review

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.

Croustibat review

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Developer: Coktel Vision
Publisher: Findus
Year: 1995
Genre: Adventure
System: DOS

a boy and a girl standing on an island with a saw in a tree and a mole holding a mirror

After issuing a challenge to folks to blog about an obscure game, I figured I should probably engage with this as well so I pulled a game that has been sitting on my backlog for a long time, Croustibat. Croustibat is an advert game for the Croustibat line of fish products by Findus and prominently features the mascot, a fish that is also named Croustibat. Apparently you could get the game by sending a letter to Findus along with the money to cover shipping and handling. The game was developed by Coktel Vision, the folks who developed the Gobliiins series of adventure games. It plays very similar to those games, especially Gobliins 2.

You have two characters, a boy and a girl, and must solve puzzles by doing your typical adventure game stuff like picking up items and using them on objects. There is technically a plot about aliens attacking a boat but it’s basically non-existent in the game itself, with instructions focusing on getting to the next location. Only specific player characters can successfully use objects and inventory items, but you don’t really know who until you try both player characters. Much like the Gobliiins games, the lack of hints or instructions mean you do a lot of brute forcing in this one as well. I didn’t think it was as frustrating as some of those games though, since it’s aimed more towards children and you are only on one screen at a time so the amount of objects to interact with is very small. I think this is a good thing. I am a fan of the Gobliiins series but nearly all the games in the series have a few puzzles where you brute force item combinations just to make some progress. That said, there was still a moment or two where I did not understand why the solution I tried worked, which is never a great sign.

I suppose the main gimmick in this one is that during each screen/level, the Croustibat mascot’s hat will appear. Picking it up will make the mascot appear and give you fish sticks, which make you extra strong. This is only ever used by the girl and exists to help her with a specific puzzle on each screen such as cutting down a tree. I’m assuming there’s someone out there on the internet that is physically attracted to the Croustibat mascot but I’m not going to confirm that.

a muscular fish with a hat saying "my friends! These fish fingers will power you up!"

Unlike Gobliiins, none of the player characters are interesting to watch or really do anything funny when you fail to do an action, which is sorta the highlight of those games. It makes sense, you aren’t going to beat up children too much in an advert game for kids, and there’s still moments like a child being frightened by a spider or a coconut falling on their head, but it does mean that there isn’t a lot going on. The kids don’t really have their own personality like the Gobliiins games either. I still think the art for all the characters is charming enough though and it has some fun animations.

My only other real gripe is that you need to transfer items between characters and it frequently just did not work for me so I had to keep trying until it would eventually work.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the game if you’ve never played the Gobliiins games before, unless you have a fascination with advert games or a strong nostalgia for 90’s adventure games. It’s not actually bad but it’s also not very interesting either but there’s worse ways to spend 15-20 minutes. I think the game is far more interesting if you played the Gobliiins series since it is by the same devs, plays very much like an easier Gobliins 2, and even uses a lot of the same sound effects and cursor. You can find the original French version across the internet since it was a free game but I played the unofficial English translation on the Internet Archive, which is playable in the browser but I downloaded it and ran it in ScummVM.

On a weird final note, my 6 year old saw me playing Croustibat and said “Are you playing that Goblins game?” I didn’t even think I had played any of those with her before (maybe Goblins 3?), certainly not in a long time, but now I will be thinking about if I play too many weird French DOS games around my kids or not. Then again, I could also get that Gobliiins Collection on the Switch which features mouse support for the Switch 2.

Croustibat is available on your favorite abandonware site such as MyAbandonware, with the unofficial English translation on the Internet Archive.

The Joy of Revisiting co-open with My Kids

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Developer: lowpolis
Year: 2021
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

Screenshot taken from Itch.io

One thing I love doing is showing games I played years ago to my kids that I think they will enjoy. Recently one of these was the first-person adventure game/walking sim co-open. co-open is a game about a kid’s first time buying groceries on their own. While it wasn’t designed for kids in mind, my 6 and 9 year olds absolutely loved it. My oldest would be the one controlling the game and walking around while the 6 year old offered suggestions on what they should look at or explore next. I think in general they are just huge fans of games where you can explore a space without fear of losing, which is why they like Proteus as well, and co-open offers so much to look at but it’s all optional. If you want to do a simple trip to the grocery store, pick out a few items and leave, you certainly can and the game won’t look down on you for it. However, you can also talk to folks and help them with their shopping trip, find things like phone numbers to call, and explore and stumble across so much interesting stuff. The game just gives you so much to look at even with it being smaller in size, so I was really happy that my kids were into that and also enjoyed its chill vibes.

