Midnight Scenes: The Highway is the first entry in a horror anthology series by Octavi Navarro, who also worked as an artist on Thimbleweed Park. There are currently five games in the series, with each one being completely standalone, but I would still recommend this one as a great place to start. The games feature gorgeous pixel art and all can be completed in one sitting, with some like this game only being 15 minutes long and later games in the series taking about 90 minutes to play through.
In Midnight Scenes: The Highway you play as a woman who is stranded on a road after her path is blocked by a downed power line and must explore the area to find a way around, but something creepy is lurking out there. This entry in the series is strongly inspired by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and revisiting it reminds me that later games pull back on this and do their own thing a bit more by transitioning to color, dropping opening narration, and feel more violent and arguable more monster focused too. This certainly isn’t a complaint about any of the games in the series. I think they’re all great. It’s just interesting to see how the series has evolvesd. I think adventure game fans who enjoy horror but don’t want to be frustrated will be into this game. It’s not a difficult game, with puzzles that are very straightforward but don’t feel like busy work, no death sequences, and it only being 15 minutes long. That might be a turnoff to some hardcore fans of the genre but I feel very comfortable recommending it to people that just want some creepy vibes for a bit.
Octavi also developed some other short horror games outside of this series that I would recommend, The Supper and The Librarian, that play very similarly to the Midnight Scenes series and can be completed in one sitting.
Midnight Scenes: The Highway is available on Itch.io and Steam.
Developer: Hypnotix, Inc. Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive Year: 1997 Genre: Arcade; Interactive Movie
By the end of the 90’s it was becoming clear that the world of FMV wasn’t going to be the next place for Hollywood to conquer, but that didn’t stop some companies from still giving it a shot. Soldier Boyz is a rail shooter based off a movie of the same name created for HBO, and brings back the cast from the film to shoot new scenes for the game two years later. A billionaire has hired a Vietnam vet and convicts who have been sentenced to life to rescue his daughter from terrorists in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the heroes of the story immediately come off as unlikable. When the Vietnam vet (played by Michael Dudikoff) proposes his plan to use prisoners from a youth detention center (who are all played by much older actors) to rescue the woman, the billionaire father expresses concern that kids are being sent to die. These concerns are immediately shrugged off by our hero, who then hosts interviews to assemble his team. It’s possible that the writing in the original movie was better, unlikely since it received universally negative reviews, but every character in this game who is not a white person is written to be a racist stereotype.
See that blurry mess to the right of the tree? That’s an enemy
I suppose some people would be able to move on from this intro if the game improved. The game doesn’t focus on the characters much after this and most of the FMV in the rest of the game is focused on shooting people in Vietnam and the player character reacting to it. However, the actual gameplay is awful as well. As critical as people were of games like Mad Dog McCree and Space Pirates, at least they were functional. The mouse went where you moved it, fired when you clicked the left mouse button, and you could see what was happening on the screen. Soldier Boyz is unable to even do this. I constantly fought with a lag on the mouse movements that made it difficult for me to shoot anyone. The game is a blurry mess too. The video quality is ridiculously poor and the scenes are disorienting. Nearly every time you shoot someone, the camera cuts to your character’s reaction and then cuts to another character. I’m not especially a fan of the wave of FMV rail shooters that we saw in the 90’s but this is the worst one.
I wouldn’t recommend the game to anyone but if you really must play it, it is playable in ScummVM. The engine used in this game was used for a few other games, although I know nothing about them other than Marvel Comics Spider-Man: The Sinister Six also being a poor game from the streams I saw of it.
There’s no reason to play this game and nothing interesting about it other than film director Darren Aronofsky helped shoot scenes for the game. It’s unfortunate that everything he shot is basically unwatchable but at least he would go on to better things (well, most of the time).
Soldier Boyz is no longer available for sale but it’s probably available on your abandonware site of choice.
Much like Friday’s indie game post, this is going to be a pretty massive post of blog posts that I enjoyed looking at this week. I’ll also sort this one into different categories and maybe you’ll find new things to add to your RSS feed reader. I’ve been using Inoreader, which has worked very well for me since I can also access my unread list from my phone. One day soon I’ll do a complete dump of all the RSS feeds I’m currently subscribed to so people can maybe find new things, or yell at me if I need to add their site. Always feel free to recommend blogs you enjoy following, or your own, in the comments.
