Author: mpklamerus

The 50 Indie Game Challenge

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There’s a trend happening on bluesky that came from The Game Awards discourse where someone said if you post “play more indie games” then you need to also post 50 indie game recommendations. I assume this was because the person was tired of the performative posts just vaguely gesturing at indie games. But it worked. People have actually been posting indie game recommendations. However, because I cannot be a normal person, I got annoyed that people were only linking to games on Steam. I posted a list of 50 recommendations on Bluesky but thought I would do the list here as well, where it’s a lot more readable and I can add some nice screenshots. There’s probably a fun theme I could have done instead like 50 Amiga or ZX Spectrum games, or adventure games, but here’s a batch of 50 games I liked and maybe you’ll feel compelled to do a post recommending indie games.

a guy in sunglasses saying "Perseverence: If you can believe a sports car, you can achieve a sports car"

Landlord Quest – Short point-and-click adventure game where you can see a landlord eat shit. Buying on Itch gives you files to run in ScummVM on everything

DOSember Game Jam – Did you know a game jam just wrapped up where we got 39 brand new games for DOS? So many great games here

santa's arm stretching out to catch presents

SANTA SACK – Tom Hall, of Commander Keen/Doom/Anachronox fame, does so much for the PICO-8 community on Itch, organizes game jams, and makes a Christmas game ever year. This one is an arcade game where you catch presents and avoid coal.

a boy looking at another boy that is stuck in a tree

The Round-about Orchard – Julia Minamata, creator of the amazing adventure game The Crimson Diamond, made a fan game for Over The Garden Wall along with people that worked on the show.

a first person view of five people fighting four monsters

Minerva Labyrinth – Just a really good first person dungeon crawler!

Egg by Terry Cavanagh – The best platformer where you play as an egg. Eat shit Dizzy

Everything by DOMINO CLUB – An anonymous game dev collective. No one is doing more interesting experimental games than them

Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation – An incredibly interesting take on the 4X genre, like an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist take on Civilization

Eulogy for Nonno – Very funny short adventure game where you delivery flowers to a home and are mistaken for a long lost cousin and must escape

Maura & Ash – Nice, short queer point-and-click adventure set in space and runs in DOS

first person view looking down a giant tree

FALLSTRUKTUR – Free first-person platformer where you must make your way down a giant structure. Very challenging

top down view of someone in a dungeon

The Chambers Beneath – Challenging but easy to pick up roguelike for DOS, available for pay-what-you-want

pixel art of someone on a building's rooftop

Neon Hearts City – Cyberpunk point-and-click detective adventure with nice pixel art. I actually wrote more about this one here.

Root Bear – An arcade game for the Playdate where you pour root beer for bears. My kids love it!

a river at sunset

Atuel – A free surreal documentary game about the environment with beautiful art. Wrote more about it here.

deer laying in the grass

Backwater Eulogy – A short visual novel memoir about growing up in a rural area. Wrote more here

Rainbows Are Carnivores – The newest game by Robert Yang. A good gay fishing game.

pixel art of guy in his bedroom

Billy Masters Was Right – A pay-what-you-want point and click adventure with Maniac Mansion-inspired art and a story inspired by The Burbs. Wrote more here.

You Are Generative AI – Twine game where you are a Generative AI consuming power and being useless

Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny – A great, free Castlevania fan game made in GZDoom

CorgiSpace – An excellent collection of PICO-8 games by Adam Saltsman

Mixed Feelings – A ttrpg with mechanics based around making playlists

Type Help – An excellent deduction adventure game made in Twine

two columns with rows of different shapes filling the columns

Spirit Swap – A Match 3 combined with a queer visual novel. I like the spells/powers you can use during the Match 3 part too. Fantastic soundtrack. Wrote more here.

