Month: May 2026

Blog Roundup (May 10, 2026)

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Well I thought I was done with these but there was a lot of stuff I enjoyed reading this week and I want to talk about how I loved it all!

Laura Michet has been posting about making Flickgames, which ended up being very important to me because it inspired me to make my own. And then our posts about Flickgames motivated someone else to make one. Join us! Flickgame is good

I loooooved this post titled Narrative Games Are Real Games. I get so cranky about people dismissing games if they’re not interactive enough or when they say “This could have been a movie.” and this post does a better job explaining why those are poor criticisms better than I could.

Did you know Myst Online is still going? You probably did because I keep talking about it. But here’s the latest Myst Online news.

The Bathysphere is one of my favorite newsletters and Expedition 55 discusses great stuff like the ttrpg New In Town and why you should make a zine about your favorite game.

Midnight Reading mentions TOWNSQUEER, a bundle of LGBT zines and games that sounds really interesting to me. Also a cat picture.

I think a post titled Things I Wish I’d Thought Of Before Putting “Fuck” In The Name Of My Game says it all. One of my favorite ttrpg designers discusses, well, what to title your game.

Michael Coorlim has a nice post about making a classic maze game in a week.

The History of How We Play has a big post abut the late David Nutting’s contributions to games.

Lotus has a massive post reviewing the games she’s played in 2026 in Dialed Indie.

Renga in Blue continues playing every adventure game ever made, in order of release. This time it’s Horror House from 1983, a text adventure that was made for a contest.

Andrew Plotkin remembers a firefighting game from 1980ish that is almost certainly lost but one that other people also remember. I think collecting memories of lost games is really important, I did it on here with HeroMUD, so I’m always happy when I see other folks are doing that too since we’ll probably never save the actual games.

schledorn defends one dimensional characters in games.

Ephemeral Enigmas is always covering games I never heard of and this time it’s Hihou Densetsu: Chris no Bouken, a game that’s maybe not the greatest but I like how it looks.

I still haven’t played any Atari ST games yet, my nostalgia is tied to the Amiga, but I love this new Atari ST blog. Yesterday’s post is about a game called Into the Eagle’s Nest, a game that doesn’t sound great but now I learned about a game I never heard of before.

That’s it for this post. If you discover a website you like from this, add it to your RSS feed reader.

Marges Destimbats (Crumbled Stone Walls) thoughts

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a grandfather talking about olive trees and saying they are in need of pruning

Developer: ferran
Year: 2026
Genre: Visual Novel
System: Browser

Marges Destimbats is a short interactive documentary about the developer’s grandfather maintaining crumbling stone-wall terraces in an olive orchard near Deltebre, Spain. I rarely see games and interactive media these days using FMV, so I was really excited to come across this for the Sant Jordi Jam 2026. It’s about something so specific too. How often do you learn about olive orchards from a video game? I also love that it was the designer’s grandfather who stars in this game. Getting family members to act in a video game can sometimes be tough, as seen from the outtakes for Myst, and you know what? He did great. I’m glad this was made and would love to see more interactive documentaries like this.

Marges Destimbats is available to play in-browser on Itch.io.

Made a Flickgame

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a crude drawing of a toilet and text saying The Toilet

I just used the Flickgame tool to make a tiny game about one of my earlier memories and I loved using it. It’s such an easy to use tool for making little comics and interactive stories. I had originally intended to make a game for smilejam but then when I finished making this game I looked at the rules and submissions and realized I didn’t really pay attention to the rules at all, oops. But it inspired me to play with flickgame and lists plenty of other neat little tools I can play with so I’m really glad I saw the jam.

Anyway, here’s The Toilet. I’ll upload it to this site eventually as well. Does it count as a Leisure Suit Larry fangame?

Perfect Tides: Station to Station thoughts

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Developer: Three Bees
Publisher: Three Bees
Year: 2026
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is a point-and-click adventure where you play as Mara, an eighteen year old woman who has just started college. You experience all that college has to offer you while obtaining new ideas and applying them to papers and other forms of writing. This will be a slimmer and more rambling post because I feel like everything I have to say about the game has already been said by other outlets such as Unwinnable but I thought the game was brilliant and is now one of my favorite adventure games.

a woman saying "Hey, no need to be embarrassed. There was a whole summer I read nothing but computer game novelizations I found in a box behind a grocery store."

One of the many things I was pleasantly surprised by was how much of an improvement it was over the first Perfect Tides, a game that I also thought was very good and well crafted. I was just so surprised by how much more confident this game was in its design, willing to drop more conventional things people expect in adventure games like the multiple verbs and puzzles the first game had, in order to focus more on the choices Mara can make and ability to learn new things. I think having difficult puzzles in this game would have just killed the pacing and wouldn’t fit in with the grounded story this is telling.

Learning new topics was also a really interesting thing to see in an adventure game. It’s been done before of course, this game cites The Dagger of Amon Ra as an influence, but in a way that feels so natural and continuing to explore and talk to other people will improve your knowledge on a topic. It’s masterfully implemented.

Everyone that is of a certain age who plays this will probably relate so much to the references this game makes as well as just what it was like to be a college student and they’re right! For better or worse, I could relate to Mara and just the experience of being a bit of a walking disaster in my late teens. If you don’t relate to that, well, it must be nice to not have that experience.

Anyway, I loved the game and hope it is very successful since it has some of my favorite writing in an adventure game and hope it inspires others to tell personal stories as well.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is available on Steam and Itch.io, and is coming soon to Nintendo Switch.

Text Adventures Still Rule in the Year 2026

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I think a lot of folks who follow this site already know this but people still make text adventure games like during the days of Infocom and they’re still very good! In fact, I think many of them are even better than the classics. That’s not to say the classics are bad, they’re very good, I just think many made post-golden age of text adventures are even better. You can download many free ones on IFDB.

Some that are friendly to beginners that I happen to enjoy are Lost Pig, Galatea, Bronze, and The Dreamhold, but there’s a nice list of more interactive fiction on IFDB’s top 100 list if you’re looking for more to play. Not all of these are text adventures but I also love interactive fiction in the form of Twine games and other forms so no complaints there. I think the commercial text adventure Thaumistry is a good intro to text adventures as well.

If you want to download these free games instead of playing them in a browser, you’ll probably need something to run the files. I think Gargoyle is neat but there’s plenty of options. Some games are also easier to play if you map out the rooms. Personally I love writing these down in a notebook but Trizbort is a nice app for mapping rooms on your computer. I use a desktop version for Windows but apparently there’s now a browser version available.

If you want to see what else folks are up to in the scene, I recommend exploring the rest of IFDB and checking on competitions like IF Comp and Spring Thing. IF Comp has been going on since the 90s. While I stopped following that one for a while because they allowed AI stuff, it seems like they’re starting to clamp down on it so that’s nice.

Anyway, if you’ve never played a text adventure before, give it a shot! Maybe you’ll discover a new genre of games you really enjoy.