Author: mpklamerus

Indie Game Roundup (March 13, 2026)

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

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.

collage of photos of someone on a trail

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

maze of skulls
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

person with shotgun shooting at green blob monster

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.

a ball of moss climbing up a wall. Bubbles fill the room

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.

top down view of people playing basketball and someone saying "I think, therefore I jam"

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

1-bit view of a person in a room with lots of writing on the walls

SALANN (Steam/Itch.io) is a first-person rpg with a nice 1-bit aesthetic where you explore a decaying city.

Wishlist

chicken running from an exploding king crab

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!

Rocket Riot thoughts

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

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.

cupcake and dinosaur flying in space and the dinosaur is saying "I can't let you ruin my evil plans, so I'm going to send you flying through 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.

Rocket Riot is available on Steam and Humble.

My Youngest Turns 2 Today

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

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.

The Adventure Game Assessment Thing

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

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.

Monsterdon

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

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.

ChatGPT Really Cooked Some Brains

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

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.

Blog Roundup (March 1, 2026)

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

It’s the beginning of the month, which means new stuff is on Criterion Channel. It’s also when The Collection Chamber uploads 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.

TTRPGs

Over at Mindstorm they write about creating settlement-oriented sandboxes that players will find engaging.

Photography

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?

I also loved Video games need to do better than treating skin like skins by Wallace Truesdale on Mothership this week.

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.

Andrew Plotkin has been Infocom releases into context and talks about what was going on with the company in 1989.

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.

RoJo Aventuras covers a lot of the adventure game demos in Steam Next Fest.

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.

Robert Tinney recently passed away so 70s Sci-Fi Art collected a lot of his covers he created by BYTE Magazine.

That’s all for today! Maybe you’ll find a new website to get excited about and tell your friends.

DREAMM 4.0 is Now Available For Your Lucasarts Needs

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

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.

Felt Sad About the World So I Went to the Art Museum

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

After feeling depressed about the US starting yet another pointless war, I tried to take my mind off things by going to the Detroit Institute of Arts. If you didn’t know, residents of Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb can get in for free because of the millage we’ve passed.

mural of auto workers in an assembly line

Every time I go, I love to see the murals in Rivera Court by Diego Rivera. This is just part of one wall of four. Love that some of the most famous art in the city is by a Communist. You can read more about it here and it’s very funny that they had a plaque about him in the 50s denouncing his politics.

three sarcophagi

My oldest has been into Egyptian history lately so we looked at the Egyptian art they had.

self portrait of vincent van gogh and a postal worker painting by him

They’re still remodeling the museum so they put a lot of the more known works together in a smaller exhibit such as their Van Gogh paintings.

sign for the Contemporary Anishinaabe Art exhibit that ends in April

They had a really nice exhibit that I was happy to see before it wraps up soon.

painting of two punk rockers titled Punk Rockers Nancy and Andy by Norval Morrisseau
photo of Iggy Pop singing by David dominic, Jr.

It was a little surprising to see a photo from a concert I’ve been to. Maybe this means I’m getting old. There’s also a dvd of this concert and I make a brief appearance for a few seconds while Iggy Pop stands next to me and sings.

Flyer for something at Belle Isle called Gays Eating Garlic Bread at the Park. It says to bring your own bread

It looks like I missed the Gays Eating Garlic Bread at the Park by about a year.

the outside of the Detroit Shipping Co. at night while it's snowing

The day ended with me eating Ethiopian food at Detroit Shipping Company.

Maybe not the most exciting post for some folks but not all of them can be about video games. If you’ve got one or two near you, maybe visit some of your local museums and relax for a bit.

Indie Game Roundup (Feb 27, 2026)

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

It’s getting warmer here again, after it was warm last week and then got cold and snowed again. This will probably happen a few more times before the warm weather finally holds, but I’m looking forward to it.

If you like these roundups, maybe you’ll want some Girl Scout cookies? My oldest is selling Girl Scout cookies if folks in the US are interested. If you live in the metro Detroit or Ann Arbor area, I can deliver them too if you want.

