review

My Favorite Halloween Game is Online Again!

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an old building and carved pumpkins and night with text on the building saying Happy Halloween
Screenshot taken from Itch.io page

The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is a cute online game by the designer of another game I love, A Short Hike. You explore a small town, carve pumpkins, and do other Halloween stuff! It’s only an online game for the month of October but you can play offline all year. Every year they add more stuff and even from playing for just 15 minutes I already found something new. I suppose it’s possible that it’s a thing from last year that I just never saw but it just shows how much there is to do in the game. I love playing it with my kids, who are also big fans of this and A Short Hike, and something that’s been really nice as the game has been adding additional adventure gamey segments you can engage with (or not, it’s all optional!) is the ability to enable/disable the horror elements. If you want, you can even switch between night and day time if you have a preference.

I don’t think it quite counts as a MMO, it’s probably too small and there’s probably a different and more specific term for an online game with a smaller player count, but it’s a lot of fun seeing other ghosts floating around and interacting with the world. There’s no text chat either and I suppose it could be possible to grief by making obscene pumpkins but I haven’t seen it.

I don’t want to talk too much about what’s in the game since a huge chunk of the fun to me is the exploration and thinking “Wow, they even put _____ in here?” but it’s got a nice mix of exploration, more Video Game stuff, and other activities that are just more creative and chill. There is a very brief moment I’d like to give a shoutout to because it made my kids laugh so much last year. There’s an adventure game section where you do puzzles, and if you play on the cutest mode, there is a door you can click on that will slowly creak open, positioning itself to be a jump scare, but then a cute pumpkin pops up and does a baby laugh before the door slams shut. This extremely brief moment alone made my kids so happy every time we played and that’s the magic of video game baby!

It’s an impressive amount of work for a project that you can play for free, but you can pay $2 to unlock the ability to wear hats and I think it’s worth doing so this game can be supported.

The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is available on Itch.io for Windows/Mac/Linux.

Well, Mega Man 2 is Still Very Good

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Year: 1988
Genre: Platformer
System: NES

Inspired by Jeff Gerstmann’s NES games ranking, I played through all of Mega Man 2 for the first time in about 10 years or so. I was a little surprised it had been that long since it’s my favorite NES game (and still is) but that’s the date for the achievement on the Mega Man Legacy Collection and I don’t think I’ve completed it since then. There’s no hot takes in this one, I still love it and agree with all the opinions on it. All the robots are solid designs and they had a lot more to choose from than later entries, the soundtrack is fantastic, that one boss level where you can softlock yourself is a bit poop, none of these are hot takes. I also like how purple and blue so many of the game’s levels are. It’s the bisexual pride flag of Mega Man games.

I don’t necessarily agree with the takes that later games get bad. I like some of the later mainline Mega Man games quite a bit and I’m looking forward to the new one next year, but I do think they get less weird over time after the formula is figured out. I wouldn’t say the X series is weird, just kind of a 90’s edgy that I don’t really care for and way too much lore. There’s stuff in Mega Man 2 like the alien boss at the end and the really quiet and moody leadup to it that I adore, and some of the Wily levels before it are very grungy in a way I like.

mega man jumping in gross brown yellow water over a fish

Look at how gross that is! I love it. Also there’s only two of those fish in the entire game. They just kinda jump up and try to eat you. I just like that they made a whole enemy and barely use it. It’s neat.

Mega Man running through a cave while red drops fall from the ceiling

Like I said earlier, I love that the final level is just this cave with no music and only these drops you can easily avoid, but they make a neat little drop sound when they hit the floor. I don’t recall any later Mega Man games that are more focused on establishing a mood and aren’t interested in provided a challenge before the boss. I think it’s cool.

Anyway, I know it’s cliched to talk up Mega Man 2 because it’s been done to death and every video game music band has covered that Wily Castle music theme to death but it’s my site and if I replayed one of my favorite games, then so be it. I should probably go back and play the Mega Man Legends series, I think I would still enjoy those quite a bit.