museum with board game photos hanging on walls

Museum of All Things – Explore Wikipedia in the form of a 3D museum

little cartoon guy playing a pinball table that has candy as obstacles

Pinboll – Very cute pinball roguelike

Hardcoded – Very NSFW cyberpunk dating sim

Indiepocalypse – Incredible games compilation featuring new indie games every month and excellent curation. New issue each month!

low poly bowling lane floating in the air with stone heads next to it

Super 10 Pin – Bowling game that absolutely nails the aesthetic of N64 games

green girl collecting big ornaments in the snow

Madvent 5 – Advent calendar of horror games with the aesthetic of PSX games

surreal clouds floating over water

ocean::ephemera – Beautiful space to explore for 7 minutes

Shindig – Cute point-and-click adventure for kids

A Short Hike – Everyone knows this one but my oldest loves it so much

carved pumpkins on pedestals

The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival – Same author as A Short Hike. You must play this in October. It’s a small Halloween MMO and I had so much fun playing it with my kids

Frogsong – Very cute action adventure game where you play as a frog

Kitsune Tails – Amazing Super Mario Bros 3-like platformer!

Dragonsweeper – Took over my life at the beginning of the year. Great combination of dungeon crawling and Minesweeper

KIDNAME: ICEBOY – Incredible parody of Sierra’s Codename:Iceman and other games by Jim Walls

Stair Quest – Another great parody of Sierra games. An intentionally frustrating game where you navigate stairs. Also has a Winter Edition of the game

Alone on a Journey – Trilogy of solo ttrpgs focused on exploration that were influential to me. Wrote more here.

VIDEOVERSE – Beautiful visual novel inspired by the Wii online community stuff

Enclosure 3-D – Remake of an adventure game inspired Sierra classics and the 3D engine presents that retro art style in a really interesting way

black and white pixel art of a woman next to a downed power line

Midnight Scenes – Looooove the Midnight Scenes series. Anthology horror series with each game being playable in one sitting. Wrote more here.

He Fucked the Girl Out Me – Short visual novel about being a sex worker and trauma for the Game Boy. Wrote more here.

Hunger – Another influential solo ttrpgs where you are a vampire. Uses a really neat blackjack-inspired mechanic. Also has a companion game called Thirst. More about it here.

Dinocar – Very cute ttrpg where you build a city for dinosaurs driving cars. Loved playing it with my kids

Parsely – If you are a text adventure fan and want a similar experience with friends, check this out. One player is the “parser” and the rest say commands to solve the adventure

Songs for the Dusk – Great Forged in the Dark ttrpg where the players try to build a better future

Co-open – Really nice game about a child’s first time buying groceries on their own

Cartomancy Anthology – Another influential one. An anthology of games inspired by tarot cards

I hope this helps you find something new on Itch.io!

Indie Game Roundup (December 11, 2025)

~ mpklamerus ~ 3 Comments

I’m finally free from school for the next few weeks which means you’ll probably see these posts more often. Since it’s been a while, this will probably be a longer one but there’s a few things I had to get out there now, so you’ll probably see a bunch of these over the next few days. Maybe play an indie game from Itch tonight instead of watching a bad awards show. If you enjoy today’s post, consider signing No Games For Genocide.

New Releases

low poly green girl running in the snow and getting ornaments

The fifth Madvent Calendar is available for free on Itch.io. Every day a new short game with a PSX aesthetic becomes available for you to play! If you somehow get through all the games in this, I highly recommend checking out previous years.

picture of a level of platforms of ice with items on them and a snowman

Did you know that Raymond Briggs’ children’s book The Snowman had a game for the ZX Spectrum in 1984? I’m not British so I didn’t! Well, now it has a remake for the PC that is available on Itch.io as Pay-What-You-Want.

‘A Normal Lost Phone’, ‘Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story’ & ‘Alt-Frequencies’ are getting delisted on Steam on January 30th 2026. I don’t know what that means for the games on Itch.io, but if you want to pick them up before then, they’re all on sale for less than a dollar. I only played A Normal Lost Phone out of these but liked that one.

