review

Exit 8

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

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.

Meanderware thoughts

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a skull saying "All it takes to create for the old school web is to know that you can. It never went away. It's still here!"

Developer: alienmelon
Year: 2026
Genre: Interactive Essay
System: Browser

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.

a skull saying "It's about the journey This is why the indie web will always matter. We exist on our own terms, and create on our own terms. The internet is for 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.

a green grid with a giant tower coming out of it. Error windows cover the landscape

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 (Crumbled Stone Walls) thoughts

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a grandfather talking about olive trees and saying they are in need of pruning

Developer: ferran
Year: 2026
Genre: Visual Novel
System: Browser

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.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station thoughts

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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.

a woman saying "Hey, no need to be embarrassed. There was a whole summer I read nothing but computer game novelizations I found in a box behind a grocery store."

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.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is available on Steam and Itch.io, and is coming soon to Nintendo Switch.

Frog Detective 1: The Haunted Island thoughts

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Developer: Grace Bruxner, Thomas Bowker
Publisher: worm club, SUPERHOT PRESENTS
Year: 2018
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

a frog saying "do you know anything about that cave?"

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.

Frog Detective 1: The Haunted Island is available for Windows and Mac on Steam and Itch.io, Nintendo Switch, PS4 + PS5, and Xbox.

Rocket Riot thoughts

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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.

cupcake and dinosaur flying in space and the dinosaur is saying "I can't let you ruin my evil plans, so I'm going to send you flying through 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.

Rocket Riot is available on Steam and Humble.

Aerial_Knight’s DropShot thoughts

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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…

a purple man with sunglasses and text saying "What up doe! I'm Smoke Wallace! When I was a kid, I was bitten by a radioactive dragon. It turned my skin purple and gave me the power to shoot bullets from my fingertips. Then the dragon ate my family. Now I'm hitching rides with mercenaries who would take me out the first chance they get, but we're all hunting the same beasts and their eggs. None of them are getting in my way. I'm here for the dragons and I'm not stopping until they're gone."

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.

first person view of someone falling and putting their finger at an orange sphere

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.

Aerial_Knight’s DropShot is available on Steam, Epic Games Store, Playstation, Xbox, and Google Play.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion thoughts

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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.

Black Panther, Jean Grey, Venom, and Spider-Man all beating up symbiotes
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