Books/Writing
Bez is an interactive fiction writer I’m a fan of so it’s exciting to me that he’s going to start reviewing self-published books he finds on Itch.io. This week he reviews Memory Leak by M. Kirin.
Tot’s Character Compendium is a new blog that is focused entirely on the character creation process in various tabletop rpgs. This is always one of the most interesting parts of a ttrpg to me so I’m excited for this one. The first post covers character creation in the F.E.A.R. inspired game FIST – Ultra Edition.
Clayton has launched a monthly post series on his Ghost newsletter about various posts and stuff he’s into in tabletop rpgs. It’s not just blog posts but it highlights a few of those too.
Hark at Them! is a new blog focused on reviewing indie ttrpgs. This week they’ve reviewed Burnborough and Stealing Your Heart.
Aggregate Cognizance talks about how to have lying NPCs in your tabletop rpg.
Prismatic Wasteland recommends some gift ideas for ttrpg fans that aren’t just dice.
The Fail Forward blog talks about death in ttrpgs and lethal-lite rules.
Not sure if this should go under technology but Katherine Morayati talks about the dead internet company Kozmo in her postcardposting series.
The creator of classic Macintosh games like Glypha and Glider talks about the need for having media offline and local on Engineers Need Art.
Anil Dash goes into the many reasons why you shouldn’t use Substack and provides alternatives and platforms to move to. I fully agree btw. They show their ass every month in various awful ways and no one should use them.
Stuffed Wombat talks about the concept of Density Decay in video games.
Indie Games
Indie Tsushin is a site focused on indie games and developers from Japan. This week I’m highlighting their review of the visual novel/adventure game Monstrous Park.
Freya talks about continuing to work on the Videotome series of game engines.
It’s not really a blog but Gamers with Glasses talks about some of the games from Steam Next Fest.
I Am a Rat is a blog that recommends a game on Itch or IFDB nearly every day. I am linking to their latest review, Wirewalk, but they’re all good.
The Kinsie talks about the horrible PC Accelerator and digs deep into a feature in the first issue about Quake 2 killers.
The Good Old Days reviews the 1988 ZX Spectrum action adventure game Where Time Stood Still.
Other Topics
Videodante talks about Francis Bacon and creating art in horrible times.
Joe Siegler, most famous for his work at 3D Realms, reviews various albums and tv shows on his personal blog and I liked his review of Pink Floyd’s album The Division Bell. I’m not even a fan of the album but I love hearing people talk about why they love music. Personal blogs are just cool!
Nuxx.net talks about signage they made about 10 years ago for not riding muddy dirt trails in SE Michigan, how it has taken off elsewhere, and the files for it for people to make their own since it’s Creative Commons.
Alex posts fond memories of his dog Lacy as well as some photos of a good dog.
Here’s some things on the World Wide Web that aren’t blogs but are still good.
Firehose3D presents Bluesky posts in a way that looks like some kind of Johnny Mnemonic intro crawl.
IMG_0001: “Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.”
Lately I’ve had some nostalgia for early YouTube where people didn’t have the algorithm figured out and video were a lot less polished, so this has been a lot of fun to play with.
I really liked this review of adventure game Phoenix Springs
A new issue of beestung is out! beestung is a quarterly micro-magazine of non-binary writers.
Adventure Game Hotspot has published an interview with Mikael Nyqvist, the creator of the Carol Reed series. I’ve been fascinated with this series for a long time because it’s now at 20 games but the games are only published through his site. He just has no interest in using Steam and Itch and I kinda love it.
Reactor talks about how it’s a really good time to be loud about the books you love.
Oh god, you actually read to the end of this? I promise that next week will be smaller. This got a bit out of control.
Well, this is a big one this week. I don’t know what happened. Due to the volume of releases this week, I tried to split things up into genre so it doesn’t get overwhelming. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. As usual, please let me know what you’ve been playing and enjoying lately, or something you or a friend has been working on! Replies here are fine but DMs and emails are welcome too! If you enjoyed this week’s post, share it with friends, buy one of these games, and tell folks about a weird obscure thing you love.
Before we jump into the games, LudoNarraCon is taking submissions right now if you are working on an interactive fiction or adventure game. Alright, here’s some recent indie games that I think are neat.