Phobos Down (dev site) looks like a neat little low-poly twin sticker shooter on Steam and Itch where you shoot bugs.

The Krampus Case (Itch.io) is a free interactive fiction game made in Twine where you find out who kidnapped Santa. You’ve got 25 actions you can take but only 20 days so choose your actions wisely.

Random Dungeon Generator (Itch.io) is just a fun little browser toy that generates new dungeon ideas for you.

santa's arm extending out to collect a falling toy

Every year, Tom Hall of Commander Keen/Doom/Anachronox fame makes a little Christmas-themed PICO-8 game and organizes a game jam for the community. This year his game is SANTA SACK (Itch.io), a game where you are Santa and extend your arm back and forth to collect falling toys and avoid coal. Tom is the best and it’s fun that someone who made games in my childhood that I loved is still noodling with smaller arcade games and helps organize things for the community.

I assume everyone reading this already knows about HORSES (Itch.io/GOG/Humble), the game that got banned by Steam despite being pretty tame. Not going to get into the bad faith takes on how Steam can do what they want or how it’s a good game, much smarter people have discussed it. I’ve been a hater of Steam’s moderation both on the store and community for a very long time. It’s why I do these posts, because so many indie sites and streamers will just not look at anything that’s not on Steam, even if they have Indie in their name. Anyway, good game, go check it out.

Game Manual Jam 25 is a jam on Itch.io where people make manuals for games that do not exist.

menu showing a collection of games to choose from

Finji has released CorgiSpace (Itch.io/Steam), a collection of games made in PICO-8. If you’ve been playing the PICO-8 games by Adam that I’ve been posting in here, you already know they are a good time. This contains some of those with fixes as well as new ones. Not that everything needs to be commercialized, but I do enjoy seeing people making commercial games with smaller engines like this. There is also a game jam to promote the game and encourage people to make small, experimental games.

That’s it for today. I’ll try to knock a few of these out over the next week so apologies for the spam in your RSS feed reader if you’ve got the site in there. If you’ve got a game that doesn’t use AI, feel free to send me an email about it with a link to your Steam/Itch/whatever page. Or you can just say hi. That’s fine too.

DOS Games Are Alive and Well on Itch.io

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people investigating a safe
Quid Pro Quo


Despite the Industry moving on from DOS decades ago, Itch.io has an incredibly active community of folks making games for DOS, that folks to play on their retro computers and emulators. DOSember, the annual streaming event on Twitch where people play DOS games, just wrapped up their first DOS game jam on Itch.io. The jam received 39 submissions, which I think is a fantastic number of new games for something the games industry and tech world decided was “dead” decades ago. There’s a lot of fantastic stuff in there for you all to play with. They’re all free but if a game is taking donations, consider tossing a dollar or two to the games you like and consider streaming them.

top down view of someone shooting at monsters
Europa Panic

If that wasn’t enough, there’s been DOS games being published on Itch before that. THP put together a list of DOS games made for jams I hosted and there’s so many good games in here. There’s a few paid games as well that I think are worth supporting. THP also made this free DOS demo disc, like in the old days of shareware. Go check the list and demo disc out!

person skiing down a hill
Did you know the original version of SkiFree isn’t actually a DOS game? It’s true!

Finally, there’s plenty more for you to check out on Itch. Poke around the site and check out tags such as the msdos and DOS tags and games like The Aching and Hibernated 1. You’ll find many more DOS games to play and enjoy!

pixel art of an office and some wizard stuff like a staff and monster head hanging on the walls
Quest for Erasmus

Landlord Quest thoughts

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Developer: katbrush
Publisher: katbrush
Year: 2025
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

a man in an office saying "Perseverence: If you can believe a sports car, you can achieve a sports car"

Landlord Quest is a short point-and-click adventure game where you play as a landlord who must do a task for one of your tenants but as expected in a comedy adventure game, this goes off the rails very quickly. It features multiple endings, with an extended ending if you do all the goals and max out your Landlord Score, but all of them are “good” unless you like landlords for some reason. It’s always a little goofy to try to write a longer review for any game that’s 30-45 minutes long but I wanted to write some kind of log since I thought it was a fun adventure game and always appreciate when a point-and-click adventure takes an anti-capitalist stance. It’s definitely not a pro-landlord game.