Mega Man 2 is available in the Mega Man Legacy Collection, which is available on many platforms including Steam.

pleasuredrome is an Erotic Game for the Sickos (complimentary)

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Developer: DOMINO CLUB
Year: 2024
Genre: Visual Novel
System: Browser

text saying "in the eternal city only one sport remains, the execution of prisoners who fail in sexual contest in...the pleasuredrome
Screenshot of the first screen because this is a site for children and I can’t post anything later on

Sometimes I go back to previous game jams run by DOMINO CLUB, the anonymous game dev collective, and look for games I haven’t played before. The latest one of those is pleasuredrome, a game made for the Bodies in Motion jam they did in 2024. This one is a short browser game that tells a story about a dystopian future where prisoners have sex to survive. It’s hot! You do not have to do any sex mini games or anything clunky like that, the story is told by you walking around a world. I love how grungy the art is and the recommended listening of Metal Fingers In My Body by Add N To (X) adds to that feeling. I think it’s the only game they made that’s set in this world but I’d like to see more of it. Anyway, felt compelled to highlight this one because Bluesky is whining about mainstream games again and people would just be happier if they looked at Itch.io more often so here’s a recommendation.

pleasuredrome is available for the browser on Itch.io

Snake Digits is a PICO-8 Game That Innovates on the Snake Formula

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Developer: PUNKCAKE Délicieux
Year: 2026
Genre: Arcade
System: Browser

top down view of a snake pushing numbers around on a board

I’ve been a fan of PUNCAKE for a while now, a collective that regularly releases smaller games in all types of genres, so it was exciting to see that their latest game was for the PICO-1K Jam 2026 because I also love PICO-8 and that game jam specifically. This is a take on the classic Snake game that I haven’t seen before. As you can see from the gif, you move around pushing numbers of the same amount together in groups and once it’s big enough, it’s added to your score. So for example, pushing together four 4’s will make that group disappear and add it to your score. Something that I think is a nice little touch is that the game is a little more forgiving about touching walls than your average Snake game since you have a lot more going on in this one. It’s a neat twist on the Snake formula and I think you should check it out in your browser along with other games in the jam. If you’ve been curious about learning PICO-8, you can also view the code and learn from it!

Snake Digits is available for free for the Browser and download on Itch.io and PICO-8 website.

The Zium Railway, the Latest Virtual Gallery from The Zium Society, contains great art tanked by bad programming

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

Developer: The Zium Society
Year: 2026
Genre: Multimedia Program
System: Windows

overview of a big world with a train rail going around it

The Zium Railway is the latest in the series of virtual galleries published by The Zium Society. I had been a fan of the series for a while and it has been fascinating to watch these grow from more straightforward galleries (but still impossible to create in a physical space) where you walk around a virtual world and look at pieces of art, to this latest one where you ride a train around a world and enter virtual worlds created by artists for you to explore. I liked it, which makes it incredibly frustrating that I don’t know if I can recommend it. It turns out that the main hub world had relied on heavy AI usage, which was not disclosed but does come up on the dev’s blog where they made an obnoxious post about how Valve and Hideo Kojima should hire them and has a romantic view of company towns. It’s just completely rancid and unfortunate since the artists on the project had all done a great job. It doesn’t appear that the artists were told about it until it was too late, judging from how frustrated some of them seem to be. I hope the artists release their things separately like this Aqualung Caverns one, which I loved. I loved the external exhibits and even the main world design was nice. I had run into bugs but overlooked it since I could work around them with the in-game options to teleport around. I suppose I know why there were so many. I guess I can’t really say I regret donating money for it since the money is being split among the artists but it’s a bummer.

