Author: mpklamerus

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!

My Micro Fiction Games Jam 2025 Entry

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Yesterday I mentioned the Micro Fiction Games Jam, where folks make a ttrpg in 280 characters or less. It’s just a fun little unranked jam that lets you quickly make a game and not feel like you’re stuck in a rut if it’s been a while since you made anything. I could have sworn I entered the jam before but maybe it was a different but similar jam. I’m too lazy to look up my previous blog post about it. Anyway, this time I made a game based on the 7th Guest microscope puzzle. It’s kinda become infamous because the difficulty of the AI was apparently determined by the processor speed and quickly became way too difficult. This has nothing to do with my tiny ttrpg. Not my best work, but fine enough for a 280 character jam, and technically the first ttrpg I’ve made in a few years.

Microscope

You’re a mutated microbe in a petri dish with 10 other microbes
Roll 1d4 each turn
-On 1-2 you infect one microbe
-On 3-4 one of your microbes divides into two and infects one
Repeat until all are infected
Once all are infected, one of them mutates and the process repeats

Who knows, maybe this will motivate me to do bigger and better ttrpgs again. I think you all should consider making one too. There’s a couple days left in the jam for you to make a 280 character ttrpg.

Indie Game Roundup (November 26, 2025)

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It’s Wednesday but since I live in the US and it’s Thanksgiving week here, it’s basically my Friday before a long weekend. Hopefully you also have some free time coming up to play games, read a book, work on a little project, or whatever you want. A lot of time sensitive things popped up this week so I wanted to get this one out since I don’t think I’ll be able to do a writeup later this week over the holiday.

New Games

Here, have a bitsy. This one is called Kitten Town (dev site).

a box by binary star games that just says void shift in glitchy text

The physical version of VOID_SHIFT is out. It’s a solo deckbuilding game about doing hard jobs in space in the far future. There’s also a black friday sale on the designer’s site.

Roguelike designing legend Michael Brough just put a ton of their old Windows games in a bundle for Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io

Angel Amore aka Cutestpatoot has been doing a game every day as well as a vlog about the making of the game. I think this is bananas and my body would fall apart but everything they’ve done this week looks amazing, the videos are interesting, and you should check out their YouTube and games on Itch.io.

pictures of goats and monty hall

Spindley Q Frog has made a game that combines Minesweeper and the Monty Hall problem. You can play it in the browser here.

person punching a robot and text being filled in saying "How do celebrities keep cool?"

Keys of Fury: Typing Action (Steam) combines retro beat ’em ups like Final Fight with typing games. I haven’t played it but Mike Drucker (review link on TheGamer) loved it. I also liked Mike’s memoir Good Game, No Rematch (bookshop.org). I feel like I’ve been pushing books a lot lately on this blog? If you take one thing away from today’s post it’s that people should go to the library more often and read books.

Here, have a new DOS game. Treasure Hunt II is a remake of a DOS game the developer made 35 years ago. Since they own the site it’s hosted on (DOSGames.com) and feel weird about reviewing their own game, they gave it 2/5 stars but I think people should have more pride in their work. You can also play it in the browser.

The Micro Fiction Games Jam (Jam site) has just started. It’s a jam where you make a game in 280 characters or less. This year’s theme is Absorb, Repose, Recursion.

The IF Short Games Showcase 2025 (Itch.io jam page) also started! It’s just an excuse to show off shorter works of interactive fiction that you made sometime this year. Consider submitting your game if you made a short IF this year.

white ball falling and taking out a lot of balls below it

Bubbled Bugs (Itch.io) is a free browser puzzle game where you drop colored balls and match them with other balls of the same color and it has a roguelike element in that you are picking powerups between levels. All done in PICO-8.

Duskpunk (Steam) is a Citizen Sleeper-like rpg that is inspired by tabletop rpgs. This one seems to have more of a survival focus and is set in a Steampunk world. I don’t know a whole lot about it but startmenu seemed to like it.

Dominic Tarason recommends billions of interesting indie games all the time on Bluesky so here are some you should check out. Consider following him if you want to learn about more games. He’s a far better writer too. This is kind of a lazy dump because I need to mention them now or they’re probably never coming up, despite looking really cool and worth your time.

  • Morsels (Steam) is a fast-paced creature collecting roguelite
  • Kingdoms of the Dump (Steam) is a SNES styled JRPG set in a fantasy world of garbage

VORON: Raven’s Story (Steam) is a Norse-inspired adventure game, including puzzle solving, but it has you flying around as a raven and gaining new powers to access new areas.