It features all the stuff you would want in a comedy adventure like good jokes, puzzles that are fair, and a mini game as well. The only criticism I have is that some of the inventory items are used in an odd way for the 9-verb scumm interface, with you generally clicking on the item itself and then the object you want to use it on and not clicking the Use verb first, but once you figure it out then it’s not a big deal.

The art is very nice too. The verb panel has the aesthetic of early Windows and I was really impressed with the animation, especially for a solo dev project. It’s good stuff! Sometimes it’s nice to just play through a short adventure game in one sitting and watch a landlord eat shit. It’s only $2 too! Other than the content warning of a possible violent suicide depiction not being for some folks, I feel very comfortable recommending it to adventure game fans who want a short comedy adventure. It’s available on Steam but if you buy it on Itch.io then you get the files to run it in ScummVM, making it playable on basically every platform.

Landlord Quest is available on Steam and Itch.io.

Updated the Button Wall

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Today I remodeled the Cool Site Zone part of the site, where I had a giant wall of buttons linking to various sites, and made it a more traditional list of links. The buttons are still there, but now have a lot more context so it’s a bit more useful and hopefully less overwhelming. The more traditional links part of the site is still very outdated and I’ll be continuing to work so it matches more closely to what I have in my RSS feed reader so if you thought I followed your site and don’t see it there, that’s probably why. But I’m making this post so maybe folks can let me know that do in fact have a little 88×31 button I can add to my page.

Weird Gamer Thoughts I Had in the 90’s

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Quest 64 has become kind of an ironic internet meme but here’s the thing, I remember getting that game when it came out and actually enjoying it a lot at the time. I don’t even complete that many RPGs but that’s one of them. This led me to start thinking about other weird things I thought about video games as a kid. Obviously most of these will be goofy since I was a child but I do remember thinking that it was a mistake for everything to keep moving away from 2D to 3D graphics and dangit, I was right. Unfortunately I had a N64 and not a Playstation at the time, or else I could have kept rolling with 2D games for quite a bit. Anyway, here’s some random thoughts that no one was asking for:

  • There’s a few games like Quest 64 and Gubble (I’m guilty of pushing this one) that have become a joke on the internet but I actually played both when they came out and had fun. Not even fun in the sense of not knowing that a game could be bad but it’s what you were stuck with so you may as well make the most of it, I just liked them.
  • For some reason I was very jealous that TurboGrafx owners had Bonk’s Adventure despite having access to plenty of great games on pc and Nintendo consoles.
  • Was also jealous that Philips CD-i owners got those Zelda games, even after I played two of them at CompUSA.
  • Was very impressed with how Bug! looked on the Sega Saturn. That was the game I was focused on for that platform and was sad my computer wasn’t powerful enough to run the demo on the pc.
  • Mortal Kombat was too violent for me but Doom was perfectly fine.
  • Couldn’t get enough of pre-rendered graphics in games. Thought Donkey Kong Country was the best looking thing ever and thought this box art for Kyrandia 3 was Very Good, Actually.
  • Games with lots of cds filled with fmv were better than games with less cds. In fact, graphics were never going to get better than fmv so why bother with other stuff.

End of the Year Music Wrapped….Thing

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

I don’t use Spotify and cannot provide a music summary thing. Nor should you use Spotify either. They stand by ICE recruitment ads, pay artists essentially nothing, the CEO uses money he makes from it to invest in AI warfare technology, it’s getting filled with AI slop, and the audio quality is poor. There’s really no reason to use it. Other streaming services pay artists more and you could probably gain a nice big music collection by just buying music every month with what you would be giving Spotify. I guess I can look at my Plex stats but I don’t wanna. But what I can do is list some of the things I liked that were released this year, with some extremely brief thoughts, and maybe you’ll find something new! All links go to the bandcamp page. I have very basic music taste that’s mostly goth and rock so apologies in advance for that.