Video Games

Steam Next Fest is this week and I absolutely do not have the time for this. Lots of folks have been writing about demos though including Indie Hell Zone, Thinky Games, and Jank. Probably a billion websites are covering the demos, those are just some that I saw in my feed.

a rabbit and a mouse sitting at a table waiting for a pear

The Midnight Cafe (Itch.io) is a cute arcade game for the browser where you are bunny at a cafe in the woods and retrieve food for animals placing their orders. I loved the collage art look for this game.

a cat with books looking surprised and 3 animals behind it with questions for "Imagine IF the game"

Imagine IF is a browser game made in Twine where you play through various scenarios as a librarian and learn about the history of intellectual freedom. I really appreciate that this game exists. Conservative attacks on libraries and book bans have never been at a higher rate and librarians are under more pressure than ever.

two cats wearing sunglasses and a guy and one character named Sandy is saying "This is not the time to play with balloons, Bob"

Cat President: 3rd-Rate Candidate is a visual novel where you are human campaign manager helping a cat running for president. You can choose between 6 cats to help in their campaign. I playtested this one! I thought it was very funny and you do not need to have played previous games in the series to understand this one. I’m just a fan of Oh, a Rock! Studios in general and all the silly games they make.

Pico8 Cookie is a remake of a game for the ZX Spectrum developed by Ultimate Play the Game (who later became Rare) and released in 1983. I never played the original but this is just a good arcade game! Because I’m an American, my brain shorts out when I read that developer name. Is there a pause? Is it read like Ultimate….Play the Game? UltimatePlayTheGame? Are you just supposed to say Ultimate?

The Queer Vampire Game Jam 2026 just wrapped up and you can check out visual novels, interactive fiction, and lots of other good stuff here.

two people in a space station and a woman named Barbara saying "Don't take it the wrong way! She's a dancer, see! And you're an astronaut."

Lithobreakers is continuing to put out games from their latest jam. TALK FAST, TYPE FASTER! is a screwball comedy typing browser game set in space. I really liked the collage art look they do in this one and it’s a really unique combination of inspirations. Also released by Lithobreakers is This Place is a Message, an interactive fiction prequel to the movie Event Horizon. I do not care for that movie but this game is good.

I don’t know anything about the game Cococommander but it reminds me a ton of the late 90s/early 00s Mac game Bugdom. It just has a similar energy as platformers for computers from that era, which is different than early 3D console game platformers in a subtle way I can’t explain.

Cookie Cutter RM2k3 Jam is, to my understanding, a game jam where people bought RPGMaker 2003 while it was on sale, downloaded a template, and started making stuff. I didn’t make time to play the games yet but a lot of folks I’m a fan of have made games for it and I’m excited to play them.

Not a new game but I just thought this was a good free Picross game for browsers.

top down view of a moose in a maze with a guy pointing a gun at it

I legally have to cover all moose related games so here is Simply Moose. It’s a Boulder Dash-like puzzle game from Poland that was originally made in 2002 I guess.

Playdate continues to put new games on their Catalog store all the time and here’s a roundup from them of their 5 latest games.

Swappy is a demo of a puzzle game made in PICO-8 where you get all the characters to their matching exits. It’s very easy to pickup and only took me about 20 minutes to play through the demo. I’m looking forward to more levels being created for it.

Tabletop RPGs

Roll +Bond Bundle is a bundle of mostly ttrpgs, with some video games too, raising money for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. EDIT: Also just informed that (see comments for this) the“Roll +Bundle” Bundle is part of the Roll +Bond Livestream that is also happening over the weekend, raising money for the same charity:

https://www.twitch.tv/rollplusbond

Hungry Out of Habit is a worldbuilding game by Adam Bell for 2-6 players with no GM where rulers of neighboring kingdoms taking turns describing and inventing the world they’re trying to control.

Dungeon Pulp is a single player dice rolling dungeon crawler by Alfred Valley where you are an adventurer moving through a horrid acid-corrupted dungeon.

Street Wolves Case Files 001: The Ultimate Red Rumble Adventure is a new module for the synth wave inspired ttrpg Street Wolves, with half the proceeds going to humanitarian aid for Ukraine.

That’s it for today. Have a nice weekend!