Developer: Living Books Publisher: Brøderbund Software, Inc. Year: 1992 Genre: Edutainment System: Macintosh
Yeah, that’s right. I’m reviewing a multimedia cd-rom. Just Grandma and Me is an interactive storybook based on the Little Critter book of the same name. You go through 12 screens of a book about Little Critter going to the beach with his grandma, which the game reads to you, and then you click on things to see funny little animations until you decide to go to the next page. There’s not a whole lot to it but it must work because my kids like it and I liked it when I first played it as a child too.
Screenshot taken from MobyGames
The first time I played it was when I was 6 years old and in my 1st grade classroom (if you want to know how old I was, it was September, 1993). The teacher put the cd-rom into the classroom’s Macintosh and I was blown away. Little Critter was talking and telling us which buttons we could push, and then started dancing to music. I had never seen a game do this before. This was my first time seeing a cd-rom as well, since we did have a PC (and Amiga before that) at home but they didn’t have cd-rom drives. I was so charmed by the story reading itself to me and all the funny animations that happened from clicking on stuff. Our family did eventually get a cd-rom drive about a month or two later and it came bundled with this game, which I played a lot along with later titles in the Living Books series.
A cd-rom is going to be a little less magical in 2026 (to some folks, not me!) but I think it still holds up, or at least my kids like it. The animations are still charming and it’s got a lot of funny little bits that happen when you click on stuff. Obviously it’s not a thing you’re still going to charge $30 or whatever for, but interactive storybooks are still a thing that kids enjoy and that’s what this is. Later releases of the game include a minigame or two as well as the ability to play in other languages. Plus with it having ScummVM support, you can play it on basically everything.
Fun fact: While he had plenty of success with his books, Mercer Meyer has a long history in computer games too. While most of his games are related to his Little Critter books, he did a few before this, including a text adventure.
Living Books: Just Grandma and Me is available on Steam and mobile platforms.
Developer: Humongous Entertainment Publisher: Humongous Entertainment Year: 1997 Genre: Adventure System: Windows
Something that’s been a lot of fun as my kids continue to grow has been revisiting games from my childhood. The most recent one has been Spy Fox in “Dry Cereal,” a point-and-click adventure by Humongous Entertainment. In the first Spy Fox game you play as a spy (who happens to be a fox, as it says on the tin) that rescue the world’s cows and stop William the Kid (a goat) from stealing the world’s supply of milk. Like everything else by Humongous Entertainment, this was a delight to revisit with my kids.
The game features the great art and animation you would expect from the studio. Everything still looks great today and the only real bummer about the current state of HE releases is that I do think they would look better at an even higher resolution. But at the same time I feel like that risks being twisted into something awful and we get an AI upscaling everything, so I’ll happily settle for how they look from the 90’s.
It’s also been fun seeing how carefully HE rolled out adventure games for children of all ages. Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, and Fatty Bear were created for very young kids, 3-8 year olds, Pajama Sam is advertised for that age group too but I would argue is for an age range that is one year old, and Spy Fox is for 5-10 year olds. It’s just a tad bit more difficult than the rest of their adventures but roughly follows the same format and there being a core goal you complete through adventure game solving, one or two mini games you can play on the side, and possibly a real time sequence. I personally think the timed reaction sequences aren’t great and would remove them, but I think the rest of the game works.
The puzzles are trickier than what you would see in Putt-Putt and makes the game take longer to complete, but I don’t think it’s anything impossible for older kids. I think the only bit during the puzzle solving that doesn’t work for me is that Spy Fox has a limited inventory space for gadgets and to try other gadgets, you need to return to your HQ to swap out what you have for other gadgets. It’s a slog. I get why this approach was taken, the alternative is to just get everything and the HQ becomes a lot less interesting after that, but I maybe would have had other reasons to return to HQ and just let them have it all. Other than that though, I think the puzzles are interesting and it’s kinda fun that they start to introduce the idea of note taking to kids in this game.
Anyway, it’s a good game. I don’t know if I would recommend it to grownups to play by yourself but my kids loved it and I had fun playing it with them.
Spy Fox in “Dry Cereal” is available on Steam, Switch, PS4, and mobile platforms but ScummVM support means you can play it on basically everything.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 #72on 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.
Screenshot from A Nothingness
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.
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.
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.
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.