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory – I’ve been a fan of Sharon’s music for a while and this has her putting together a band and moving into a much more goth direction.

Promise Mascot Agency Soundtrack – I have also been a fan of Alpha Chrome Yayo for a few years now and it’s been a lot of fun seeing him do his first game soundtrack. I don’t think you need to play the game to appreciate it but I also recommend the game. The soundtrack has a nice variety of sounds and use of Japanese instruments. There’s also a soundtrack album by Ryo Koike that I mean to pick up soon too.

gloomy june – I guess I would call this alternative or emo pop? Lot of fun. It’s their first album since they switched from being The Y-Axes. The new name is much better. One of the members makes tabletop rpgs.

andwhichstray by Mint Mile – Tim Midyett of Silkworm’s current band, although Silkworm has reunited so I guess that’s his current band too. They’ve done a few albums by this point and they’re all very solid rock albums. This is one of the final albums Steve Albini produced and one song was written by Jason Molina for the surviving members of Silkworm, the day after Michael Dahlquist was killed in 2005, so it’s definitely a heavy one.

The Squirrely Years Revisited by Ministry – Horrible album art but it’s fun to hear Ministry revisited the very early stuff, which I actually like the most by the band to be honest.

Trouble by NUOVO TESTAMENTO – Fun early 90s dance sounding stuff. Earlier stuff was more goth and darkwave sounding.

Dead Channel Sky Plus by clipping. – Technically a rerelease of an album from last year with new track but I think that still counts. A little embarrassing that I haven’t really listened to clipping before this year since they’ve been around for ages but there’s some massive gaps in my hip hop library.

New Dawn by Marshall Allen – The debut solo album by the 100 year old (yes really) bandleader of the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Physical by youryoungbody – Just some fun goth dance music

Evergreen Plaza by Previous Industries – I’ve been a fan of Open Mike Eagle for a while and this supergroup is new to me. All the songs by them are named after defunct spaces, mostly retail.

Phantom Island by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Heard about this band for a while and knew they had a really devoted following. I didn’t quite get obsessed when I heard them for the first time this year but they’re good. Sometimes you can just enjoy rock music a normal amount.

Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan by The Mountain Goats – I’ve liked everything by TMG and I like this album too. Nothing too interesting to say about them. I think it’s kinda funny Tommy Stinson played on this album knowing that Jon Wurster (the drummer) previously made fun of him on a call to The Best Show like 8 years ago after Tommy canceled an appearance at the very last minutes (30 minutes into the show). I don’t think there was any actual grudge though. Not a big Lin-Manuel Miranda fan but it’s just backing vocals.

I’m sure I left out a ton since I was just looking at stuff on Bandcamp that I have. Sorry if I left you out. Whatever you made was probably great.

Blog Roundup (November 30, 2025)

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It snowed a lot here last night, which seems to be exciting for me and literally no other adult. From looking at the week ahead, it seems like it won’t melt soon and we may get some more on top of that. Again, only a thing I enjoy but I will enjoy it quite a bit. As I write this I am listening to the last episode of the Reggae Schoolroom radio show on WFMU. Public radio is great. This week is going to be extremely heavy on video games posts but maybe you’ll find something new to add to your RSS feed reader or feel compelled to share things you’ve enjoyed lately in a post. The internet might feel small because of it revolving around a handful of social media sites but there’s still lots of folks with their own websites.

Video Games

Chuck Jordan, one of the writers of Curse of Monkey Island as well as many other games, praises the new point-and-click adventure Foolish Mortals despite not actually being a big adventure gamer. He also just got around to, and enjoyed, Her Story and Return of the Obra Dinn.