Video Games
Action
Bug Castle (Itch.io) is a slick twin stick shooter made for the TIC-80 virtual machine for the 20 Second Game Jam. Free and playable in the browser.
Cowgummi (Itch.io) is a short browser game where you are a purple cow that rolls around, knocking other cows off your meadow. The best game with purple cows that I’ve played all year. It even has merch!
Loser Lane (Site) is a game protesting Ontario removing Toronto’s bike lanes.
Adventure/Interactive Fiction
Chiaroscuro (Itch.io) is a short experimental text adventure game inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure available as Pay-What-You-Want. I like when text adventures insert small amounts of graphics or sound for immersion and thought the use of sound in this one was really good. I’d also recommend this one to people who haven’t played a text adventure before.
Great God Grove (Steam) is an adventure game about stopping the end of the world since the gods are too busy squabbling to do it.
CODENAME: ICEMAN is an adventure game designed by Jim Walls and published by Sierra in 1989. Often considered their worst adventure game, the game starts off ok enough with you spending time on a beach and eventually getting your mission details, but then you board a submarine. You spend half the game on this submarine, fighting with awful controls, little plot development, and doing incredibly tedious tasks. Eventually you leave the sub and do some puzzles that don’t make a whole lot of sense and the game ends with a frustrating mini game. There’s fan games for many games in the Sierra catalog but not this one.
Not until today.
KIDNAME:ICEBOY (Itch.io) is an incredible tribute and parody of CODENAME:ICEMAN where you play as the child version of the protagonist from the original game as he goes to the US Navy’s Submarine Camp. I won’t spoil the game because I strongly recommend it to everyone who’s vaguely familiar with the original game, but I think it does an excellent job emulating Jim Walls’ unique adventure game style and is one of the funniest adventure games I’ve seen in a while if you’re familiar with his games too.
Loco Motive (Steam/GOG/Nintendo Switch) is a new comedy point-and-click adventure where you must solve a murder on a train. I haven’t played this version yet but I loved the game jam version and this has been receiving great reviews so far.
inkjam just wrapped up! ink is a scripting language used for narrative games and this is a jam hosted every year on itch for the language. You can check out all 19 entries on Itch.io
Maybe that’s all we need (Itch.io) is a short (15 minutes) about a masochistic gay woman created for the Videotome jam. Read the CWs first since it’s a NSFW game.
Miniatures (Steam/Itch.io) is a collection of short stories, about 30-40 minutes total, each with their own unique art style. Gamers With Glasses liked it.
Monkey Island Manual Game (Itch.io) is just a nice tribute to The Secret of Monkey Island made in Bitsy where you explore the island and read snippets of the game’s manual.
I think I covered this game last week but THRESHOLD (Steam) is now out. I’ll play this game someday when I’m not being a baby about horror but it seems like reviews have been very positive and I love how it looks.
Playdate
Hausbau (Itch.io) is a free game for the Playdate where you build modernist cityscapes by placing tiles. I haven’t played it yet but I really like how it looks and the game promises jazzy tunes.
One-Armed Space Bandit (Itch.io) is a remake of the slot machine game from Space Quest 1. Unlike that version, this has multiple difficulty levels if you want to die less or more times than you would playing the game. It kinda reminds me of the Macintosh version of Space Quest because of the art. Anyway, it’s a great port and the crank is used well in this game. If you like this, check out their King’s Quest 1 Redux project.
Puzzle
Domino Grove (Itch.io) is a wonderful and free browser game where you domino blocks with trees on them and get points by placing similar dominos next to it until you fill up the screen. I thought this was a fun mechanic for the puzzle game, and thought the art direction and sounds made this a very relaxing puzzle game.
InfluxRedux (Steam) is a remake of a 2013 game where you roll a ball through a variety of different environments and puzzles.
Meal Plan (Itch.io) is a free puzzle game where you find the common element in two 7-item sets. It was created for the Win32 jam so it has some glorious windows in it.
Robot Detour (Steam/Itch.io) is a very cute puzzle game where you play as a little robot delivering batteries to robot friends. I’ve only played the demo so far but the puzzles felt fair but gradually increased in challenge with unique mechanics being introduced to keep it from feeling stale, and the art and music made the game a relaxing experience.
