. I can’t make a strong endorsement for it but if you want to occasionally play an arcade thing for a few minutes and don’t mind it being a little repetitive, then maybe you’ll have fun with it.
As it says in the header, he turns 2 so there’s no roundups this week (also my midterm fried my brain). In celebration of him and his love of buses, you can help make the world a better place by advocating for mass transit where you live and maybe also pushing a cool toy car off a ramp.
Recently a group launched an Adventure Game Aptitude Test as a one-day event where people logged on to play an adventure game while being on a webcam to make sure they don’t cheat. It turned out to be the game Maniac Mansion, which needed to be completed in four hours which…..ok. I think this was all meant to be a goof, which is perfectly fine and good and this post isn’t a dunk on that, it just got weird when a few games outlets and The Gamers started having takes on it past “haha, fun goof.” These takes seemed to be a combination of “wow, adventure games were so obtuse/difficult/unfair back in the 80s” and “wow, gamers can’t hack it anymore.” and neither of these is accurate.
These games were meant to be played over long stretches, with players thinking about puzzles when not playing them, and discussing solutions with friends and family. No one was beating Maniac Mansion in four hours back then. Maniac Mansion, at least in my opinion, is not even an unfair game. You still have to think about puzzle solutions and stuff for four hours straight. That’s exhausting. You’re still meant to step away for a bit to process it. These games were just not built for marathon sessions like that. As someone on Bluesky said, you can also complete a crossword puzzle in a couple minutes but you generally don’t.
I also think adventure games, even new ones, are generally more fun with played with friends over Discord, except when I want to be moody or depressed by myself when playing something like Norco or Kentucky Route Zero.
If I do have a criticism of the adventure game assessment, I do think it’s stripping the game from it’s context and putting it in one that it really isn’t meant to be played in and if you’re going to do something like that, you should probably give some setup unless you’re trying to make up a narrative for people to run with. Yeah, some of them have bad puzzles and I think softlocks are annoying, what else is new. My hot take about those is that I actually think a lot of the early Sierra/Infocom stuff holds up better than the late 80s/early 90s stuff because it’s so easy to whip through the game again and it’s much more straightforward about it being a treasure hunt for points or whatever (being extremely reductive here, I know it’s not that simple) where the later games are quite a bit longer and telling more elaborate (and better IMO) stories, but then you’re hit with these really frustrating interruptions where you may have to restart the game and it really hurts the storytelling. This is also why I’m a bit defensive of mid-90s Sierra, which I feel like adventure gamers generally dump on but I like. Oh well.
Anyway, all of this is to say, I will happily play weird French adventure games with friends over Discord.
I’ve actually started enjoying my Sunday nights again and it’s all thanks to the #Monsterdon tag on Mastadon. I know the social media network isn’t for everyone but if you do use it, every 9 PM EST people follow the #Monsterdon tag to receive news on what update folks will be watching together, I believe it’s always available for free somewhere like Tubi or YouTube, and comment/riff on it. It’s a nice time that helps relax me before the work/school week, and I forgot how much watching b-movies can improve my mood. You can see the previous movies they’ve watched on this Letterboxd list.
It feels like the new argument from LLM users is that “Well yes, they create a lot of waste, but so do other things.” Recently an active member in a specific Discord I generally like (the Discord, not this person) argued that it’s ok to use ChatGPT because video games are unsustainable too. In case you don’t understand why this is ridiculous, one is a form of art and the other is a plagiarism machine that contributes massive amounts of pollution to marginalized communities, drives up the cost of computer hardware, constantly makes stuff up, and tells kids to commit self harm. These are not equivalent things.
I think there’s an argument that video games could be more sustainable, absolutely. There’s also folks like Fireflower Games, who donate a percentage of proceeds to environmental efforts, and the Solar Server, a website for games that is powered entirely by solar power. This is not what LLM users care about though. It’s similar to when people say “No ethical consumption under capitalism” to say that it doesn’t matter what they buy because it’s all bad so why should they bother even trying, keep buying stuff from the worst people (btw, boycott Microsoft).
There’s also an argument that not all games are ethical. If you’re making video games for the US Army so they can recruit kids, you should immediately quit your job. Generative AI also falls under this since it’s a tool being used by fascist governments to generate misinfo, another reason to never use these things.