Speaking of adventure games, the adventure games convention AdventureX just happened and a few folks have posts about it. Jana from Rat King wrote about showing Mops & Mobs and The Point n’ Clicker has a few posts covering the event. Both have lots of photos.

Remember Valve’s Ricochet? Well, erysdren digs into the release date listed for it.

Interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin has thoughts on Microsoft making the source code for Zork 1-3 open source.

No Small Games has their monthly indie game roundup, in podcast form.

Retro XP reviews Bonk’s Adventure for the Game Boy. As a child I was weirdly really jealous about the Turbografx folks having Bonk, despite owning a Nintendo console? I don’t really get it now that I think about it. Yes, clearly Bonk games did come to Nintendo consoles but I didn’t consider them to be “real” Bonk games.

Misty talks about a bunch of games from IGF 2026.

The History of How We Play figures out the release dates for some very early crpgs.

Eric, designer of the very good Virtue’s Heaven, has thoughts on Evil Game Design.

Gaming Alexandria uploaded scans of the Scatcher manga and other fun bits connected to the game.

Rob has a really nice writeup and fan art for the indie game Snake-A-Roid.

Indiepocalypse has started hosting writing features. This one is about Hana’s Light and Blink and how they relate to the ways we view the world through technology.

Oma writes about the weird death mechanic in the 2004 ps2 game Malice.

Dev Logs

I mentioned Mops & Mobs earlier in this post. Well here’s a dev log for it. You can check out the current version on Itch.

Laura Michet has a post about writing for the upcoming Young Suns, which I think looks fantastic.

Michael Coorlim makes a small game for the Retromancer collection.

Michigan

Ryan has updated his community giving guide if you’re looking to donate to charities in southeast Michigan.

Michigan!/usr/group has their next virtual meeting on December 9. The topic for this month is IPv6.

TTRPGs

I goofed and forgot to collect good TTRPG posts but here’s one I liked, Pocket-Sized Powder Kegs. It’s about micro-scenarios.

Writing

The Golf Shrine, a website dedicated to golf video games, makes up a bunch of golf films.

Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup hosts writing from Amal El-Mohtar on birdwatching and the loss of a friendship.

Food

It’s not a blog post but I liked this article at Eater about writers talking about growing up with parents who owned a Chinese restaurant at Christmas time. One of the writers is Curtis Chin, who wrote the very good memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, which was about growing up in Detroit during the 80s, being gay, and working at his parents’ restaurant.

Technology

Someone just published a simulator of a 1961 relay computer that runs in your browser.

Virtue’s Heaven thoughts

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Developer: MOKKOGRAD
Publisher: MOKKOGRAD
Year: 2025
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows

pixel art box art of the game that I made

Virtue’s Heaven is a 2D Metroid-like where you explore a world that has been ruined by capitalism and you set out to eliminate those that caused that destruction and free your friends. Unlike a lot of games in the Metroidvania genre, you do not get powerups that allow you to explore new areas. You have all of your abilities at the start of the game and destroying bosses will give you keys to open new areas and make you stronger. My experience with the game was one where I didn’t initially click with the game, but when I figured out how I was playing the game incorrectly it became one of the most satisfying gaming experiences in a long time.

a guy about to kick a robot
Screenshot from Steam

My initial experience with the game was that I was very impressed with the art and music, and thought the combat system, which is based entirely on melee attacks, was an incredibly interesting approach. However, soon it felt like the game was becoming too difficult. The combat started to feel like a slog because the character was not doing much damage and enemies were too strong. I knew it was me doing something wrong though, since the game had put so much thought into every other aspect, that I just got annoyed with myself for missing what was probably an obvious detail and then got distracted by other things and put the game down for a month.

