Developer: Calligram Studio Publisher: Calligram Studio Year: 2024 Genre: Adventure
Phoenix Springs is a neo-noir point-and-click adventure game where you play as a woman in search of your missing estranged brother. I knew very little about this game going into it, other than it being developed over a long period of time, but picked it up based on really liking the art and it ended up being one of my favorite adventure games from 2024. It’s hard to explain more about the story, partially to avoid spoilers but also because it’s a very surreal story told in a non-traditional way, but I actually liked that a lot. I was talking about the game on Mastodon and Andrew Plotkin (who liked the game) described the game as “Philip K. Dick took the good acid,” which I think is a good description of the game’s story. Some people on Steam were critical of not full understanding the story but I liked that.
Since the game is a detective story, the game has a really interesting mechanic where you are basically using ideas and memories as inventory items. I loved that you’re using these “items” in a way that you would like an inventory item. There’s a lot of interesting side investigations as well that don’t advance the main plot but do reveal more about the world. There’s also a lot of red herring thoughts that aren’t used and get crossed out once you’re out of an area that is no longer relevant.
If I do have any criticisms, I do thing the last section of the game is too big and aimless. I had felt like I was doing the adventure game thing where I just try every item on everything and repeating that a bit. It was a little frustrating since the rest of the game moves as a pretty fast pace. The game even includes a builtiin walkthrough which I think is nice.
I think the voice acting also deserves a shoutout. It’s all narrated by the same woman and it has kind of a more deadpan or monotone delivery, but it works really well. Even the dialog from other characters is voice acted from the viewpoint of the main character.
I just think it’s a really solid mystery and think it’s worth a look if you want an adventure game that is willing to experiment a bit more.
Developer: Nintendo Publisher: Nintendo Year: 1985 Genre: Platformer
I don’t know man, it’s Super Mario Bros for the NES. I have nothing unique to say about this one but this has replaced Backloggd for me so it’s going here. It’s an important game and I still like playing it, with the exception of the maze in world 7. There.
I guess what I will say is that sometimes it’s fun to go back to a game you’ve played a billion times and really dig into it more if you haven’t already. That Minus World glitch you’ve heard about before? Go in there and actually try it out for yourself. It’s fun to see all the weird stuff in a game that’s been discovered by people who have been playing it over the last 40 years. Maybe check out a rom hack or two. Check out the differences between versions in other countries if they exist. This was part of my recent revisit to lots of old games since I have an emulator setup for the first time in a while, even though I also own this in the original hardware AND it’s accessible to me through the Nintendo Switch. RetroAchievements was what got me to revisit the game and poke at it in weird ways that I usually don’t. It’s hard to make time for this sort of thing when you can take a look at your games backlog and see that there’s a billion things in there, but I think it’s also worth revisiting something you like that you haven’t played in a long time and poking at it in ways that you usually don’t.
Super Mario Bros. is available on the Nintendo library in the Nintendo Switch Online service
Developer: Bioware Publisher: EA Year: 2019 Genre: RPG
Anthem is an online action roleplaying game where you play as Freelancers, basically adventurers in big metal suits with jetpacks, that must stop some evil folks from taking controls of the Anthem of Creation, which is a mysterious force that has created most of the advanced technology in the world. I started playing this one after EA announced the game was going to be shut down for good at the beginning of 2026, however it turns out that the game was no longer for sale and only accessible through EA Play, where it was only available for the next month.
I kinda didn’t know what to think going in. It was my first Bioware game in something like 15 years and I think my first AAA game in a while too, outside of Nintendo’s stuff. Bioware doing multiplayers shooters is also just not what I want from them and why I never bothered with ME3, since at release that relied on you having to play those bits for that best ending or whatever was going on.
The game is a bit of a mess but for the most part I had a good time. The flying and shooting feel great. I don’t know if I’ve played a game with a better jetpack. It was technically very impressive to me too. I think some of the design of things in the world falls a bit flat. None of the designs of things like the suits were really that interesting to me. But the effects and creation of that world look nice when you’re zooming around in a jetpack and the modeling and facial expressions are all well done. I forgot how expensive video games can look since I usually don’t play that many expensive ones, so it’s a weird change for me to play one where you can feel tons of money being dumped into one and for things like famous actors who pop up just to voice a couple lines.
The shooting feels good too. It all feels good! It’s just that it all becomes pretty repetitive. Generally you fly to a place, shoot all the bad guys in an area, and repeat. Sometimes you grab some Important Things in an area and bring them to the glowing thing in the center of a region. This is generally how the missions go. I’m making this all sound kind of awful but I still enjoyed it. I think this is where the “It’s a 7/10 game (complimentary)” thing comes in. I actually think there’s two types of 7/10 games. There’s the kind that are your experimental games, like early 90s French DOS Games that takes lots of fascinating swings that don’t always work, and the other kind being pretty safe games that are kind of messy or boring at times but can still be fun to play. I felt like Anthem falls into the latter. Once you’ve played for a few hours, I feel like you kinda “get it.” But I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Well, maybe it is if you bought it at full price for $60. But I didn’t mind as a one month of EA Pass thing. Sometimes I just want kind of a mindless shooter that has a nice jetpack.