But even if LLMs weren’t telling kids to kill themselves and polluting communities I would be sick of them. Imagine being so dull that you’re going to use a machine to do the fun part of making art? Or doing research or programming, yes, I think both of these are fun. It’s endlessly irritating to me that people will say LLMs for art are bad but not for coding. Programming is not any less worthwhile or creative than coding. In fact, there’s a whole book I would recommend if you want to know more about creativity in programming. Even if you only cared about productivity, it doesn’t seem to help that either. In addition to that, you’re now building a group of coders at your company who don’t know anything about programming and can’t work with the code base you have. Nice work!
On a final note I’d like to say that I accidentally shared something recently that used Claude for coding and someone sent me a DM to let me know. I truly appreciated this! I never want to share any art or games where the creativity has been stripped out when there’s so much I can share that hasn’t been.
Anyway, yeah, it’s a grumpy post but there’s so much harm in the world right now being caused by ChatGPT and the like that I think it’s the ethically right thing to do to call this usage out.
It’s the beginning of the month, which means new stuff is on Criterion Channel. It’s also when The Collection Chamberuploads new abandonware games that has been configured to work on modern versions of Windows and man there’s some real weird ones this time. I hope you find some new sites to add to your RSS feed reader this week. If you have a website, consider adding a RSS button to your site so people can easily add it to their reader.
I liked these photos taken of a snowstorm on the 3DS at The Works of Egan and I wish we got one final snowstorm for the year here too.
Politics
Sarah Gailey writes about the horrible H.R. 7661 bill and how folks in the US can fight it from passing.
Video Games
I subscribed to Jank and Mothership this week, which means I’ll probably be posting a lot about them for a long time. Did you know Jank had a nice writeup about the very good Treachery In Beatdown City?
Anyway, with games outlets and journalism just going through…..a lot, it’s fun subscribing to some writers to support them and also get a lot of nice benefits at the same time.
No Escape writes about that Marathon game that’s coming out very soon and its weird history. Even though PVP fps games aren’t for me at all, I’m still hoping it shapes up to be something interesting. Also come hang out on the No Escape forums and post about indie games. I would like to see more folks there.
I’m a big fan of Read Only Memo, a newsletter about emulation that comes out twice a month. The most recent one is about the Triforce arcade hardware platform that Nintendo made with Namco and Sega.
Jordan Minor at PC Mag writes about 24 Indie Video Games From Developers of Color. Fun to see some games I love being highlighted and plenty of games I never knew about. Adventure game fans, listen to this list and go play the free game Dot’s Home.
Over at The Imaginary Engine Review (and yes, I copied their text from their bluesky post) ‘Librarian and researcher Talita Valle delves into “the rolling stacks of digital archives” and offers a nuanced analysis of B.J. Best’s LAKE Adventure. They remind us of the importance of paratexts and Barthes’ concept of the indexicality of a cultural object of expression, such as the IF.’
Ok, the bit I won’t steal from their post is that TIER has been doing a lot of good interactive fiction crit and people should go check it out. It feels so rare IMO for any games outlet to talk about interactive fiction so I really appreciate when we see it.
Chuck Jordan, who has worked on games such as The Curse of Monkey Island, Sim City 4, and Sasquatchers, has a big blog post on his blog about the Sim City series and how much single changes can impact the whole game.
Writing
I also like the newsletter by Charlie Jane Anders and in her most recent one, she talks about how book criticism has been dying. Not the most fun topic but an important one.
The bespoke emulator DREAMM has now reached version 4.0! DREAMM is an emulator focused entirely on games from Lucasfilm Games/Lucasarts. “Why would I use this instead of ScummVM?” you may ask, well, this includes tons of stuff that aren’t adventure games like Jedi Knight, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and that sort of stuff. It’s also more focused on emulating the games to play how they did at release, with the original menus and not the various other tweaks that ScummVM makes. It’s all by Aaron Giles, who worked at Lucasarts back in the day, doing a lot of porting work, and I guess a modified version of this was used in the recent Rayman release.
The big update this time is support for some late 90s Lucasarts games, all the Lucas Learning stuff, and Monopoly Star Wars and Willow, which I don’t believe were published by Lucasarts but are obviously connected to that world. Monopoly Star Wars is not a great game but I did play it quite a bit at the time. The Lucas Learning stuff is interesting because none of it is available today and DroidWorks, a neat 3D game where you build a droid and walk through levels solving puzzles, has been a massive headache to get working on modern computers for a long time. The other ones in here that I’ve played before are The Gungan Frontier, which is basically a sim game with the Gungans from Episode 1 and Pit Droids, which is kind of a Lemmings/Chu Chu Rocket-like.
Anyway, it’s really neat that this exists and it’s completely free. You can check out all the games it supports here.
