First roundup of the new year! If you enjoy these, share with a friend and consider giving to the GoFundMe for Renee Good’s wife and son after she was murdered by ICE earlier this week. Also if you’re still on X/Twitter, get some help. Why are you on the child porn generator site? Jesus Christ. Ok, here’s some games.

Booze Elroy (Itch.io) is a Pac-Man clone with a billion customizable options to choose from. Even if it was just Pac-Man it would be a good clone of that, but it adds so many options you can enable that change the game quite a bit and I think it’s fantastic. I really can’t recommend grabbing this one enough, it’s pay-what-you-want, before a big site like Kotaku or PC Gamer covers it and gets the game pulled like they always do.

We just got Indiepocalypse #72 on Itch. Each issue features a collection of tabletop and experimental video games, as well as a game commissioned for the issue. You can buy physical copies of the compilations here.

Gardenloom (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want collaborative tool for building a tarotesque oracle deck for 1+ players. It’s still being worked on so give a try and give some feedback. TTRPG designers always appreciate playtesters.

Celestial Coffee Quest (Itch.io) is a short point-and-click adventure available as Pay-What-You-Want. It’s by Wavey Games, who made the great adventure Melon Head, so it’s nice to see a new free adventure game from them. I really love the retro EGA aesthetic that all of their games have too and just how odd and goofy the games can get.

Bimbo (Itch.io) is a static site generator by Izzy! I’m a big believer that people should make their own websites, even on something like Neocities, so I full support this. No it’s not a video game but social media sucks, people should have their own homebase where crappy moderators can’t limit what you say, and it’s my blog so I can put whatever I want in here.

Solo But Not Alone 6 (Itch.io) just went live. It’s a charity bundle featuring 90 single player tabletop rpgs for just $10. All proceeds go to mental health charity Take This.

The Procession of Horses in Motion (Itch.io) is an experimental short software film that runs about 6 minutes long and I think is worth watching. The term software film is being used because it really is a program that you run and watch, with no interactivity, and is explicit in that it’s not a game in any sense. I’m still including it though. Does this make it a cousin of demoscene stuff and the non-interactive demos that you would see released for video games in the early 90s? Anyway, I really like it and think you should check out the other works of INFINITE TEARS too.

Another jam for Decker just wrapped up on Itch. Decker is a Hypercard-inspired tool for making little apps and games for browsers and now there’s 37 new things made with Decker for you to check out.

And finally, every December Tom Hall, of Commander Keen/Wolfenstein 3D/Anachronox fame, runs a game jam where he makes lots of assets for folks to use and an optional ARG to participate in. It’s a lot of fun and great games are made for it each year. That jam just wrapped up and now there are 94 games for you to play. He’s a massive PICO-8 fan so the assets are built for that but the jam welcomes games made with other engines too.

That does it for this week. If you’ve got a game you want to post about and you don’t use AI, feel free to send me an email about it (see the About page for contact info). Don’t need to send me a key for it either. I just like to hear about stuff folks are working on.

I meant to do a few of these each week during my break and uhhhhhh oops, I guess that didn’t happen. So now I’m going to put all of them from my notes into one giant post and hopefully you find one or two neat things to play. I’ll try to sort this a bit more by genre so it’s a little less overwhelming. I hope these posts were useful to folks. Even during Steam and Itch sales, people are still releasing games! I even made a free Playdate game with my kids. If you enjoy these roundups, consider adding your own game or other small indies to MobyGames so they’re covered elsewhere too. There’s already been a few games covered in these that are delisted and that’s always weird to see. And consider blogging about small games you like in the new year too! There’s not much coverage of a lot of these games and there should be better writers talking about them. There’s plenty of games that never come out on Steam that are worth your time.

Adventure

After being in development for a very long time and then Early Access for a while after that, SpaceVenture (Steam/Itch) is finally out. This is a point-and-click adventure by the creators of the Sierra classic Space Quest. I’m just happy to see it come out. They had to deal with health issues and the worst Kickstarter backers I’ve ever seen, so it’s a miracle at all that it’s out. It’s nice to see that Steam reviews are positive too. I played a very early version and it was buggy but I think the people I know that are massive Space Quest fans have been fairly happy with it.

The Itch page for SOUP ROOMS (Itch) describes it better than me so I’ll just copy that. “SOUP ROOMS is a SOUP-like room tourism experience directly inspired by SOUP, an obscure Japanese minimalist art-game from 2007 where you walk around a series of small abstract rooms and generally soak in the atmosphere. Think of it as a sort of digital art gallery.” There’s 100 rooms from a variety of indie game devs AND a tool for making your own rooms. Plus it’s all for free!

jfrisby has a new horror adventure called MALLICIOUS (Itch) that is available for Pay-What-You-Want. It was made for the monthly game jam on the Adventure Game Studio website. I always like how jfrisby’s adventure games look and love that this has the aesthetics of a C64 game.

The Simogo Legacy Collection (Steam) is a collection of games released by the developer Simogo for mobile devices from 2010 to 2015. The most famous one is probably Device 6 but there’s some other big ones here too and it’s just really nice to see these games preserved on a platform that’s a bit more stable than the iOS App Store.

Arcade

Death in Abyss (Steam) just looks like a really solid arcade shooter with a low poly aesthetic, and I feel like I don’t see many arcade games taking place in a horror setting. A demo is available to try.

