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.
Meanderware: Things I loved about cyberspace is an interactive essay collecting various thoughts on the indie web and how ephemeral the internet and digital art can be. It’s probably obvious from the description that it’s something I would love but it’s so expertly crafted that I want to recommend it to everyone.
The game (I’m still calling it a game) mostly takes place as a first person exploration of a virtual space with you coming across doors that link you to external websites about the internet and dialog windows modeled after tooltips as seen in the screenshots above. The game has an aesthetic inspired by 90s software and internet graphics but is more than just nostalgia bait, with the essay exploring what the internet could be and how we can build that. It references the Internet from the 90’s because it needs to discuss how it has evolved over the decades, but never falls into the trap that things of this nature often seem to. It doesn’t lecture you on how the internet was better and ignores all the issues that the internet had during this period and I felt that all of the themes of the essay were communicated very well through the 3D space you explore.
The essay also addresses one of my biggest gripes with Internet nostalgia. People will frequently lament that the internet just isn’t what it used to be and it’s too bad it’s all gone, but it isn’t! People still use forums (see previous posts on here), and people still make their own personal sites on places like NeoCities. It’s all still there, just being covered up by a heavily commercialized layer of apps that make it harder to discover. What I really love about how this game addresses it is that it provides you with some of the tools to build your own site and weird internet tools. I really appreciate that this essay wants to say that the internet can still be weird if you want it to be.
Part of the game is about discovering little corners of the web that become very meaningful and how short lived they can be. This brought back so many memories of being on forums in the 00’s and how important they were to me at the time, even if they were generally pretty silly places. AdventureGamers.com just died last year after being around for decades, and was a place that I spent quite amount of time at. I still think about these communities quite a bit even decades after I have left them.
On an unrelated note, is this the first game to reference HappyPuppy? It has to be?
To be honest, we all know this review could have been summarized by that overused gif of Meryl Streep pointing and saying yes, but I hope that me endlessly praising it will encourage you to check it out and perhaps even create your own website.
Meanderware: Things I loved about cyberspace is available in the browser on Itch.io
Marges Destimbats is a short interactive documentary about the developer’s grandfather maintaining crumbling stone-wall terraces in an olive orchard near Deltebre, Spain. I rarely see games and interactive media these days using FMV, so I was really excited to come across this for the Sant Jordi Jam 2026. It’s about something so specific too. How often do you learn about olive orchards from a video game? I also love that it was the designer’s grandfather who stars in this game. Getting family members to act in a video game can sometimes be tough, as seen from the outtakes for Myst, and you know what? He did great. I’m glad this was made and would love to see more interactive documentaries like this.
Marges Destimbats is available to play in-browser on Itch.io.
Developer: Three Bees Publisher: Three Bees Year: 2026 Genre: Adventure System: Windows
Perfect Tides: Station to Station is a point-and-click adventure where you play as Mara, an eighteen year old woman who has just started college. You experience all that college has to offer you while obtaining new ideas and applying them to papers and other forms of writing. This will be a slimmer and more rambling post because I feel like everything I have to say about the game has already been said by other outlets such as Unwinnable but I thought the game was brilliant and is now one of my favorite adventure games.
One of the many things I was pleasantly surprised by was how much of an improvement it was over the first Perfect Tides, a game that I also thought was very good and well crafted. I was just so surprised by how much more confident this game was in its design, willing to drop more conventional things people expect in adventure games like the multiple verbs and puzzles the first game had, in order to focus more on the choices Mara can make and ability to learn new things. I think having difficult puzzles in this game would have just killed the pacing and wouldn’t fit in with the grounded story this is telling.
Learning new topics was also a really interesting thing to see in an adventure game. It’s been done before of course, this game cites The Dagger of Amon Ra as an influence, but in a way that feels so natural and continuing to explore and talk to other people will improve your knowledge on a topic. It’s masterfully implemented.