I think something else that kids are very good at embracing and I’ve lost is roleplaying in video games. They are happy to just explore a space and make up stories about the characters as they play. Another example is that my 6 year old loves playing Unpacking, with the puzzle elements turned off such as everything needing to be in the proper place, and just making up her own stories about all the objects. While I love roleplaying in tabletop rpgs, somehow I’ve lost this in video games and there’s a lot my kids are showing me in how someone can play a video game. Maybe I should have made up an elaborate backstory for the moose in Moose Life. It made me happy that co-open was a game they enjoyed and that my 6 year old still asks occasionally about playing “the grocery shopping game.”

co-open is available for PC/Mac/Linux on Itch.io and in physical format on the Videogame Tape Market.

Knytt Classic

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Developer: Nifflas and Bit Kid
Publisher: Bit Kid
Year: 2026
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows

Knytt screenshot of people hanging out by the water, someone laying down, someone fishing, a house and trees
This game has so many little guys

I have fond memories of playing Knytt so I was very happy to see that it got an official rerelease recently to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary. If you haven’t played it before, it’s a freeware game where you have crashed on a planet and need to explore the planet by platforming around and finding parts to repair your ship. There’s no combat and only a handful of enemies that can hurt you. If you touch one of them or a hazardous element of the planet like lava or water, you teleport to your most recent save point. The save points are scattered frequently around the world so it is not an issue if you touch something you shouldn’t. The world itself is fairly big and maze-like, but you can also hold down a button to have the game point you in the direction of the nearest ship part, so it never feels overwhelming. It’s an incredibly chill game and exactly what I needed to replay at this moment.

It was just really nice to revisit the game since it had a big impact on me in college, when it originally came out (lol I’m old). That, and Seiklus (EDIT: I originally got it mixed up with Within a Deep Forest, another freeware game I recommend), a similar game with a relaxing vibe, both seemed like they came out sorta around the same era when there was maybe an explosion in freeware games. I wasn’t a part of any scene so I was just stumbling across this stuff on sites like Game Hippo and Retro Remakes. Laura Michet’s blog has far more interesting thoughts about this game than I do. It’s just a game that means a lot to me because I didn’t really have the money to spend on games and really appreciate that there were folks making some really interesting stuff for free. I suppose you could argue that stuff like Steam wasn’t really taking over yet, but you still had folks selling games digitally so they maybe could have figured out a way to make money off it. I don’t know. It bummed me out that some of the discourse from the Manifesto Jam was about how folks releasing games for free devalues them and hurts people making paid games. Not only is it not true, just look at the last 50 years of computer games, but teenagers like video games too. Ah well.

I still haven’t played the new extra difficult modes that were added for this rerelease. I might poke at them a little bit, they’re probably not for me, but I think it’s fun that they’re there.

Anyway, give it a look if you never played it before. It only took me about an hour to beat on my first run and I think it’s a nice, free game.

Knytt Classic is free on Steam and GOG for Windows/Mac/Linux.

Check out the new DOS game Europa Panic

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Developer: hoolis
Year: 2026
Genre: Arcade
System: DOS

top down view of a person shooting lasers at green tentacle monsters and there's a purple tentacle monster

Just a few days ago the full version of a DOS game called Europa Panic came out. A demo version was previously released for a jam last year and I enjoyed that so I was happy to see this full version come out. It’s a top down arcade game where you enter rooms of a planetary station to recover parts of a generator. After you collect all the parts in a level, you go to the generator and turn it back on. While you navigate the station you need to avoid or shoot enemies with your very slow laser gun thing that causes the enemy to slowly disintegrate. To make things even more difficult, if you take too long to complete a level you will see a purple tentacle monster appear and quickly hunt you down if you don’t exit the room very soon. The game is immensely challenging but also very forgiving in that touching an enemy will instantly kill you, but you do not need to restart the entire level, just the section you are doing, and none of the sections are too long. You also have infinite lives, unless you turn on the option to have a specific amount.

(EDIT: This bit is actually no longer relevant because it’s since been patched and the game has some extras added now too. I’m leaving it here just to document my feelings but at the moment but it’s been fixed.) The only real frustration I had was that the hit box is larger than it appears to be, meaning there were a few times where an enemy was not actually touching me but I died anyway. This only became an issue with a section in the 2nd level (there’s 3 levels total) that requires navigating some tight spaces with lots of enemies bouncing around, and once I completed that part everything went back to feeling very tough but fair.

I loved the game. While it’s incredibly tough and not the type of thing I typically play these days, I loved the huge amount of level and enemy variety in a relatively short (took me about an hour) game, and I have a soft spot for 16 color EGA DOS games. Plus it’s pay-what-you-want, so you can play it for free first (including in the browser if you have no interest in DOSBox) and pay some money after. Give it a look if you like challenging arcade games.

