Developer: The Zium Society Year: 2026 Genre: Multimedia Program System: Windows
The Zium Railway is the latest in the series of virtual galleries published by The Zium Society. I’ve 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 absolutely loved it and cannot recommend the entire series enough. While I liked some of the worlds more than others and there’s the odd bug here and there, it is a stunning amount of work put into a multimedia program that you can get for free, although I recommend donating money if you can because the revenue is split evenly between the artists and you get some neat bonus materials too. If you happen to get tired of exploring the space the long way, you can also press keys that instantly teleport you to the galleries. 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 this is it!
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. I’m so happy this series exists and will be playing through all of them again. I hope to see more of them in the future.
The Zium Railway is available for Pay-What-You-Want for Windows on Itch.io.
Developer: Not Jam Year: 2026 Genre: Arcade System: Browser
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.
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.
Developer: Mike Piontek Year: 2026 Genre: Adventure System: Macintosh
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.
Developer: Aerial_Knight Publisher: Aerial_Knight Year: 2026 Genre: Puzzle System: Windows
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.
Developer: thecatamites Year: 2026 Genre: Platformer System: Windows
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Developer: Nifflas and Bit Kid Publisher: Bit Kid Year: 2026 Genre: Platformer System: Windows
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.
Developer: hoolis Year: 2026 Genre: Arcade System: DOS
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.