Everyone that is of a certain age who plays this will probably relate so much to the references this game makes as well as just what it was like to be a college student and they’re right! For better or worse, I could relate to Mara and just the experience of being a bit of a walking disaster in my late teens. If you don’t relate to that, well, it must be nice to not have that experience.
Anyway, I loved the game and hope it is very successful since it has some of my favorite writing in an adventure game and hope it inspires others to tell personal stories as well.
Developer: Grace Bruxner, Thomas Bowker Publisher: worm club, SUPERHOT PRESENTS Year: 2018 Genre: Adventure System: Mac
Frog Detective 1: The Haunted Island is a short first-person adventure game where you are a detective who is also a frog and need to investigate reports of a ghost haunting the island. My oldest has been playing the series on her own and her younger sister wanted to see them so we just played through the first one together. I’m glad I got to revisit it because I liked it more than I remembered and my daughter loved it. I had always liked the game but I had some small gripes about the game that were much more minor than I remembered.
The gameplay is very simple. You walk around and talk to various characters on the island, asking them about the ghost, other folks, and if they need help with anything. You continue doing this and helping them with their needs and it eventually leads you to the end of the mystery and game. The puzzles are very simple and there’s no fail states, which may frustrate some experienced adventure gamers, but the focus of the game is on the humor and art and I think that makes it a great intro to adventure games for folks. It’s also fun exploring the space that Grace created, which is filled with a lot of fun little details to look at if you aren’t trying to rush through the game.
The gripes that I had with the game before still remain but are much more minor than I remember. The puzzle solving is a bit repetitive since it’s mostly dialog puzzles you solve by going from person to person but again, I think it’s mostly fine since it’s not meant to be a challenging game anyway. The other issue I have is that the humor does start to feel repetitive towards the end as well, but the game is very short (45-60 minutes) that once I had started to feel that way, the game was getting to wrap up anyway. It was also much easier to overlook since I played it with my 6 year old and she was having a great time walking around and talking to everyone. I think playing the game with someone who doesn’t have Gamer Brain really helped me appreciate that it’s a game filled with lovely artwork and that I should just take my time exploring this space instead of viewing it as a series of conversation puzzles to solve.
I have to imagine that anyone who is reading this already knows about the series and has either played it or never will, but maybe this recommendation will slightly nudge you towards checking it out or replaying the game.
Developer: Codeglue Publisher: Codeglue Year: 2016 Genre: Arcade System: Windows
Rocket Riot is an arcade game where you fly around an arena in a jetpack shooting at other enemies with rockets until you beat them all. Originally released for the X-Box 360 in the summer of 2009, I wanted to revisit the game and slowly played through the single player campaign in the Steam release. There isn’t much to say about this one. You essentially do the same thing in different level layouts, with the occasional mini boss thrown in and they sometimes mix it up by having different level types, like running a football across a level for points, but for the most part you are doing the same thing, shooting other guys with rockets, most levels. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, I play arcade games all the time where you just do the same thing repeatedly, but once you play the first set of levels you kinda know what the rest of the game is like and it doesn’t really increase the difficulty over time.
It’s too bad about that because the core of the game plays very well. It feels good flying around and flinging rockets around, and the game has a nice retro aesthetic. I suppose the game itself is retro now since it was a 2009 release, but what I mean is that it has an art style that has 2D art but with 3D blocks flying around when things explode. It looks good in motion. It’s very strongly influenced by 80s British computer games too with cassette loading screens between levels and music that feels like it was slightly influenced by that era.
Another frustration with the release on Steam is that it’s missing multiplayer, which is arguably half the game. The gameplay is a very good fit for it and works well on the X360 release, but is missing from the PC version. Even a local multiplayer feature would have been appreciated.
Anyway, the game is fine. I can’t make a strong endorsement for it but if you want to occasionally play an arcade thing for a few minutes and don’t mind it being a little repetitive, then maybe you’ll have fun with it.