Racing
Thalamus has become a favorite publisher of mine by publishing a variety of games for retro consoles and computers, and games inspired by classic 80s games. Their latest release, Nitro (Itch.io), is a racing game for Game Boy Color. You can play it in the browser or buy it for $1.
RPG
Cybil (Site) is a free 20ish hour long rpg inspired by Might & Magic 3. It was made with megazeux, a game engine from the 90s that I believe is a sequel to ZZT?
Dungeon Clawler (Steam) is a roguelike deckbuilder that uses a claw machine to get items. I haven’t played it because claw machines make me angry but Indie Games+ liked it.
Strategy
Rogue Command (Steam) is a RTS with roguelike elements that has just entered early access. I haven’t played it yet but I thought it would be worth mentioning since it feels like RTS are fairly rare these days and so far it has positive reviews on Steam.
Visual Novel
INTERSTATE 35 (Steam) is a visual novel that follows a young woman returning to her hometown in Texas after a nuclear disaster.
Pinup (NSFW! Itch.io) is an adult M/M fairy bondage visual novel. I liked their previous game Off the Cuff and this one is Pay-What-You-Want and playable in the browser.
Stellifier (Steam) is an idol drama game about an older group making a comeback from retirement, featuring a GxB/BxB/non-binary romance. I haven’t played this one yet but I really liked their game Sifting Thyme. It’s also exciting to me that this studio continues to make VNs since they’re local to me.
Tabletop Games
Bloodsuckers (Itch.io) is a new-ish tabletop rpg available as Pay-What-You-Want where you play as a vampire. It just got a one-shot that starts in a bodega (Itch.io). Since we all know these do not exist outside of Brooklyn, we can finally roleplay the fantasy of being in a bodega.
Crux (Itch.io) is a solo tabletop rpg about overcoming challenges and climbing a mountain. The Itch.io page also links to where you can get a print version of the game.
The Deep Water Jam (Itch.io) is a currently running game jam about making tabletop rpgs about water.
Folklore Jam 2024 (Itch.io) was a game jam where people would write an analogue game that incorporates elements from a folklore or a place where they belong. The jam has ended and you can check out all 39 entries on Itch.io.
MeatCastle GameWare Annual #2 (Itch.io) is a zine collecting TTRPGs, articles, Mothership 1e add-ons, and more published in the second year of Missives from the MeatCastle. The digital version is available as Pay-What-You-Want but there is also a print version available for pre-order.
Polymath (Itch.io) is a new font for dice. It looks nice, it’s free, and has a really nice license.
Solovember (Itch.io) is a currently running game jam where people create solo tabletop rpgs. There’s 8 days left but it already has a lot of entries.
Wicked Tales (Itch.io) is a solo tabletop rpg available as pay-what-you-want where you play as a villain and hopefully not be stopped by the heroes.
Writing
None of these are games, but they’re all on Itch and I thought they were beautiful so I’m including them anyway.
Andromeda Zine (NSFW? Itch.io) is about Andromeda from Greek mythology and how they’re sometimes portrayed with a penis in medieval art. It’s available for Pay-What-You-Want.
Cartomancy Anthology was an incredibly influential games anthology for me from two years ago so it makes me happy to see that they just released an art book (Itch.io) for it that I can nerd over.
Sonia Sulaiman has two zines about Palestinian folklore and folk religion in the Paranormal Palestine series. Both are available on her Itch.io page and available as Pay-What-You-Want.
WORLD IS A FUCK (Itch.io) is a zine by Oma Keeling featuring adult sci-fi short fiction and illustrations.
Crowdfunding
There’s also a lot of games currently crowdfunding that I think are worth a look.
Michael Brough is crowdfunding a new game! 868-BACK is currently crowdfunding on Backerkit and it will probably be pretty great, as all his games are.
Legends of Castile (Kickstarter) is a point-and-click adventure set in 19th century Spain, about a village girl who investigates folk legends in order to become a nun.
The Time We Have (Backerkit) is a two-player storytelling card game about brothers in the zombie apocalypse and the final days before one of them turns.
I mentioned Nochi earlier in this post and they’re also crowdfunding their next game. This one is a port of their game Somnium Eleven (Kickstarter) from mobile to PC.
