Author: mpklamerus

Blog Roundup (August 3, 2025)

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My first blog roundup of Blaugust, the month long event where folks try to make a little blog post every day (not it’s not required for participation in blaugust). It’s been fun seeing folks I already follow jumping in, even unofficially. I recommend these blogs!

If I forgot your blog, please excuse my screwup and let me know so I can follow it too!

The Obscuritory did its first post about a game in years and I’m so excited! I never even heard of The Tone Rebellion.

Indie Tsushin is back!

I haven’t even heard of many of the Games Aura’s Playing and that’s awesome.

I also love to hear about marketing adventure games and just stuff along those lines, so here’s exodrifter talking about No Signal.

I think if you’ve been following my blog then you are used to me telling you to see a RSS feed reader, but here’s a very good intro guide to them for you to share with friends.

It looks like Myst Online has a bunch of events organized by the community coming up this week! Just a reminder that Myst Online is absolutely free to play.

Do tumblr posts count as blog posts? Maybe? Anyway, here’s a good post on Ultima Underworld.

It’s not a blog post about I liked this video on The Hidden Origin of Artillery Games.

Also not a blog post but I like this website on why you should leave Substack and alternatives you can move to.

Gemini

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I’ve joked sometimes on social media about how there needs to be an Internet 2 because of how crappy the modern internet has become, but I just learned about the Gemini protocol, which is maybe not The Internet 2 but a fun thing to noodle with, thanks to this blog post. I’ve downloaded Lagrange, which seems like the recommended application for looking at these pages and started poking around. I think it’s pretty neat so far, even if I have no idea what I’m doing. If you have a page, I guess let me know? I’ve found a few pages from people I know but I’m always looking for more to bookmark since I’m still learning how to navigate this. I would also appreciate any tutorials on how to make your own page so I can do my own.

Indie Game Roundup (August 1, 2025)

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Since I skipped doing this last week, this is going to be an entry that is both huge and also missing a lot of stuff so apologies in advance for that. I’m probably not going to talk about a lot of bigger things like the new Ninja Gaidan because I don’t even know if those things qualify, but feel free to reply with whatever things you’re excited about. If you have time, help fight against the delistings of games by calling in to payment processors. You can also play this Game Boy game on Itch for more information.

The Video Games

person in a dungeon and text saying "you feel afraid"

The Chambers Beneath is now available! I think I mentioned this one in a previous blog update but I’ll mention it here too. It’s a new roguelike for DOS that I got to beta test and I think it’s very good. The game is available as Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io and the developer’s site. I’m not good at it (I’m always awful at roguelikes) but it was very easy for me to pick up and get going in this one.

INSERT/DATE/HERE is a short browser game about the genocide in Gaza on Itch.io and the amount of deaths that have happened so far.

Draw a Fish is a browser game where you draw a fish, see how accurate of a fish it is, and then have it swim with other fish people have drawn.

a view of an empty room with a table, dartboard, and bottles on a shelf

No Signal (Itch.io/Steam) is a first person adventure game about exploring an abandoned space station and learning about what happened to the crew.

Dead Take is a new horror adventure game on Steam. I know nothing about it other than it has FMV so it automatically goes in this post.

a little robot saying to another "I love how you can fly a little bit"

Mishina (Steam) is a digging game by the folks that made Judero and it’s filled with tons of great stop-motion animation.

Heartworm (Steam) is a horror game inspired by classic games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill with optional tank controls.

images of pirates on a 5x5 grid

Sunken Stones (Steam) is a turn based puzzle-strategy game about pirates and cursed treasure. If you want to try the game out first, there’s a demo on Itch.io.

drawing of a rabbit in a chair saying "Go away! I'm having tea! I'm British!!"

The Manhole from Memory (Glorious Trainwrecks link) is an attempt to recreate the classic Cyan game The Manhole entirely from memory inside of Decker.

Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking (Steam) is the newest game by Strange Scaffold, folks I’m always excited to see new games by. It’s a co-op horror game you are medieval monks and must feed giant monsters, so I guess it’s what it says on the tin, as British people would say. I refuse to call this friendslop because slop is supposed to have chunks of things in it.

a fly buzzing near a guitar

Time Flies (Steam) is an adventure game where you have a limited amount of time as a fly to do a variety of goals and features some great looking 1-bit art.

The Tabletop RPGs

Playlist Dungeon is a dungeon crawling ttrpg that is designed to be quick to pick up and play for 1-4 adventurers and one DJ, with the character creation process being based on playing songs. It’s available as Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io

Underneath (Itch.io) is a solo cave mapping game of the unexpected things you encounter underground using a map, journal, and dice. Just got this one from backing the kickstarter and I’m so excited to play it.

Blaugust is Here!

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As I mentioned last week, it’s Blaugust! I will be trying to post every day so apologies in advance for for the huge quantity of posts that are coming your way, with a lot of them being on the short side. I hope you’ll consider joining me in making lots of posts on your blog! I don’t plan on following any sort of prompt or theme. Mostly just highlighting various indie games that I think are worth a look, especially with so many being delisted lately.

Black Hole Havoc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog Roundup (July 27, 2025)

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

Video Games

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

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

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

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

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

Retro Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tabletop RPGs

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

Dev logs

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

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

Meredith Gran posts about her brother releasing a video game.

Writing

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

Tech

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

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

Other Bits

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

Fighting Censorship of Games on Itch.io and Steam

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

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

Blaugust Plans

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

Glypha: Vintage

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

screenshot of two birds flying in a room with egyptian art

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

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

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

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

Glypha: Vintage is available on Steam.

Happy 40th Birthday to the Amiga

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