Developer: Aerial_Knight Publisher: Aerial_Knight Year: 2026 Genre: FPS System: Windows
Aerial_Knight’s DropShot is the newest game by Neil Jones, who goes by the handle of Aerial_Knight for his game dev work. It’s a first-person game where you fall through the sky, shooting bad guys and avoiding obstacles. Honestly, the intro screen describes the plot better than I ever could…
It’s fantastic stuff. I love when games give you a wild premise on one screen and then immediately doing fun video game stuff after that. It reminds me a little of Death Ray Manta where the plot is simply “Death Ray Manta has lasers in his head. He blew up his house, now he lives in space instead.” and then you go shoot stuff in space.
The game reminds me a lot of AaAaAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. You fall through levels and get the highest grade score you can, by shooting enemies with your finger gun and collecting coins. You have a limited number of shots each level but can get more by picking up powerups. There’s also pickups you can get that give you other temporary weapons, but my understanding is that this has since been reworked in a patch so this post is already out of date as I write it.
The game technically only takes 2-2.5 hours to “beat.” But so much of the game is built around you rerunning levels and trying to beat your previous score that it feels silly saying that my initial run of mostly lower letter grades for completing levels is it, I’m going to go back and replay them to beat my scores as people frequently do in arcade games. There’s 50 levels and while most of the game follows the formula of you falling and shooting other enemies until you reach the end of the level, there’s the occasional boss battle or race level, where you try to catch a falling dragon egg before your opponent. If I had any real criticisms of the design, I suppose I wish it had a little more variety in the level design in the middle but the game moves so fast that I really can’t complain.
My only other real criticism is that the game could have used more polish, bug fixes, and felt better navigating menus with mouse and keyboard but again, it has probably been improved by the time you read this and while the game does say it’s meant to be played with a controller, I think it controlled very well with a mouse and keyboard. I just do not enjoy playing FPS with a controller so I remained stubborn and played with the keyboard and I thought that it felt great whipping around shooting guys with your finger gun while falling from the sky. Any gripes I have mentioned in this post are minor, I think the core of the game is very solid and I had a great time. Something I really appreciate about his games is that they all have an art style that is unique to him and looks gorgeous. The two screenshots I have in here don’t really do justice to how great the game looks in motion. I think it’s Aerial_Knight best game yet and I’m hoping it’s a big hit because I would also love to see it get a sequel, much like how his previous game Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield led to Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield, which I feel got overlooked but does some really interesting stuff with the runner game.
If you had trouble parsing all those rambling thoughts, I think it’s a lovely game and tribute to Neil’s friend Daniel Wilkins, who created the music for Never Yield and We Never Yield. I can’t recommend it enough and I’m excited to see what Aerial_Knight creates next.
Developer: Tribute Games Inc. Publisher: Dotemu Year: 2025 Genre: Beat ’em Up System: Windows
Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a beat ’em up where up to four players select Marvel super heroes and go through levels beating bad guys up until they get to Annihilus, who they also beat up. I played through this one with my kids and it was surprisingly good? Not that I had low expectations for it, but it’s probably one of the best ones I’ve played in a long time, partially because I haven’t played Streets of Rage 4 yet. I don’t think there’s a whole lot to say about these. It’s a pretty straightforward game where each player picks two characters they can switch between on the fly, walk through levels, and punch guys. But it all feels really good and never felt unfair to me like some of the early games in the genre. Really nice pixel art and animations too.
Image taken from Steam store
It’s a game I would have lost my mind over if I was a kid. I grew up as a big Marvel fan and fell off about 15 years ago, which means some of the stuff in the game was wild. Did you know that at some point (maybe currently?) The Punisher is the current version of Ghost Rider and he’s now in space? Was this done because every police officer chud uses a Punisher skull logo? They did a good job putting some oddballs into the game.
