Black Hole Havoc

Developer: Cosmic Bros
Publisher: Panic
Year: 2025
Genre: Puzzle

gif of a cannon shooting black holes at black holes in the sky

Black Hole Havoc is a puzzle arcade game created for Playdate’s Season 2. Black holes have opened up in the sky and it is up to you to close them by creating black holes of equal size and shooting them into the holes to close them. You do this across a series of 80 levels, with animated cutscenes regularly appearing between levels.

The core gameplay loop of creating black holes and shooting them is great. The crank is used very well to grow and shrink the size of the black holes before you shoot them. There’s a combo system you can take advantage of for more points if you shoot faster, which I didn’t really use too much, but I’m glad it was there. The game introduces so many variations in the levels as you play so the game never felt like it got tiring for me. I saw one or too criticisms, probably on backloggd, that each mechanic wasn’t used more but I loved that. I feel like a lot of games overuse a new mechanic once it’s introduced and this game often only sticks with them for a few levels or at least rotates through it. The game ends with a boss level, which I didn’t really care for but it’s pretty quick and when 79/80 levels in a game are good, I can’t really complain. I know games are often tempted to add a big finale like that but it often doesn’t work for me. There’s an arcade mode too. It’s fine! It’s what it says it is but I felt very satisfied after playing through all the levels once.

I’m always surprised at how good games can sound and look on the Playdate and I was really impressed by the animation in this game. The animation style reminded me a lot of flash cartoons from the 00’s. In fact, my only real complaint about this game is that it feels like internet humor from the late 00s in how the characters talk. I didn’t really care for it and felt dated with the jokes about people posting too much on social media or taking selfies, but it was harmless and unlike the actual humor from that era, it wasn’t obnoxious or trying to be edgy.

It was nice to see Season 2 end on a high note. I wasn’t familiar with these devs at all so this game was a very pleasant surprise.

Black Hole Havoc is available as part of Playdate’s Season 2.

Blog Roundup (July 27, 2025)

Well, this was a rough week where game developers were under attack from censorship and queer game devs are again feeling like they’re being attacked, but on the other hand I got an A in my first grad school class so who can say if things are bad or not. Even with everything going on, this ended up being a week with a lot of blog posts that I read so this is kind of a massive post. If you like this posts, add their blogs to your RSS feed reader. I use Inoreader but I’m sure there’s plenty of good options.

Video Games

Where’s the best writing in games? Idk, this blog I guess?

The adventure game community lost Roberta Vaughan very recently and folks have been trying to process that sudden loss. Adventure Game Hotspot had a nice tribute to her from various folks in the community.

The Historical Games Network has a post on the representation of women in historical games and how poor it is.

I’m still processing my thoughts on everything happening with Itch and adult games right now. I wrote a little bit yesterday on some actions folks can take. I think I agree with a lot on what this blog post is saying about it too.

Liana wrote a nice template for creating your own storefront for selling games. Calm down, I’m not saying you should all do this or that we need to do this instead of Itch. Somehow this became discourse on Bluesky. I just think it’s neat and if people want an extra option in the toolbox, go for it.

Retro Games

There were a lot of posts about old games this week so they get their own category this time!

Jolt Country has been logging games they’re playing and this week it’s the BASIC DOS game Meteor! I just like using a blog as a games diary or log and would recommend it as a possible alternate for something like Backloggd (I am a grump about Backloggd).

Super Chart Island writes about the computer game American Football. As a hater of our version of football, I’ve always been jealous that it’s not a thing in other countries. But it is fascinating to hear about the attempts to make it popular elsewhere and computer games marketed to those groups.

Once again I’d like to give a shoutout to Renga in Blue and their mission to play every adventure game in order of release. This week it’s the text adventure Journey of a Space Traveller.

Castle of the Winds was one of the first rpgs I remember ever seeing, so it was fun watching CRPG Addict cover this one. I should go back and play it.

Ephemeral Enigmas covers Curse of Enchantia, a point-and-click adventure that has been sitting in my Amiga games backlog for a long time. It’s also on DOS but I’m an Amiga nerd so that’s where I’ll end up playing it someday.

Tabletop RPGs

Daring Demon Eclipse calls on everyone to write loud queer games.

Dev logs

I was very happy to hear that the third Captain Disaster game is making good progress. I’m a fan of the previous adventure games in the series.

Megan gives an update on the musical tarot game Divinuet and what it’s like to sometimes work on a game as a side thing and sometimes as a full time project.

Meredith Gran posts about her brother releasing a video game.

Writing

I got to attend a very good talk at the Ann Arbor District Library this last Wednesday from Sarah Gailey about the history and legacy of the Hays Code and the Comics Code, contemporary censorship efforts, and the necessity of identifying with criminality. They unfortunately got covid for the first time and found out a few hours before the talk, so they had to give it from their hotel room just around the corner from the library, but it was still very good and I recommend checking it out. It was very weird attending this talk and then going home to find out about all the Itch adult games stuff.