Sometimes on social media I’ll lament the death of multimedia cd-roms and other programs that combine art and music in interesting ways without there being a series of win conditions you’re supposed to meet, but I think there’s space for it by doing virtual exhibits. I do hope that it’s something other folks will consider doing things like the Zium series, folks who won’t crash out on the slightest bit of pushback on AI usage and again, praise company towns on their blog.

inside a cavern and looking at a waterfall. There's a sign that says Aqualung Caverns

After this had come out, I went back and loaded up The Zium Garden to play with my 6 year old since it was one of the few that runs on Mac and she had a great time. Kids sometimes just like to have interesting spaces to explore without things running around trying to kill them. Which just sad that I can’t bother with these in the future due to the wildly unethical way that AI companies are run, steal so much content from others, and poison marginalized communities with data centers. Something brilliant was started due to the efforts of so many talented collaborators and then thrown in the bin.

The Zium Railway is available for Pay-What-You-Want for Windows on Itch.io but, well, you saw the post.

Necking is a Cute Game Where You Make Giraffes Kiss

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Developer: Not Jam
Year: 2026
Genre: Arcade
System: Browser

two giraffes separated by bushes

Sometimes you are just in the mood to play a short arcade puzzle game with very cute art where you make giraffe necks stretch so they can kiss another giraffe on the screen while avoiding obstacles and someone happens to share their game on social media that meets those needs. It’s really nice. The game itself is about 5 minutes long and while it’s an arcade game with upbeat music, I found it to be very relaxing since the levels are very short and messing up quickly restarts you to the beginning so messing up isn’t stressful. There’s also a surprising amount of variety in the levels given that the game itself is only a few minutes long too. You go from controlling just one giraffe, then levels where you avoid obstacles, to controlling multiple giraffes and levels with inverted controls. It’s great and I hope you love it too.

Necking is available to play in the Browser on Itch.io.

Metroid thoughts

~ mpklamerus ~ 5 Comments

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1986
Genre: Action-Adventure
System: NES

Look, obviously I am not going to have any unique takes on Metroid, one of the most discussed games ever, but I just completed it and I’m pretty proud of that so into the Game Log it goes. I think everyone reading this knows what Metroid is as well so I can skip that bit too. I still love the game even though it’s got some fiddly and frustrating bits from it being so early in this style of game. The only major pain point really being that if you die, it takes ages to refill your health and missiles from grinding enemies.

I’m mostly excited about completing it because it’s a game that I have owned literally my whole life. It came out in 1986, a year before I was before, and I always played it on and off over the decades and yet never completed even though I’m a big fan of the series and have completed many of the later games. What’s odd is that it didn’t even really take me that long really to complete this time. Maybe about six hours or so. I still thought it was a challenging game but it’s not really that long so I’m a little surprised I never completed it before when I had entire days free to play video games and write down passwords. It’s a very weird, and highly recommended, experience to complete a game that has existed your entire life that you’ve poked at a few times so if you got a few of those hanging around, consider knocking one out.

One of the things I really love about the original Metroid is just how weird and mysterious it is compared to later games in the series. It’s not an entirely fair comparison, of course the first game in a series is going to feel a lot more new than later games and some of the later games do have weird bits, but at the same I think it would be nice to see more unexplained stuff and weird worlds instead of revisiting some of the same characters and places so often. I don’t think this is the same as doing a “back in my day games were hard and blah blah blah” because this isn’t what made the original Metroid difficult. I’m just saying the vibes are very good and it’s less focused on telling a linear narrative, which is why I don’t care for Metroid Fusion as much as other folks even though it’s got some weird stuff in there (that I think it over explains). It’s a similar arc as the game’s inspiration Alien, lots of weird unexplained stuff and then it kinda becomes more normal and overexplained. A more modern example of what I mean is the game Axiom Verge, it’s got lots of weird stuff that you never fully get. I would love recommendations if there’s any other indie Metroid-likes that I’m missing out on with great weird vibes.

This probably sounds like I’m basically saying the Metroid gets worse over time and I’m not. I love most of those later games too. Some of the sequels have even weirder things like all the various designs of the Metroid creatures in Metroid 2 and how much it feels like horror at certain points. I just want more of it.

Anyway, no hot takes here. I still think the first Metroid is very good and I’m looking forward to the new one that was just announced. If you’ve got a game that you like but haven’t completed even though you’ve owned it for a few decades, go complete it. You’ll probably find it’s not as impossible as you remember.