Europa Panic! is available for DOS on Itch.io

Moose Life thoughts

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Developer: Llamasoft
Year: 2020
Genre: Arcade
System: PC

Given that this site is called The Virtual Moose, I’m surprised I never wrote a post about Moose Life, the 2020 arcade game by Llamasoft. It’s a game where you play as a voxel moose, flying through 3D tunnel-like levels, shooting at weird little bits and making them explode into trippy visuals. The gameplay gimmick in this one being that as you glide through the levels, you can either shoot at objects on the floor or flip upside down and run along the ceiling to shoot. I don’t know if it’s my #1 Llamasoft game, that’s probably Polybius, but it sure is up there.

a moose in a tunnel hanging upside down

It’s got everything you would want in a Llamasoft game. Sheep, trippy 80s arcade game-inspired visuals, the same audio samples you’ve heard in a dozen or so other Llamasoft games. It’s not doing anything radically experimental but that’s fine with me. It’s just great playing an arcade game by someone that has been making them for decades and is at the top of their game. It’s a bit more challenging than their previous game Polybius, where I loved being able to basically enter a trance-like state while playing, but I suppose that’s what the Free Ride mode is for, where you can play without worrying about lives. Even though it’s an arcade game, the game saves the best state each time you enter a level, meaning you can pick up at the most recent level if you lose all your lives. You’re certainly welcome to start at the beginning if you want, but I appreciate that there’s a way for players to experience all the levels in the game.

Something I really love about Moose Life is how much it seems like it’s doing its own thing. Other Llamasoft games are often a riff on another arcade game but in Minter’s own style and innovations, but I don’t see the specific influences with Moose Life. I maybe see a tiny bit of Defender and other people bring up Juno First in their reviews, but I don’t know what the direct inspirations are and I think that’s really neat. I certainly don’t mind when Llamasoft remakes an existing game, I’m a huge fan of their Tempest games and their most recent game, I Robot, is a delight too, but it’s fun playing a Llamasoft game and not knowing where it came from too.

moose in a tunnel and text saying "Purple moose mode!"

There’s really no unique insights or surprises in this post. I just love Llamasoft’s games and wanted to talk about one that I think gets less attention since it’s not a remake. If you’re looking for an arcade game, consider giving it a look. I also want to give a shout out to the Llamasoft documentary Heart of Neon, which I need to do a longer post about at some point, but I really enjoyed it and how it not only looks at Jeff Minter’s career but the indie devs in his circle as well.

Moose Life is available on Steam and PlayStation 4.

Caper in the Castro thoughts

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Developer: C.M. Ralph
Year: 1989
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

menu screen for caper in the castro showing someone leaning against a lightpole and text saying "It's not just a game, it's a gayme!"

Caper in the Castro is a short point-and-click adventure game created in Hypercard and the earliest known queer game, so I thought it would be fun to check it out during Pride Month. You play as the lesbian detective Tracker McDyke who must find her friend, the drag queen Tessy LaFemme. It’s a very straightforward adventure game where you navigate up and down a street, going into buildings and poking around for clues. Since it was a simple game built in Hypercard, it doesn’t have any inventory items and progress is gated by various notes you take in the game that you will need to use elsewhere. There are death scenes that will force you to restart the game but it’s incredibly quick to get back to where you were before.

game screenshot set outside a bar at night. The bar is titled "The Gayme Room"

I have known about the game for a while but never actually sat down to play through the entire thing and I’m so glad I did. Any flaws the game may have from the lack of depth or the fussy parser, which you briefly use at a few points, was easy for me to overlook because of how charming the game is. I am an absolute sicko for this era of Macintosh games and Hypercard and I loved the art. The game was obviously made at a really dark time and the game encourages people to donate to AIDS charities as a form of paying for the game. I get very emotional seeing people creating queer art during this time and the fact that this was created to be charityware to help others was very moving to me. I was a baby during this time so I also always appreciate any queer art and writing that lets me see what the queer community was doing at this time. The game itself is very campy and messy in a way I really enjoyed (other than the dated language the author apologizes for on the Archive.org page) and I think it would fit in very well with what a lot of experimental queer games that folks are making on Itch.

I’d recommend it, especially if you are interested in queer and/or retro adventure games. It’s not the tightest puzzle design given that the author was working with a limiting tool they didn’t have a ton of experience working with, but I think the art and writing are very charming and it’s an interesting time capsule.

Caper in the Castro is available for free on the Internet Archive and you can repay the author by donating to your LGTBQ+ charity of choice.