Tech

I’m not feeling so great about Canvas being used for my classes

I’ve thought about moving to Eleventy. It sounds really nice. Here’s a list of plugin recommendations

Other Bits

I liked this post titled No, posting alone won’t save Palestine but you should do it anyway

Fighting Censorship of Games on Itch.io and Steam

If folks weren’t aware, Steam and Itch.io have been delisting adult games on their stores due to pressure from Mastercard and Visa. This has impacted many games, even games that are not porn but just have adult themes. That said, even if it just impacted erotica it would still be bad, because I think people should have access to that too. Fortunately, it seems like there is a way to fight back and help out game developers. People have been calling Mastercard, VISA, and Stripe to complain and it seems like it’s starting to work. It will take days of doing this to make a change though, so here are places you can call to complain and take up their phonelines and costing them time and money in the process until they ease off Itch.io and Steam.

If you’re able to help out, here is a page listing phone numbers you can call and petitions to sign. It sounds like some folks at Mastercard and VISA are telling people to email instead but please keep calling. Emails just allow them to filter out things they don’t want and phone calls clog up the phone lines.

Blaugust Plans

No indie game roundup today. Was caught off guard by all the Itch adult games stuff (and also just schoolwork tbh) and will probably talk about that later if I have anything interesting to say about it about than it sucks and makes me sad. Blaugust is coming up, the month long challenge where folks try to do a blog post every day (even short ones are fine), and I had been thinking quite a while about how I was going to have posts about FMV games every day. Even scheduled a few. Then all the adult games stuff happened with itch and I think the rest of the month will be me finally uploading all the games I’ve made to here and talking about them a little bit, and highlighting some adult games for visibility. That seems fine!

Glypha: Vintage

Developer: John Calhoun
Publisher: Soft Dorothy Software
Year: 2023
Genre: Arcade

screenshot of two birds flying in a room with egyptian art

Glypha: Vintage is a remake of the 80’s Macintosh arcade game of the same name. It’s a variant of Joust, which happens to be my favorite arcade game, where you fly around on a giant bird and use your lance to destroy enemies by bumping into them while you are at a higher height than them. As far as Joust variants go, I think it’s one of the better ones, but to be fair there’s not really that many Joust clones I can think of. It’s mostly the same game, but with everything modified to have more of an Egyptian theme. The thing that stands out to me is how fast it moves compared to Joust. Everyone moves faster and less floatier, so you have to hit the flap button quite a bit more to stair in the air and enemies can turn around much faster. The egg items hatch a lot faster too. This all makes the game a lot more difficult than the original but to compensate, Glypha is much more generous with the extra lives you get from accumulating points. It took a few minutes to get used to but once I did, I thought it had felt very good.

The original Macintosh era was all a bit before my time. By the time I was in elementary school, our classrooms all had Macs that had color, so I don’t have any nostalgia for this era of computers. That doesn’t mean I don’t love the art in black and white Mac games though. It’s essentially the same art as the original Glypha game but obviously at a much higher resolution and a lot smoother. I’m guessing there’s some additional animations as well but I’m not familiar enough with the original game to know. I think it looks great.

I never played the earlier Glypha games but my understanding is that they eventually got color and probably other changes as well. I think they were all developed by John Calhoun, who is also know for his paper airplane arcade game Glider, also for the Macintosh. He eventually worked for Apple for a long time before retiring and I think this most recent version of Glypha was developed either right before retirement or right after. If you want to see what else he’s up to, I highly recommend adding his blog to your RSS feed reader.

Anyway, this is probably one of the best versions of Joust that you can actually buy for the PC. As far as I know, the original arcade version of Joust isn’t for sale anywhere and yes, obviously you can always just emulate the game, but it’s nice having this version as well with its ideas on how Joust should play and I’m not usually an achievements person but they’re fun in an arcade game like this.

Glypha: Vintage is available on Steam.

Happy 40th Birthday to the Amiga

Apparently the Amiga computer turns 40 today! It was first computer I used and what we had in our household when I was born so I have a lot of fond memories of it and playing games on there with my dad. It’s nice to see that it still has a very active game dev scene for it and you can find lots of great games for the platform on Itch.io. Amiga emulation is a little bit of a headache which understandably keeps a few people from checking it out, but I think it’s worth pushing through it and giving the games a lot. There’s a lot of weird stuff on there like everything by Bill Williams, the Psygnosis stuff looks really nice, and it’s got some nice versions of old adventure games like the early Sierra games and Infocom’s The Lurking Horror.

PBS Passport

After the defunding of public media happened here, I subscribed to my local Detroit PBS station’s Passport streaming service that people have been recommending on social and this thing is alright! It’s just $5 a month for a bunch of things that are probably exciting to only me. I didn’t realize that it had so many local Detroit shows for streaming, including talks at the Michigan Theater going back to 2015. I recently watched the Pet Shop Boys: Dreamworld concert, which I thought was great. I also started watching British mystery shows, since I guess that’s something you have to do if you have access to PBS.

Anyway, good service. I also supported my Detroit NPR. I sure wish we could just tax rich people to pay for this stuff.