Anyway, good stuff. It’s the best Marvel beat ’em up that’s been made so far, and yes, I’m including the X-Men arcade game in this.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion is available for Linux, Windows, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S
Since I’m doing a post in place of a log every time I complete a game, this means I’ve finally come across Myst after replaying it with a friend. I could have sworn I’ve done something more “reviewish” since I basically mention Myst in every other blog post I do, but I guess not? Maybe this site started after I played the remake. So this is going to be less of a formal Review and even more rambly than I usually do since everyone knows I love Myst and will recommend it to everyone anyway. The remake is great, go play it and immediately go into the options to turn on the FMV because it beats the 3D models. The rest of this isn’t spoilery but won’t make sense to anyone that hasn’t played it.
I just replayed the game with a friend over Discord, they had never played Myst before, and this gave me an opportunity to finally play the Rime age that was added last year. The Rime age was originally added to realMyst and appeared in realMyst Masterpiece Edition as well, but did not ship with this Myst remake. Previously it was a very tiny age that you get after you complete the game, something that’s just a nice little treat and you can play through in 15-20 minutes. It’s been heavily reworked and expanded to add more backstory and build on the relationships between characters in the game. Something that’s fun about it is how much closer it is to the style of puzzle design you see in Riven, where everything feels like it’s part of a real world. As much as I love Myst, sometimes the puzzles and even some Ages feel more like puzzles or places just built because they look cool and a fun place to walk around in. By the time they got to Riven they had started to think a lot more about what a fictional world with its own rules would be like to walk around in. The new Rime age was a delight to explore and with development of new games slowing down at Cyan because of financial issues and the industry as a whole collapsing, I treasure every new bit of world design we get from Cyan.
It was also fun to see that my friend enjoyed it in our playthrough. I think. Or they were just being very polite. I think the design of the game largely holds up. The only Age that I kinda lose interest in is Selenic, where the maze goes on quite a bit longer past the point of “ok, I get it.” I think the Mechanical Age is what I have in mind when I think about the worlds that are built around looking neat rather than a real place that people could live in like later Myst games. Playing this over Discord really does highlight how much the adventure game genre is meant to be played with friends. Even when neither person knows what to do next, it helps to have someone to bounce ideas off of or just to have someone to talk to while dealing with the tedium of trying various bits. Most of the time when I played adventure games with this friend, it’s usually pretty awful FMV heavy adventures during the holiday season, so it was nice to play something that I consider to be good. It’s also one of the very few genres that can be played over Discord, where one person controls everything and the other player can sit and talk and take notes if they want.
At this point, this is the version of the game that I would recommend to others. I think the optional subtitles go a long way to helping with the sound puzzles that a lot of people struggle with, especially if you’re a bit tone deaf like I am. It also still feels very snappy, which isn’t lost from the move away from nodes in a Hypercard game. I think you kinda need to turn on the FMV, an option in the menu, because the default 3D models aren’t great and the FMV acting is charming to me. Even though this post is more of a ramble of thoughts and not really a review, I do think the soundtrack also deserves a shoutout. It’s wild that they were hesitant about adding a soundtrack until the publisher pressured them, and immediately realized it added so much to the game.
Finally, I should probably add that Cyan allowed the Video Game History Foundation to scan and archive everything they had and that’s all available here. It’s an incredible collection of Behind the Scenes materials and it’s wild how much they preserved, even company picnics!
Anyway, Myst is great and Cyan is my favorite developer.
Myst is available on Steam/GOG/basically every other platform for Windows and Mac.
Outlaws is a FPS where you play as ex-Marshal James Anderson, looking to get revenge after outlaws murder your wife and kidnap your daughter. It was originally released in 1997 by Lucsarts and got a remaster from Nightdive. I felt compelled to check it out after The International House of Mojo did a negative review of it. Much like that reviewer, I remembered enjoying it. Was it really that bad? I had access to the remaster through Steam Family Sharing so I thought I would give it a shot and the TLDR is: meh. It’s not as bad as the review says, but also not as great as I remember either.