Metroid is available on the NES Virtual Console for the Nintendo Switch but you can probably find ways to play it elsewhere.

Transfer Point thoughts

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Developer: Mike Piontek
Year: 2026
Genre: Adventure
System: Macintosh

a bus stop at night. Text says "You're at a bus stop. It looks nice form a distance. Beyond the bus stop is complete darkness. There are paths leading off to the south and east."
Screenshot taken from Itch.io page

After posting about the game in an indie game roundup early this year, I finally made the time to play through Transfer Point. Transfer Point is a new adventure game for the classic Macintosh, but playable in the browser as well. It was created in World Builder, a program released on the Mac in 1986 that allowed people to make their own games. You play as a woman who finds herself at a bus stop, but with no memory of how she got there and only remembering parts of her past. The game itself is first person, with you using a combination of clicking on things and typing into a text parser.

I was very excited to play this one and wasn’t let down. I had occasionally watched Mike design the game on his robotspacer Twitch channel and thought it looked great. Even though I didn’t grow up with this era of the Mac, I love how games on the platform look with their black and white art. It’s just very comforting to me. Luckily the rest of the game is solid as well. I enjoyed the story in this (you play as a woman married to another woman!!, not really a spoiler!) and while it’s not really a comedy, there’s some bits in here that I thought were very funny. There was a death scene in the game near the very beginning that I absolutely loved and made me really happy to see. It’s not a game with many deaths if you are an adventure game fan concerned about running into them. A nice thing about waiting a day or two to write a post about a game is that I can think about some plot elements for a bit before really settling on how I feel about them, which includes a twist later in the game, nothing too twisty really, that I wasn’t sure about at first but I like it. I think the puzzle design is solid for the most part too. There was one puzzle that even the Invisiclues apologizes for, but other than that one I think the game has good and fair puzzle design and if you do get stuck, the designer has provided the Invisiclues to look at, which give you small hints instead of spoiling a puzzle completely. I would love to see more adventure game devs provide this with their games.

Since I have only played a few World Builder games before this, I was fascinated by the things that seem like requirements for making something in the engine. The game has a Weapons column, but you never need to attack anything. The designer manages to make use of the section by placing “use rapier sharp wit” under there and makes it work, but I think it’s fun seeing people work with engines like this that force the designer to make choices like that. There’s also a Search command, I think it’s probably a leftover bit from text adventures, that you basically use in every room to see if there’s anything hidden. It’s a little odd if you don’t play text adventures since you can see what you’re looking at in the panel on the left, but it’s necessary for completing the game.

I’m trying to avoid talking too much about specific elements in this that I loved because it’s a fairly short game (took me about 1-2 hours) and spoilers in adventure games can sometimes hurt enjoyment for some players, so apologies about being so vague about the content, but I highly recommend this if you’re a fan of adventure games and the classic Macintosh look. While you can buy the game on Itch.io to get a version of the game that runs on Macintosh and also some nice bonus materials, you can also play it in your browser window if that sounds much easier for you. There’s a version in development for the Playdate to look forward to as well, which you can follow development of on Twitch.

Transfer Point is available for Macintosh and browsers on Itch.io.

Aerial_Knight’s MrFreezy thoughts

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Developer: Aerial_Knight
Publisher: Aerial_Knight
Year: 2026
Genre: Puzzle
System: Windows

two rows of bodies, some with heads and some are missing
Screenshot taken from Steam

Having been a fan of Aerial_Knight’s games for a while, I was pleasantly surprised to see another game by him. He just released Dropshot earlier this year, which I really liked, and didn’t expect a second game this year. This one is a puzzle game where you play as a woman who is an axe-wielding serial killer. You have two rows of five heads and need to make rows of 3 or more heads by swapping their positions on the two rows, and then decapitating the row. Decapitating an entire row of five heads gives you a combo. You beat the levels by decapitating enough heads in the limited number of moves you’re given. This all sounds incredibly violent but the game is so stylized and all the bodies intentionally look like mannequins that it never felt like too much to me. There’s technically a story told through cutscenes but it’s mostly just there to set the mood and not the main draw of the game.