Wishlist

Here’s some recent indie game announcements that you may want to add to your wishlist on Steam.

Sometimes I just want a 2D platformer where you shoot things. Junk Sec (Steam) looks like a nice one of those. Because I have Amiga nostalgia poisoning, it reminds me of the game Obliterator, despite it actually looking nothing like that and probably being much better too.

I’m so excited for Young Suns (Steam) by KO_OP. A co-op space game with chill vibes and a bunch of great narrative designer/writer folks working on it? Yes, absolutely. That’s 100% for me.

Thank you for reading today’s post. If you’re interested in telling me about a game, feel free to comment or send me an email. Your own games are welcome too as long as they don’t use AI. Comments/emails to say hi are always welcome too.

Crystal Caves HD thoughts

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Developer: Emberheart Games
Publisher: Apogee Games
Year: 2020
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows

Crystal Caves HD is a remaster of the 1991 shareware game by Apogee where you play as Mylo Steamwitz, a miner in outer space, trying to become rich. The platformer has you going through levels and grabbing all the crystals in each one while trying to avoid various monsters and traps. There’s also a puzzle element as you have to carefully plan the use of the timed power ups in the level to reach certain areas and the order that you’ll unlock doors and activate platforms. I used to play the original version quite a bit as a kid so it was nice to see this rerelease happen. Emberheart has done a few of them at this point, with Secret Agent and Monster Bash being the other two Apogee remasters they’ve done. I’ve previously played through the Secret Agent one and enjoyed that quite a bit, and the gameplay and additions in this remaster are very similar.

a miner jumping on metal or stone platforms behind a giant green monster
Image taken from Steam page

The remaster adds more color and smoother animation to the original game, music, an entire new episode of levels, and a level creator. I can see the argument for the additional colors removing some charm from the original game but I think it looks nice. The music is fine too but if I did have any criticisms of this remaster I think it’s that the music almost sounds more like something on an older video game console rather than a PC game from this era. This is a very minor gripe though. I think the new levels are very solid and feel like a good continuation of the previous three episodes, and the level editor seems to have been embraced by a very active community with the developer still adding stuff years later.

a screen about how the main character has found success with his burger restaurant, which is floating in space
This ending screen from episode 3, also in the original game, is just Monolith Burger from Space Quest 3, isn’t it?

I’m very possibly too nostalgia poisoned to accurately assess this game but I think it holds up pretty well and Emberheart has done a wonderful job with the remaster, just like they did with Secret Agent. If I had any complaints about the game, not the remaster, it’s that it becomes tedious to marathon the game and it’s why I very slowly played this over a year, but it’s still pleasant to play in short bursts. The developer has also done a remaster of Monster Bash, another Apogee shareware game I loved. I haven’t played it yet but the reception on Steam seems to be very positive and I’m sure it’s great if it’s anything like the other two they’ve done. I haven’t finished it yet but Emberheart also developed the fps Wizordum, which kinda feels like if Catacomb 3D had kept being iterated on instead of ID moving on to Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. If you’re a retro FPS fan, I highly recommend it. There’s also an upcoming remaster of BioMenace that is not by this developer but looks amazing, with it having lots of features I wish this had, like the ability to switch between the old and new graphics. Give the demo a try if you have fond memories of the original.

Crystal Caves HD is available on Steam and GOG.

Indie Game Roundup (November 21, 2025)

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We have survived another week. Hope you’re all doing well. If you find today’s post to be useful, consider picking up a vTuber model or cross stitch pattern from Rose. As usual, you’re more than welcome to let me know about your project, as long as it doesn’t use AI, through email or DM. Don’t even use AI art in early prototyping, come on. It’s such a bummer to see the little AI disclaimer on a Steam page saying it was used at some point early on but they have their own art now, pinky promise. You can also just comment with stuff you’ve been playing lately.

The Games

The excellent lesbian romance boss rush BOSSGAME: The Final Boss is My Heart is now on Switch and Playstation. I was a big fan of this game, which was already on mobile and PC, so it’s nice to see it come to more platforms.

Local Heroes (Itch.io) is a one-shot tabletop rpg for 4-5 players where the players (who are playing as themselves) take on a shape changing monster in their own neighborhood. I really like Amanda’s work and I’m happy to see another game by her.