Cut to a month later and I finally came back to the game to see how I would do with the game this time. Pretty quickly I saw that I was correct and missed an obvious detail. The game expects you to go back to town after defeating bosses to get an upgrade to get more health and be able to use more of the powerups you’ve obtained, which you get from freeing your friends. This time the game really clicked with me and I was so happy with how great the game felt. The combat was still challenging but very fair and it was immensely satisfying to keep getting more upgrades after beating bosses. I kinda hate the term juice for describing the feeling of sound effects and other effects that happen when the player interacts with the world, like an explosion after defeating an enemy, but folks, it’s got very good juice. Some of the best explosions in a video game to be honest. The game’s anti-capitalist theme was obviously a big selling point to me too. It feels very rare to see it in a setting like this so I really appreciate the developer taking the big swings with the story it’s telling. It’s not really a game that sets itself up for a sequel but I think there’s some really interesting directions that it could go in if they do decide to make one, which I would certainly be the first in line to buy.

guy dodging an attack in the guy

I should point out that the initial bounce off the game was entirely my fault. The game is very generous with reminders on other aspects of the game and I was probably playing the game and not feeling very patient, which is the wrong mindset when going into a new game. I could have also played the game at the wrong time, when I wasn’t in the mood to learn a new ruleset. This has happened to me before. One of my all time favorite games, Morrowind, is one that I had initially bounced off of but when I came back and was more patient, it really clicked with me and I loved it. I think this was a similar experience. I don’t necessarily like to say that it needs to be appreciated on its own terms, because that might make it sound like you need to accept the shortcomings of something. These weren’t issues with the game. I had just played it at the wrong time. I think it’s even harder now when there’s just so many games that it’s hard to be patient and understand what the game is doing. It’s not like it’s doing anything radical here, I’m not expected to learn a brand new number system like in Riven, but it was still very easy for me to get distracted to jump to something else.

It feels a little silly to write about this massive journey I took with a game that’s ultimately only 4-5 hours long but if a game takes you on an adventure, you have to write about it folks. I’m so glad I came back and recognized what I was doing wrong because it’s a game that I now love and hope more people check out.

Virtue’s Heaven is available on Steam and Itch.io

Indie Game Roundup (November 28, 2025)

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Today is the Black Friday day on Itch.io, where the site is not taking a cut from sales. Technically you can adjust the scale on your page so they never do this, but it’s fun to have a day where it’s enabled by default. Plenty of people have put their games on sale like mine, but I probably have more respect for people that have increased the prices on their games for today. I suppose you could always scan through this list I made on Itch to see what games that have been covered in these roundups are on sale.

Unrelated to indie games, have this video of a moose hitting a cop car on bluesky

There are still lots of new indie game releases happening every day too and here’s some of the ones I’ve noticed. Apologies for today’s post being a little low effort but for me today is a day where I don’t do much and mostly eat leftovers.

The Games

Endless Stairwell (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want system-neutral TTRPG one page dungeon inspired by surreal horror games like P.T. and MyHouse.wad. Throw it into your campaign if you want to mess with players.

TRANSMORFIGATION (Itch.io) is a solo lyric ttrpg about transmorfigation. It’s a new game by Maria Mison and that’s always exciting news.

This bundle of queer art on itch just launched!

first person view of a gray tunnel

erysdren released a free compilation of MS-DOS demos (Itch.io)

The fantastic Moonring is now on Switch. My understanding from comparing the DX version on Switch and the Steam DLC to the free version is that it comes with a massive dungeon? In any case, Moonring! People should play it on either platform.

pixel art bartender saying "There was no woman. The girl came here by herself."

Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved (Steam) is a new visual novel/detective game in the style of older adventure games from Japan. Look at it! It looks great. It reminds me that I need to play Famicom Detective Club too.

robot person shooting and cartoonish robot creatures

Berserk B.I.T.S (Steam) looks like an auto battler/idler game strongly inspired by the Mega Man Battle Network games. While the Battle Network games were never quite for me, I can see why this game would be exciting for other folks. Steam reviews have been very positive too.

duck and turtle jumping over frogs

Windswept (Steam/Xbox/PS/Switch) looks like a really cute platformer where you are a duck and a turtle. It has a demo to try too!