A fun little Monkey Island reference
I should probably talk about the good stuff first. The cutscenes and soundtrack are amazing. At this point in the life of Lucasarts, we were just starting to see them wind down on doing 2D animation in their games and cutscenes. Curse of Monkey Island also comes out in 1997, but I believe after this year they move fully into 3D and keep moving further into being a company that just makes Star Wars games. They still make quite a few good games after this point, I’m a huge fan of Grim Fandango (1998) and they continue making good Star Wars games, but to a certain fan we’re starting to reach the end of the line for the company. But Outlaws does an outstanding job using these cutscenes to tell the story between levels, and they look great. It’s probably the thing that keeps people thinking about the game. The soundtrack is great as well. It’s by Clint Bajakian and perfectly replicates the feel of classic westerns. I think anyone who is a fan of the game will tell you it’s the presentation that really wins them over.
The game itself feels very good to play. It’s built on the engine used for Dark Forces, so everything feels very solid. The weapon selection isn’t too bad either. It’s a little repetitive with the number of shotguns it offers you, but they did everything they could with the setting they had to work with. It’s built on a very solid foundation, so the game controls very well.
I think where the game starts to run into issues is the level design and mechanics of the game that it has to stick to due to the nature of it being a Western. The level designers did the best they could, but you can only do so much in a world design that still needs to be grounded in reality but plays like a fast-paced shooter. You’ll have very small towns or giant buildings like sawmills that you need to explore, but progress needs to be gated somehow and the only real option they have is from having locks and keys. They had a very limited number of design choices to choose from and it ultimately makes the game feel very repetitive. They tried to mix things up by having you on a moving train at one point, which I always love in FPS, and cliffs in another, which helps. The one level where it starts to get less grounded and you’re doing puzzles while sliding down streams in a lumber mill is my least favorite one, so maybe my theory is wrong. But Lucasarts had great level design in all of their other FPS, and the same folks worked on those, so that’s what I’m going to blame.
Due to it being a western you’re also just stuck fighting the same types of enemies repeatedly. Some may have shotguns or rifles, but there’s not a whole lot they could have done. There’s a boss enemy at the end of each level which is generally just a stronger person with a gun who may shoot faster, but I think those are still neat. They also have you shoot at big spiders at a few points which I absolutely hated as a kid. It’s still an odd thing. But that’s what I mean about them only being able to do so much, it’s a western so you’re shooting at various guys with guns and that’s it. The Mojo review mentions the enemies being very dumb and yeah, they are. They mostly stand there or pace back and forth, and sometimes shoot in the wrong direction, which was odd even at the time of the original release. Since the game was released in the 90’s, there was at least some awareness that the tropes in westerns could be very racist, so they avoid most of that, but not always! The brief moments where they run into those are not great. Most people don’t read manuals but I didn’t really care for the descriptions of some of the boss enemies either.
I think the remastered bits are perfectly fine. The new art for the enemies is built on the concept art and generally fits in ok with the rest of the 2D art in the game. The original game uses prerendered sprites of 3D models which I think can be charming, but I can’t imagine anyone new to the game preferring that over the remastered artwork. Luckily you can just enable and disable whatever you want, so it’s hard to see anyone getting mad over the new artwork. It also remaps the keys to fit in more with the control schemes of modern FPS, but I think there’s mods for the original game that can do this too? The only real part of the remaster that I got excited about was all the bonus materials showing concept art and other behind the scenes materials. It’s nice to see all of this here and preserved. If there’s a reason why you would pick this version up over the old one on GOG, it’s probably this.
I guess where I come down on Outlaws is that the game and remaster are fine. I think the other FPS by Lucasarts such as Dark Forces and Jedi Knight are much better due to how much more freedom they had in their design, but I wouldn’t call it a bad game either. I know that’s just a huge ringing endorsement for this game. I would have a very hard time telling people they should pay $30 for this, but if you ever see it on a deep discount and you have nostalgia for the original game then yeah, maybe you would enjoy revisiting the game. Sometimes you just shrug after playing a game and go “that was alright.”
Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster is available on PC (Steam, GOG), PlayStation (PS4, PS5), and Xbox (One, Series X|S).