I think the biggest release this week is probably Demonschool (Steam), a tactics rpg inspired by Persona where you navigate university life and fight demons. Reviews of it seem like they’ve been very positive!

top down view of a snake in space and asteroids and space ships

Snake-A-Roid (Steam) is a vector graphics arcade game that combines the games Snake and Asteroids. It was recommended by Rob so it’s probably a pretty great arcade game with nice flashy retro-inspired graphics.

beams of light shooting out the tops of pillars while text says less than a percent of all lives recognized

Grove of the Felled Olives (Steam) is a free virtual memorial dedicated to the over 60,000 humans killed in Gaza between October 2023 and July 2025.

Damnatio Ad Bestias (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want tabletop rpg that you play with your cat and actions are based on what toys they bring you.

pixel art of a king saying "can you retrieve the sword and defeat evil forever?"

RUIN Ch.0 (Itch.io) is a short, free narrative adventure that you can play in the browser and serves as a celebration of the anniversary of a fictional game.

Ambrosia Sky: Act One (Steam) is described as “an immersive sim about exploring an asteroid colony devastated by an unknown contamination.” There was discourse about immersive sims this week and I’m not engaging with that. You all can have fun with that one. Even though it’s labeled as Act One, my understanding is that it still feels like a satisfying experience.

Early Access

Cleared Hot (Steam) is a spiritual sequel to games like Desert/Jungle Strike where you fly a helicoptor around in an isometric perspective and blow things up.

Moonlighter 2 (Steam). I never played the first one but this looks like an action rpg and probably of interest to people that liked the first one.

isometric view of a diner and food being cooked

The Diner at the End of the Galaxy (Steam) is, as British people love to say, what it says on the tin. It’s a management game where you run a diner on another planet.

Wishlist

Some games just got Steam pages and might be of interest to folks here.

Gilt is an upcoming point-and-click adventure by Ben Chandler and published by Wadjet Eye Games. As expected by anything Ben is working on, the art looks incredible.

Return to Dark Castle is a new entry in the classic computer game series by the original series designer. I heard these games maybe don’t hold up but I used to play the first game on the Amiga a lot so I’ll probably check this one out too. EDIT: I have been informed by Misty that this is actually a rerelease of the 2008 Mac game but that it has been unavailable for a while and never came out for Linux or PC so it’s still nice to see.

TR-49 is a new interactive fiction game by Inkle so into my wishlist it goes.

I really liked picoCAD so I’m happy to see it getting a new version.

Indie Game Roundup (November 18, 2025)

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Well the Cloudflare issues may have taken down most of the internet but you know what place didn’t go down? That’s right. I guess it didn’t really matter since Itch was down and a majority of the links posted wouldn’t work anyway. Here’s some games:

Gnorts Vs. the Greylenoids (Itch.io) is a free prototype platformer that resembles 2.5D platformers for the Playstation and I think it has a really nice filter it’s going through to make it look like it’s on an old tv. If you like the aesthetic it has, check out SodaRaptor’s other games. Check out the other entries for the ShroomJam 2025 too, since a lot of other games were aiming for a similar aesthetic for the theme like DUCK TAPE.

VIDEOVERSE is a visual novel inspired by the MiiVerse and early 00s forums that I’ve been a huge fan of for a long time on the PC (Steam/Itch) and now it has launched for consoles like the Switch and Playstation.

a bird with a drill for a beak jumping through the air

Drill Bird (Steam) is just a cute and affordable puzzle platformer and it’s got a demo if you want to give it a try.

Speaking of puzzle games, the ThinkyCon Jam 2025 just wrapped up and there’s a ton of free puzzle games for you to try on Itch.

top down view of a triangle shooting at various shapes on a grid

Sometimes you just want a nice twin stick shooter with lots of bright colors and exposions and Sektori (Steam/PS/Xbox) looks like a nice one of those.

The Tower of the Forest Wizard (Itch.io) is not a video game and in fact a coloring book, but I think it’s neat that an artist I like put a coloring book on Itch so here it goes.

view of an office with a desk and lots of drawers for files.

The developers of Trüberbrook have been working on this adventure game for the last four years. The Berlin Apartment (Steam) is a first-person adventure game where you explore an apartment to discover its history, but unlike the Robert Zemeckis film Here, it does not have uncanny valley Tom Hanks. There’s a demo if you’d like to give it a try.

it sucks to be us (Itch.io) is a free interactive fiction about a closeted trans masculine person and a trans man who was forced to detransition. Obviously there’s going to be content warnings that come with something like that but I think it’s really a remarkable and well-written game and even as someone who is not a trans man, did have things I could relate to.

top down view of a ship shooting lots of lasers at other ships while dodging dots

BIRDCAGE (Steam) looks like an incredible Radiant Silvergun-inspired shmup for the PC. I only played the demo but it felt great to control, loved that it has difficulty settings, and nailed the aesthetics of its inspirations. It’s a golden age for people who are nostalgic for late 90s video games.