Demos and Upcoming Games
Car Pack Capital (Steam) looks like a fascinating sim game to me. You try to wipe out a city and make it as unwalkable as possible to sell more cars and parking spaces. So basically the most evil sim game since Dungeon Keeper. It’s a really interesting concept but may be too depressing for me to play.
Cart Life is back? Maybe? It has an Itch page where you can download a demo anyway.
According to the dev on Bluesky, horror visual novel Grizzly Man (Steam) should be arriving sometime by the end of the year.
The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker 2 (Steam) is an upcoming FMV game by D’Avekki. There isn’t much to see yet but I liked the first game. I can’t tell if this one drops the text parser, but the first game used one in really interesting ways.
Kathy Rain (Steam) returns in a new point-and-click adventure. I liked the first game and the art in this looks great. The Steam page also has a demo for folks to check out.
I am a big fan of Cosmic Void’s point-and-click adventure games and I’m happy to see them making a cyberpunk game with Neon Hearts City (Steam/Itch.io). The page also has a demo.
I continue my efforts to put every photo from the CompStoreVisuals account from Cohost (and then eventually the Twitter archive and Mastodon) on my site so there will be a longer lasting home for them. For whatever reason, this one will have more of a Christmas theme to theme. It must have been that time of year when I started posting these pics but I guess it kinda fits in now too.
Not sure where I originally grabbed this one. It has appeared in a few places on the internet and now there’s one more place!
A manager assembles a Windows 95 display at Computer City in Vienna, Virginia.
Sierra On-Line’s Christmas cards, designed to play on computers in stores
1992 CompUSA Christmas commercial
Photo of the Windows 95 midnight launch at a CompUSA in New York City
The Internet Archive has a few pages from a Christmas catalog for Egghead Software from 1990, however my Cohost account says 1991 so maybe someone corrected me based on the games featured? Or I’m just wrong there.
A photo I took of Apples & Oranges in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Probably last year or the year before that.
Here’s an article from a news report from the video game department of a Sears in 1982. Includes shots of Atari computers. https://retroist.com/a-1982-video-visit-to-the-video-game-department-of-sears/ But you know what’s no longer here? The actual footage! Something that’s been incredibly frustrating and sad about maintaining these accounts and posting photos is that I’ve only been doing it for a couple of years and so much disappears! Not just actual stores closing, since it’s a dying form of commerce, but all the sites and videos that will suddenly disappear overnight. Sometimes my goofy accounts are the only places that have preserved photos, which is why I keep reposting them since Cohost and Twitter have both basically died in the last couple years as well. People like to say that things last forever on the internet but they really don’t! I’ve saved a few videos from my time doing this but not this one. If you can find it, please let me know so I can link to it here.
Scans of an article about a computer auction, taken from the July 7, 1990 issue of New Computer Express on the Internet Archive
Alright, I think I’ve gotten back into the groove of posting on here after taking a break because of mental health reasons. Doing posts on here has actually helped with that so I guess I’ll keep it up.
Progress on the adventure game is going well. I think I’m “done” with my game in that it’s playable from start to finish and it’s basically all there. Now I get to just spend the next few weeks testing it for bugs and adding more jokes, and that seems nice. Overall this was a very good experience for me. I’ll finally have shipped a game in Adventure Game Studio, which I’ve wanted to do for at least a decade, and learned a lot in the process. Having a deadline made sure that happened. However, having a deadline is always a little bit stressful for me so I’ll probably take a couple of weeks off after it’s turned in so I can recover. I wouldn’t quite say I’m burnt out, but I think that if I jumped straight to another game I would be.
I’m looking forward to the break though, because I’m going to have a bit of time off in December and will be able to chill and also maybe stream some video games. Maybe some that I will cover in my GOTY awards on here! If you saw my previously grumpy post, I want to see more recognition of indie games, even ones that aren’t on Steam. I’m kinda of bitter about games only being seeing if they’re on there, so I have started putting together a GOTY list and also a For Your Consideration form. I only launched it an hour ago and I’m already discovering a lot of cool stuff I never knew about. I guess if you want to hear about cool things, just make a post saying “tell me about your art!” These won’t have any nominees listed, because that only pits people against each other. I would like to make certificates and send them to people, but depending on the volume of this, they may have to be digital or I’ll lose a lot of money. We’ll see. Not everyone will claim one so maybe it won’t be overwhelming.