Exit 8

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Developer: KOTAKE CREATE
Publisher: PLAYISM
Year: 2023
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

a business man standing in a long hallway

Exit 8 is a short first-person horror game where you are trapped in an endless repeating hallway and must escape. I was curious about the game after seeing that it got a film adaptation and was glad I finally checked it out. The core gameplay (literal) loop has you looking for any differences in the repeating hallway. If you see any, then you need to turn around and go back, otherwise keep walking forward. You have to successfully repeat this pattern eight times in a row, so you can get to Exit 8. If you fail a loop, it resets the counter back to zero. None of this is a spoiler, it’s all listed on the very first sign you see in the game. There’s really no plot here and it boils down to a Spot the Difference game where you are occasionally placed in danger. I’m being reductive in my description of the game but it mostly works for me. The game successfully creeped me out without doing any jump scares.

The main issue I have with the game, and one that I see plenty of other folks also state in their positive reviews, is that when you find a difference/anomaly, it’s temporarily removed from the game. This happens until you find them all, and then they’re all returned to the game and it becomes very easy to solve the game since you’re an expert at recognizing them. The part where this becomes an issue is that it eventually turns the game into a bit of a checklist of things to look for since you probably have entered a loop of spotting some of the obvious and more interesting differences, removing them from the game, and then missing a more subtle one and the counter being reset to zero. After repeating that a few times, you get into a flow that feels like a bit of a slog where you find one or two subtle differences, miss one, repeat until you find them all and everything is added back to the game and you win. It’s certainly possible that players do not run into this and beat the game before seeing everything, but if you do stumble into this cycle it makes the game very tedious for about 15-20 minutes. It’s unfortunate because most of the game does work for me and I’d still recommend it. It was very nice playing a horror game that only took 90 minutes and was creepy without stressing me out with health systems and monsters I need to fight. It just needed a little more to elevate it to being a great horror game.

Exit 8 is available on Steam, Switch, Playstation, Xbox, and smartphones

Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard

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Developer: Grace Bruxner, Thomas Bowker
Publisher: worm club, SUPERHOT PRESENTS
Year: 2019
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

a rhino named Mary saying "Have you heard of extortion?"

I continue to replay the Frog Detective series but this time with my middle child. This one has you investigating a parade in a small town prepared for the arrival of an invisible wizard that has been ruined and it’s up to you to find out who did it. It plays very similar to the first game, which is not a complaint at all because I really enjoyed that one. The mystery itself has a cute resolution and I liked exploring the small town at night more than the island in the first game. There’s a bit more to look at in this one so I felt it was a more interesting environment to explore. The game also features a little notebook that tracks clues for you and you can mark who you think is suspicious or not. None of this is essential to completing the game but it’s all very fun to play with and my 6 year old treated it all very seriously as she would change who was suspicious or not after talking with each person. It was the perfect game to play with her since it let her roleplay being a detective without having to make any actual decisions on who ruined the parade, which has a happy ending anyway. The game only takes 60-90 minutes to play too, the perfect length for something to play in a sitting. I always liked these games but I appreciated them a lot more after playing them with my kids.

Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard is available for Windows and Mac on Steam and Itch.io, PS4/PS5, and XBOX.

Loved the Incredibly Ambitious Interactive Fiction Game PARA//LLAX

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two columns with separate stories being told about men feeling pain

Developer: Stanwixbuster
Year: 2026
Genre: Interactive Fiction
System: Browser

PARA//LLAX is an interactive fiction game created by Stanwixbuster for the Videotome 3 Jam about two men who wake up with a hole in their chest. The story is told by two separate columns with the men describing what they see, and advanced asynchronously by advancing one column at a time using the left and right arrow keys or both at the same time by pressing down. My limited experience with games made using Videotome is that they’re linear and the story is advanced with a mouse click or keypress until you finish the story. That’s certainly not a criticism. I think even a limited interaction like that changes the reader’s relationship to the story compared to if it was a book or post, but it really surprised me to see that you could do asynchronous storytelling using the engine. It’s not something I’ve seen before and the implementation was far more ambitious than I had expected.

When I saw that you could advance the story on either column, I figured that it was still going to be a linear narrative and they eventually end at the same point but the game has 27 end states. I wasn’t able to find them all but the branching storylines all felt very unique. I can’t even imagine how much work must have gone into writing all of them and building out all the branches, but it was a perfect fit for the surreal body horror story this game is about. I also felt the ambient music and different colored graphics for each side of the screen for each man are used well to immerse the reader.

Body horror probably isn’t going to be for everyone and I do recommend reading the content warnings before playing but I can’t recommend PARA//LLAX enough to anyone who is a fan of interactive fiction.

PARA//LLAX is available in the browser on Itch.io.