Support Rebecca Heineman’s GoFundMe

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I was originally going to do an indie game roundup but don’t really have the energy for it today. I’d just like to encourage people to donate to Rebecca Heineman’s GoFundMe. It was originally setup to help cover the cost of fighting cancer but is now for covering hospice and funeral costs. She’s done so much for other folks in video games and has always been very generous with her time so please consider donating if you can. If you’re curious about what she’s worked on, MobyGames has listed plenty of her credits but I’m pretty sure there’s quite a few that aren’t on there.

Blog Roundup (November 16, 2025)

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In last week’s post I said it was snowing for the first time this season. Yesterday it reached a high of 65 (C or F, I’ll let you decide). For the first time in a while, my RSS feed reader has actually been cleared out. I like to do these because it just helps make the internet feel a little less small when the general narrative seems to be “the internet is a few social media websites and discsord.” A few websites have been celebrating big anniversaries too and it has been nice to see websites post about how they are 10/20/30 years old. Even this one is already 3 years old, which isn’t much but still feels weird.

Anyway, maybe you’ll feel like adding some of these to your RSS feed reader or start your own website.

Video Games

Gaming Alexandria turned 10! If you have an interest in video game preservation, poke around and check out all the items they’ve uploaded over the years.

There was some annoying discourse kicked off by someone I don’t care for on Bluesky earlier this week about dialogue choices but it did result in Jon Ingold from Inkle, who does know what he’s talking about when it comes to this kind of thing, writing a brief defence of dialogue choices. So I guess it wasn’t a total waste of time.

Possessor(s) (Steam) came out this last week and there have been a few folks writing about their work on the game and celebrating the rest of the team since the studio was also hit with layoffs before the game shipped. They still receive revenue sharing so this isn’t an instance of a studio trying to screw people over. It’s just been an incredibly hard time for everyone in video games. Anyway, I recommend reading Celebrating the Possessor(s) team and Possessors has released!

The very good fan site Final Fantasy VIII is the Best is still going and receiving regular updates. This week was PuPu week so it’s just been posts about that thing.

The Space Quest fansite Roger Wilco’s Virtual Broomcloset turned 30 this month and has been celebrating with updates and posts, including a history of the canceled Space Quest 7 and a 3D platformer reboot that was attempted in the early 00s.

Someone recently asked about how I find out about indie games and aside from spending too much time on social media, I just have a lot of sites in my RSS feed reader. So here’s a random shoutout to various sites I follow and links to posts from them this last week:

So there’s a random handful of sites posting things just this last week about games I never heard of and they’re all covering very different things.

TTRPGs

From the Hart has a post recommending 8 RPGs you could be playing RIGHT NOW

Music

Morning Music is a blog I love that regularly posts what they’re listening to that morning and it’s almost always stuff I never heard of but really like. The most recent post is about Yellow Fang – แค่เพียง.

Dev Logs

I like reading posts about how projects are coming along. Here’s some:

Food

I get excited anytime someone I follow posts a recipe so to encourage that, here’s a recipe for confetti soup.

Tech

Here, have an invoice for an IBM computer from 1994.

Yaffle does a very nice roundup of posts on other websites.

Vintage Computing and Gaming turns 20, which I suppose makes it vintage as well, and reflects on the complicated feelings they now have about new technology.

If you enjoy computer history, may I recommend the Computer Chronicles Revisited Podcast?

That’s it for this week. I hope you found something you enjoyed reading and it inspires you to post on your own website.

Indie Game Roundup (November 14, 2025)

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My attempt to post about all the indie games continues. I didn’t play that much these last few days because of school and was also listening to Tim Curry’s memoir, which I enjoyed. He mentions having fun working on Red Alert 3 but nothing about Gabriel Knight or Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster! Unbelievable! Still a very good book though. Video games are good but books? Also good. You’ll see a one or two pop up in today’s post.

If you enjoy today’s post, consider tossing a few dollars to indie game hero Rob, developer of great games like Death Ray Manta and supporter of many indie game devs over the last few decades.

The Games

Rebel Wars (Itch.io) is a new top-down action game for the ZX Spectrum available for pay-what-you-want. If you didn’t know that Itch.io has a very active ZX Spectrum community, then I recommend checking out the tag on Itch.io and seeing all the great games still being made for the computer.

old windows status bar filling up and saying "checking national enquirer..."