I don’t remember if I posted about the other adventure game I was working on before I started work on the one I’ve been blogging about. It’s a sci-fi one made with stop motion animation using clay. I posted about it a few times on Cohost but I don’t know if I did anywhere else. I’d like to jump to that next after I take a short break. It already had a good amount of work done and should cruise along pretty quickly now that I know AGS pretty well. There’s also a stop motion FPS I had started work on and may jump to after that, even if it’s just a very tiny game. I had a lot of fun working on that too. The design doc was already done and so was a lot of the artwork. I have a stack of games I’d like to make but won’t talk about them until I start development on each one or else I don’t think it will happen.
Well, that’s it for this week. Hope you’re doing well!
Around this time every year every outlet starts talking about their games of the year, despite the year not even being over. People often get annoyed by The Game Awards since it’s the biggest and most obnoxious one, but I can ignore this one pretty easily since it’s big and dumb and never offered anything of value. The ones that get to me are from the outlets that talk about how much they love indie games but all the games seem to have a large-ish budget and are available on Steam. Places that offer really experimental, solo games like Itch.io and the interactive fiction competitions like IF Comp get ignored.
It just makes me wonder, where are all the indie game outlets run by perverts?
There’s probably a better way to word that, but why isn’t there more recognition of all the fucked up games people are making? Why aren’t they covering adult games and games with upsetting body horror? There’s smaller places like Weird Fucking Games and Adult Analysis Anthology that are doing good work, but nothing bigger seems like they can be bothered to look at that stuff. Why? Is it just a lack of curiosity? Surely an anonymous game collective like Domino Club dropping a free anthology of experimental games twice a year would be interesting to people who like indie games? Adult game Hardcoded (VERY NSFW Itchio link) just came out after years in development and was a big release in that community. It’s not just the fucked up games being ignored. There’s so many games coming out in every niche, even ones that have been declared dead like point-and-click adventures and text adventures that use parsers.
I don’t think this is the same thing as the tired discourse of “places are covering indie games” because they do. There’s a lot of great outlets that cover them and deserve the support. I just wish a lot of these places dug deeper and were more willing to cover experimental games that didn’t have the time or budget to be really polished. I love UFO 50 as much as the next person, but it’s not the only games anthology to come out this year, and they certainly didn’t invent the games anthology. I just feel like these game of the year awards from people who talk about how much they love indies turn someone even as dull as me into John Waters, and have me asking where are all the people talking about the indie games about people fucking and eating dog shit.
At this point I think everyone knows about the Myst series. It was a gigantic success at release, becoming one of the best selling computer games of all time, and the sequels have done very well too, including the recent (and very good) remakes of Myst and Riven. What a lot of people don’t seem to know about is the MMO spinoff Myst Online. Back in 2003 there was a game called Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, set in the modern day where players create an avatar and explore various ages in 3D. While I was a big fan of the game, it sold below expectations. It was going to have an online component where people got to explore ages together, but it got shut down by the publisher Ubisoft very quickly after release. In 2007 it came back online as part of the games subscription service GameTap, even receiving new content, before shutting down again.
However, it went back online around 12 years ago and has run on a Cyan hosted server, remaining free to download (Myst Online website) and play, and relying on donations for server fees. In recent years it has even received new content that was created by the community. I wrote about one of these updates a year ago and the game has had some big bug fixes lately and a new content addition planned for the beginning of next month.
What I want to talk about in this post is how the community is still very active despite it being a MMO that has died multiple times. Last Saturday night I had the pleasure of playing the Myst universe’s version of Rock, Paper, Scissors called Ahyoheek. It uses a Beetle, Pen, and a Book instead. The Beetle beats Pen, Pen beats Book, and Book beats Beetle. The additional twist is that up to five people can play the game at once. For the last year, people have been meeting up at 11PM EST every Saturday night and meeting in the Competitive Myst Neighborhood to play Ahyoheek. The meetups were started by streamer BogusMeatFactory, although he doesn’t stream the meetups since they’re just folks casually hanging out, playing the game, and talking about their week.