I think it works really well. Each level is only a few minutes and I found the setting up of rows to be very satisfying. Eventually the game increases the difficulty by introducing new types of heads that introduce new obstacles, some heads can’t be moved, some don’t always move for you, etc. This introduces a lot of variety but also adds some frustrations that I had in the second half of the game. The game gives you power-ups you can select for each level, with some that will help your score and others that overcome the obstacles that the heads provide. I think it’s a fun idea that works for most of the game but near the end I felt like I just had to choose the power-ups that let me actually take out the heads or else it would start to feel like a chore to keep fighting with the heads in that level. The game also does not let you know what head types are in a level so if you want an optimal power-up for a level, you have to go in and clear a few rows, see if your power-up is relevant to that level and if not, restart the level with a power-up that will help you. Most of the time it’s not an issue but if you end up going into a level where you have a head that cannot be decapitated unless you have the power-up that lets you do it, then you often cannot get combos and the level moves slowly, which meant that 90% of the time I just went with that power-up.

That complaint aside, I think the game works well. It’s a fun puzzle game that takes a few hours total to complete and makes for a good game to play in short bursts. A weird thing I get excited about is when devs reuse assets from their previous games (See: Llamasoft) and there’s a little bit of that as well. I just think it’s a smart way to save time and helps establish a consistent style from the designer. That all said, I’d recommend it if you want a puzzle game to play this Halloween season.

Aerial_Knight’s MrFreezy is available for Windows on Steam.

That new thecatamites game International Obsession is very good

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

Developer: thecatamites
Year: 2026
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows

text saying "What is?" over a building titled Institute of Retroactive Sexology" and a character with a spike head named Torture Ball saying "I mean, it doesn't LOOK forbidden"

There was some very silly discourse yesterday about how there are no original ideas in games anymore and that all games these days are just made by game devs who only play video games and do not read books or watch films and while this is wrong on so many levels, boy have I got great news. They finally have a game they can write about on their website! I’m sure they’re all rushing to write about the new thecatamites game right now because it’s fantastic.

God it’s fucking hard for someone of my writing skill level to summarize a game like this but I’ll try. International Obsession is a narrative platformer where you are a spy, I guess, and in a world where mankind has gained the ability to double jump, you are trying to stop a terrorist group who is trying to stop the world from entering our current millenium in the first place and go back to how it was. It’s by thecatamites, who has created other games I highly recommend like Anthology of the Killer. You explore this world by double jumping through environments and seeing what various characters are talking about. As you can see in the screenshot above, it’s got a very trippy low poly look that I loved to walk around in and you get transitional scenes with comic panels of characters talking and I loved those too. I don’t think I’m the best at video games and platforming but aside from some jumping puzzle parts, it wasn’t anything I’d really consider difficult. There’s enemies in here that can knock you around but there’s no health meter and they just knock you back a bit so if you’re more of an adventure gamer, I think you would still really enjoy exploring the environments and experiencing the story that I think is an interesting exploration of nostalgia poisoning. But it’s also just funny and fun to look at so if you just want that from a game, you’ve got that too.

Just a note before playing because I was a dipshit and maybe other folks will make the same mistake that I did. Please carefully read the readme before playing and please pay attention to the controls. There are two buttons for jumping and they do different things. It is not the same jump button in two different spots. This is not the fault of the game, it’s mine, but if you are a weirdo that chooses to play this exclusively on the keyboard because they couldn’t be bothered to get a controller out, maybe you will run into this as well.

But yeah, it’s a lovely game. I think some folks will see that it’s Part 1 of a series but I would still highly recommend it to folks who might be hesitant to check it out when this is the only part that’s available. I’m usually the same way but I felt like it was a very satisfying and self-contained game that took me about 40 minutes to play and did not feel frustrated by the ending.

International Obsession is available for free on Itch.io for Windows/Mac/Linux.