Devil’s Hideout

Developer: Cosmic Void
Publisher: Cosmic Void
Year: 2024
Genre: Adventure

a man and a woman talking at night outside of a hospital and the man saying "this hospital is strangely silent for a medical facility"

Devil’s Hideout is a short horror point-and-click adventure by Cosmic Void about a woman searching for her missing sister, after discovering that cultists faked her death. While it’s in the horror genre, I feel like it’s going for more of a schlocky 80’s horror film that you would find on VHS at your local video store. That probably sounds like a criticism of the game but I absolutely loved that it had that feel. It never scared me but the vibes are very good and fun. I think the excellent pixel art and the colors used in the art help contribute to this mood and if you’ve played Cosmic Void’s games before, you won’t be surprised that the art in this is good.

If anything, I wish it had pulled away even more from trying to be scary. There’s a few points where it tries to do jump scares but these didn’t work for me and the atmosphere in the game was already very good.

The plot in this is pretty straightforward but I didn’t have an issue with that at all. I wouldn’t have minded if it was longer and had more time to develop characters, but it’s a smaller budget game and I was perfectly fine with the length, which took me about three hours to complete. It has multiple endings too, which I don’t know if I’ve seen in a Cosmic Void game before, so it took some time to go through both of those as well.

The gameplay is what you would expect from a first-person point-and-click adventure. You go from room to room, grabbing items and using them elsewhere, etc. There’s some pixel hunting that I found frustrating until I realized the game has a hotspot finder, which I always appreciate seeing in adventure games. I don’t think finding the right pixel to hunt is challenging in an interesting way at all and I’d rather not have to go through that. The mouse cursor will also change to a different color when there’s nothing else to say or do with an object is very nice and helps eliminate some of the busy work too. There’s some little mini games in here too like a Blackjack game and variation on the Lights Out puzzle game and while it can be a little silly that have that stuff pop up in an adventure game, they’re easy and add some variety too. I think they were fun.

If I did have any real criticisms of the game, it would be that there’s a few moments where the game is really fussy about how you must interact with things in a certain order before some objects will give you the info you need. Like looking at a painting before clicking on a tv to get essential information from a report. It’s not a puzzle or anything you would really know to do and the only way around it is to just click on everything repeatedly. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves in adventure games so it was a little frustrating to see here.

That gripe aside, I liked the game quite a bit and would recommend it if you’re looking for something with an 80s horror vibe. Cosmic Void’s games have always been very enjoyable to me and this one is no exception.

Devil’s Hideout is available on Itch.io and Steam.

Tex Murphy: Mouselook Edition

Someone has patched in mouselook controls to Under a Killing Moon! If you’ve ever played the original game, you know that it has kind of a goofy control scheme. I love the game but it takes some time to get used to and can sometimes make it tricky to recommend to people. The post below includes a video of what the patch does and it looks great, but also incredibly weird if you’ve played the original game. But again, probably also a big improvement on what it had before. Nice job!

Blog Roundup (July 20, 2025)

Outdoor Concert Summer continued last night with me seeing Yo La Tengo on the front lawn of the Detroit Institute of Arts last night. It was great! I only kinda sorta know their stuff but they played all my favorite stuff by them and I loved it, aside from the rain during the last few songs. Even aside from the whole pandemic thing, I don’t know if I can really do indoor concerts anymore. They’re just kind of a pain and I just prefer being able to move around more freely and I can hear better too. I think I’m just getting old. Here’s some things I liked reading. Use a RSS feed reader and tell your friends.

Video Games

Last week Steam started banning porn games due to pressure from Mastercard and Visa and this was stupid. No Escape has a post about it. It turns out there was also a post about it on Waypoint as well by Ana Valens. I have gigantic issues with the new Waypoint and haven’t been reading it, but it turns out it didn’t matter because Ana has said on bluesky that Vice just deleted the writing about it anyway. If you want to read the archive about it, you can do so here.

I’m glad Uppercut is back and posting articles again. Here’s one about Slay the Princess

Wraithkal keeps doing nice #ScreenshotSaturday roundups of posts on Mastodon.

Indie Hell Zone has good things to say on Puzzmo. I don’t do the NYT crossword puzzle but I keep hearing this proposed as a nice alternative to that.

Harris Powell-Smith has an advice column for writing interactive fiction.

Tech

I don’t even use Notion but I think Dante has sold me on using Obsidian. I just kinda have a jumble of Google Docs, which seems like a bad idea. I’ve already been pulling away from using Gmail and have a Fastmail account, which I really like.

Dev Logs

Andrew Plotkin wrote about Hadean Lands (great IF game) being in a Boston indies bundle on Steam and I think more people should just get involved with their local dev community and do stuff like this.

I really like Julia’s Crimson Gazette, her newsletter about the games she’s been working on and I think it’s worth subscribing to. It mentions Chance’s Lucky Escape, which I blogged about here and think it’s worth picking up if you have a Playdate.

Cyningstan has posted an update about releasing a new roguelike for DOS. I got to playtest it and while I’m bad at these types of games, I think it’s really good. It’s not a fault of the game, which I found very easy to pickup and start playing, plus it’s free.