Unbeatable (Steam) doesn’t really need a mention on this site because it’s done so well already and everyone knows about it by now, but it’s going on here anyway. I joked elsewhere about how a game about a fascist government making music illegal is basically the Aerosmith video game Revolution X, but it looks nice anyway.

FPS

One Rotten Oath (Steam) is an interesting looking one to me. It’s an adventure game/FPS hybrid that uses tank controls and has FMV for all of the enemies. I realize that is probably not for most people but there’s a handful of us that go wild over FMV so I’m including it here. It’s got a demo too. The developer of this previously made a FMV game/interactive movie called A Trip to Yugoslavia.

I can’t believe ROUTINE (Steam) is actually out after being announced like 13 years ago. It looks great! FPS probably really isn’t the right category for this since it’s more of a survival horror thing that happens to have a gun. But it’s here, reviews have been positive, and it seems to be selling well so good for them. It’s weird that this roundup has two games (see: SpaceVenture) that started development over a decade ago.

Game Jams

Do you like Yuri? Well a whole game jam for it just wrapped up on Itch with 94 entries!

I don’t think I mentioned the 7 day fps jam in the last post either but that was also wonderful and had lots of entries on Itch. There’s also some very good ones that went past the deadline and were released outside of the jam instead like Dronelord Hyperviber. The look of that one actually reminds me of the DOS game Magic Carpet although it plays a bit differently.

Simulations

Tom City (Itch) is a very cute city builder for browsers by Dave Lloyd of Powerhoof and his son. Obviously I’m a fan of people making games with their kids so this gets a 10/10 from me.

Sports

I feel like I’m trolling a bit by putting Skate Story (Steam) in the sports section but it’s gotta go somewhere. Anyway, I’m the last person who hasn’t played it yet but I keep seeing everyone say the vibes are very good. It has a demo too!

Old School Rally (Steam) is exactly what it says it is. It’s a rally game that looks like it’s between the PSX and PS2 in terms of aesthetics (so Dreamcast era then?) and I think it looks nice.

TTRPGs

We Shall Be Monsters (publisher page) is a solo ttrpg inspired by Frankenstein about creating a living being, and now you can buy it in the form of a 20 page zine. I’m a big fan of Good Luck Press and their designers!

Dragon Reactor (Itch) is a mech tragedy game about conflict on a grand scale using d6 and for 2+ players.

I have a very minor cold today which of course means that I’m acting like I am incapable of doing anything and just being miserable all around. The good news is that in a few more days I’ll have a few weeks off work. The bad news is that this means they are some of the slowest days of my life. I am hoping this means I’ll get to play a lot of neat stuff during all that time off and maybe make a tiny game. I actually recommend the post Small Christmas/Winter Indie Games on Syl’s Blog, but here are some more games for you to play after you’re done checking out those.

New Releases

Ken Griffey Jr.’s Horrible Tower (Glorious Trainwrecks) is an incredibly difficult platformer where you try to ascend the floors of a tower while Ken Griffey Jr. taunts you. I am absolutely terrible at these kinds of platformers where you repeatedly try levels until you beat them, but this is a good one of those and it’s free.

Robo Attack 3D (Crazy Games link?) is a free browser game where you save astronauts and shoot robots in a Vampire Survivors-ish inspired game. It’s by John Passfield, who has made games like Halloween Harry, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, and Flight of the Amazon Queen. It’s just a fun little arcade game! I have never heard of the site Crazy Games before in my life!

The 2025 PICO-8 Advent Calendar (Lexolaffle site) is an advent calendar where you get a new game made in PICO-8 every day. I just love playing little PICO-8 games and it’s fun seeing folks like Tom Hall (of Commander Keen/Anachronox fame) making stuff for it too.

Angeline Era (Steam/Itch.io) is a new game by the developers of Sephonie and Anodyne. I’m so excited for this one! I love how it looks and I will always get excited about bump combat, which is literally when you bump into enemies to damage them. There’s a demo if you want to try it out.

Rainbows Are Carnivores (Itch.io) is a short gay fishing game by Robert Yang that you can play for free in your browser. It’s great, as Robert’s games always are, but I think the most fascinating part about the game is actually the blog post about its inspirations and the making of it that you should read after you play the game.

Southeast Asia Games Onward 2025 is a nice showcase of games that you can check out on Steam and Itch.io. They have different games being featured so be sure to look at both!

Light Up The Town (Steam) is a cozy Christmas game where you are a ferret and hang up lights in your town. I watched decafjedi stream it and it looks incredibly cute and relaxing.

The TTRPG Bookmark Jam just wrapped up on Itch.io. It’s a jam where people made a ttrpg (or ttrpg related thing) that fits on a bookmark.

Blendo Games released their second game this year after already putting out Skin Deep earlier in 2025 after a few years in development. Antibody One (Itch.io) is a short shooter where you explore the inside of a human body and it’s only $1.

Sales

I wanted to give a shoutout to the Resnijars XMAS Extravaganza Sale!! on Itch.io because I am a fan of their games and this bundle is an affordable way to get them all. If you like 90s looking first person adventure games then I think Manglepaw is worth a look.

Crowdfunding

Chess Joker (Backerkit) is a tabletop game by Asmadi Games that combines Chess with cards that have effects on the game.

That’s it for today. Hoping to do a few more this week to get any/all holiday games out there. I hope you find something new to play! Feel free to message/email me about anything you’re working on if it’s not using AI.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!