People playing a round of Ahyoheek
I’ve known about the meetups for a while but never made the time to attend one until now. I can easily say it was a delight and I will be going to many more. It was so much fun to play a part of the game I’ve never really experienced, despite occasionally hopping on a few times most years since its revival because it’s a frequently empty game. A few of the folks who played in Ahyoheekwere actually pretty new to the MMO and only decided to check it out in the last year because they were Myst fans but never actually played this spinoff. I played a few rounds and then decided to just sit and hang out to talk to folks while playing, since the table only supports five players and the total turnout was 12 people. Conversations included Myst Online of course, but people also talked about other things like cooking or whatever else they were up to. It was just a pleasant time and it was nice seeing people hanging out in the world like you would expect from a MMO that was doing well and hasn’t been shut down multiple times.
It turns out that the Myst Online community actually does quite a few meetups and events. Every other week someone hosts a radio show inside of Myst Online called Radio Free D’Ni, a big meetup on the first Saturday of every month, tour groups of the game’s ages, and story times. These are all listed on The Guild of Messengers calendar page. I could probably be clever and make a reference to Myst about how the ending has not yet been written but it really is the case for a lot of MMOs. Asheron’s Call 2 was my first MMO and there are people making good progress bringing it back, with the first Asheron’s Call already having community servers. Even Sierra Online’s online community from the 90s is still going thanks to fans. Just because a game has shut down doesn’t mean it’s gone forever.
Photo from the end of the end at the most recent Ahyoheek meetup
I made a post on bluesky yesterday about having your own website or blog and it really blew up so now I’m fired up about websites and will probably be more annoying about them than usual. If you’re reading this then you probably have one but if you don’t? Go fix that. It’s a lot of fun and then I can read it and tell everyone about how cool it is!
Also did you know you could like posts on Bear Blogs? I didn’t realize that until just a few minutes ago. Haha, WHOOPS! So if you have one, just pretend I was liking every post until now, because that’s probably what I would be doing.
Anyway, here are some of the posts I enjoyed reading this week! If you enjoy these, subscribe to some RSS feeds and do your own link roundup. Google sucks now and this is how people will discover new sites.
Dev logs are great. You all need to post updates on your games on your own site instead of on a social media network that might not even be around in a few years.
I love reading blog posts that are just life updates from people I know, and they talk about what art they’ve been enjoying or what they’re up to. For example, these posts from Renkon and coffeentacos were really nice to read. If you’ve ever wanted to blog about that stuff and didn’t think people wouldn’t care, you’re wrong!
If you had a cohost account, you should repost your stuff! Here’s a nice pencil animation.
It’s not a blog but Unwinnable talks about the dying art of finding porn in the woods. I always heard about this but even in the 90s it never happened to me.
I also enjoyed some older posts that I saw folks sharing. This blog post talks about how it’s good to be frivolous on your blog, talking about whatever you like. I found it from someone I follow just reblogging it.
Molly White talks about an approach to social media that I think I’m currently doing, POSSE.
Developer: College Fun Games Publisher: College Fun Games Year: 2024 Genre: Adventure
The Protagonish is a recently released adventure game by College Fun Games where the twist is that you control everyone in the story but the protagonist. You follow him around on his quest but whenever he interacts with another character, you control their actions and influence his journey.
Each playthrough of the game features the protagonist interacting with NPCs in four scenes, with each scene lasting about a minute or two. The playthroughs are about five minutes long and you’ll want to replay the game a few times to see how your actions can affect the story and see all the endings. The animation and voice acting in each scene were top notch and made the scenes pleasant to watch, even on repeat playthroughs.
If I did have any criticisms of the game, I wish it were longer. I think the concept works very well and it would have been interesting to see what a game like this would be like if a playthrough was at least twice as long. It took about 20 minutes for me to get through everything in the game and it felt like a satisfying experience, but I think it could have also been longer without wearing out its welcome. I don’t feel like that is a bad deal for a game that’s $4, but that’s very subjective and I personally don’t feel very comfortable about telling you how much entertainment per dollar you should be ok with since we all value this stuff differently.
That all said, I had a good time playing The Protagonish and would recommend it to others if you want to see a game experiment with the tropes of the adventure genre. I would love to see a sequel that expands on the ideas in this game.
The Protagonish is available for $3.99 on Itch.io and Steam.The review is based on a key sent from the developer.