Alien Detector (Itch.io) is a parody of those novelty programs you would see being made for Windows during the 90s.

a little sprout like thing jumping

Merp in Merpworld (Itch.io/Steam) is a new 2D platformer by maybell. that is inspired by GBC platformers. I am a giant fan of their previous games like satryn deluxe so I am excited to see them make something in a different genre.

MORSE (Steam) is a minimalist strategy game that teaches you morse code. You can even hook up a telegraph key to play it. I need a streamer to play this with a telegraph key, please.

Choose Your Own Adventure books count as games IMO and if you were a fan of the Tex Murphy adventure game series, a new mystery in CYOA format has been released. You can pick it up on Amazon and I THINK on Aaron Conner’s site as well if you want a signed copy of it or any of the other Tex Murphy books.

person hitting someone with a bat

I suppose it might be a little weird to put something published by Devolver here since they’re getting pretty big but Heart Machine is a great developer that has been hit by layoffs right before releasing their latest game Possessor(s) (Steam). I know there was some understandable hesitation from some folks about buying the game but it sounds like people will receive revenue sharing even if they were let go.

After being in development for 7 years, GIGASWORD (Steam) is now available. It’s a metroidvania that leans more into a puzzle focus and has a demo if you want to try it.

a big dragon like thing in the sky

If you enjoy arcade games with trippy visuals (aka Llamasoft fans) then THRASHER (Steam) may be worth a look. It’s from some of the folks that worked on THUMPER and has an optional VR mode.

Gila RPGs has published their free playtest for RAID (Itch.io), which is their take on the OSR style of ttrpg. It mixes sci-fi and fantasy elements into a game about killing gods. It’s only 11 pages long but already looks pretty snazzy.

That’s it for today’s post! If you’ve got something you’ve recently released and it doesn’t use AI, feel free to send me an email or message about it!

Indie Game Roundup (November 11, 2025)

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The almost daily indie game roundups continue as I attempt to cover all the games I think are neat. People keep insisting on making games though so the list keeps growing! If you enjoy today’s post, consider buying Geeky Jay a coffee to help cover some bills they recently got.

Today’s Games

a motel at night

TRIPtych (Itch.io) is a short walking sim where you explore various places at night during a road trip and I thought it had nice vibes. I think this game was made for a class? I’m currently making a game for a group project in a class too so I feel compelled to put this one at the top today because it’s a weird way to make games.

two guys in the woods, one is stuck in a tree

Julia Minamata, creator of the wonderful adventure game The Crimson Diamond, just released a fan game for Over the Garden Wall (Itch.io) that reunites creator Patrick McHale, background artist Levon Jihanian, musicians The Blasting Company, and Elijah Wood is back as Wirt. Can something be considered a fan game if the original creator is involved? Anyway, it’s a great, short game.

a robot with a staff overlooking a chasm

Hypogea (Steam) is a 3D platformer where you are a robot that must escape from a giant underground structure. The game itself reminds me a lot of something you would see in the early 00s. Not just the graphics, but just the general feeling of it being something you would see on a CompUSA shelf during that time, which I 100% mean as a compliment. The game itself is a platformer but I really think a lot of adventure gamers would enjoy it too because of the puzzle solving and storytelling being done without words. There’s a demo if you want to give it a try.

Go Kart Island (Steam) is an open world kart racer where you can explore an island and do different types of racing events. The character design in this kinda reminds me of the characters in the old shareware game Wacky Wheels. A demo is available too.

a underground cavern with small monsters and rocks filled with worms

Farewell (Itch.io) is a challenging free platformer where you must dig down through an abandoned mine to cure a plague. You have a limited time because of your torch and must buy powerups or find pickups to extend the life of your torch to get to the end.

Puzzle Depot (Steam/Itch.io) is a sokoban-like set in a post-apocalyptic world and features lots of nice pixel art. The game has a demo if you want to try it out.

Crowdfunding

A few folks are currently doing crowdfunding for their tabletop rpgs. Heart of Glass is a mini-campaign for the synthwave inspired ttrpg Street Wolves. Apocalypse World: Burned Over is the 3rd edition of the incredibly influential post-apocalyptic ttrpg. Both have already hit their goals too and will be happening.

That’s it for today’s post. Always feel free to let me know through here or email if you’re working on a game and it doesn’t use AI. Also consider adding this blog to your RSS feed reader