I can’t really blame people for being critical of it in reviews though. There’s never that much roleplaying that happens or a whole lot to mix it up, which is kinda why people go to Bioware games. Once in a while you do some dialog choices but they aren’t especially interesting and I found some of the characters to be irritating too. The game’s plot at a high level is an interesting idea but it never goes to any directions that I was really into. The small storytelling details are great though. I liked things like the codex and in-game mailbox where you get emails from other people and spam mail. You’ll also find little bits of story by exploring the world and maybe finding little things like a list of passengers on a crashed ship, shopping lists, or a recipe. I loved all of this! It sounds like fluff but this is the kind of stuff that makes the world feel more like a real place. You’ll occasionally overhear bits of conversation between two people while walking around the world, maybe in an alley or hanging out on a balcony, and I wish there was more of this too. The hub world you walked around between missions really could have used more of this to give it more life.
I think I’m frustrated by this game because it never develops a strong enough identity and doesn’t justify being an always live game to me. I think a lot of people would feel very differently if it was a single player game with instanced coop. The game never allows more than four people in the world in an instance and never in the hub area either, so it all feels extremely unnecessary other than to say “Well, EA wanted a live service game so here it is I guess.” There were only a few times where I would come across another player, who would stop for a moment and help me shoot stuff, but that was it. There were times I got to play with friends but again, that could have been handled in a way that doesn’t make this a live service game.
The game was delisted from EA Play yesterday, meaning it’s no longer available to play for me. This is a bizarre decision to me because the game is still playable to people who bought the game until January. Why not let people subscribe to EA Play for the next few months for an exclusive game and make some more money from that while the servers are still up anyway?
My understanding is that the production was a bit of a mess, with a lot of bad decisions being made at the executive level. It’s so unfortunate because you can tell that a lot of care went into this game by the people working on it and were hampered by these bad decisions. There are moments of brilliance that come through when it’s not fighting against all the directions the game was being pulled in during development. I still had fun playing it and it’s so unfortunate that it will no longer be available for folks to play in a few months unless people figure something out in the next few months. I know StopKillingGames is a whole thing but this game came out years before that started and why I think that movement is poorly thought out is a whole other mess.
Anthem is no longer available for sale and not playable anywhere.
Developer: CtrlMovie Publisher: Wales Interactive Year: 2017 Genre: Interactive Movie
Late Shift is a choose your own path-style game where you play as a student named Matt who forced to help with a heist and must make the correct choices to survive the night. You watch the interactive film and at specific points in the game you make binary choices that lead to different branches. The game features multiple endings with one being the optimal ending.
If you don’t make the right choices earlier, she will pull away and say “No time for love Dr. Jones.” While usually not this bad, a lot of the dialog in this game is poorly written.
I found this game incredibly frustrating. It’s well shot and the actors are all great, but nothing else worked for me. The choices often boil down to being a Good Choice and a Bad Choice with it feeling like a coin flip, and if you chose poorly, you are eventually given a bad ending. This normally wouldn’t be that big of an issue but if you want to go back to redo that choice, you must restart the game and you cannot skip previously seen scenes. Many other choices do not matter at all. Playthroughs also happen to be pretty long, making it a chore to replay. If you want to redo a choice, you have to rewatch up to an hour of the game again just to try the other option. The game also suffers from some poor dialog that would take me out of the game. If you’re looking to play an interactive movie, there’s plenty of better options. Some of the other games by this publisher, Wales Interactive, are worth considering over this game too.
Late Shift is available on a variety of platforms, linked to on the publisher’s site.
Developer: Ann Arbor District Library Publisher: Ann Arbor District Library Year: 2025
With the Ann Arbor District Library Summer Game basically nearing the end for this year, I feel very comfortable saying this is my Game of the Year. If you don’t know, the Summer Game is a yearly event organized by the Ann Arbor District Library where you can enter codes for points, usually scattered around the city and various branches of the library, along with logging your reading and participating in events and online games on the library’s website. You can then redeem the points for prizes. NPR recently did a very good article about the history of the Summer Game and goes into more detail on what the Summer Game is.
I’ve mentioned the Summer Game on here a few times before but with this being the first time I actually participated in it, I cannot get over what an incredible experience it has been. My kids and I had so much fun finding codes around the city and it encouraged them to read more. You can’t beat that! It also encouraged me to go to more library events, which I always have a great time at. I guess it’s a little bit of a cheat to say that something like this is better than Video Games, but technically the website does have video games that I played for points so I will count it. A previous year I considered the Pikmin mobile game to be my GOTY, not because it’s an amazing and well designed game, but it helped me learn about paths I could walk on near my house and when something improves my life that much, it kinda wins by default. Maybe I just need more edutainment games as an adult.
Morph Girl is an FMV game inspired by 90/00’s Japanese horror movies such as Ringu. You play as Elana, a widow who is unable to move on following the loss of her wife to cancer one year ago. A supernatural being resembling her wife begins to force itself into her daily life and the decisions you make during the game determine if she embraces or rejects the creature. It’s the first game by Autumn Knight, who later worked on D’Avekki’s game Dark Nights with Poe and Monroe as an editor and game tester.
It maybe lacks the production values that a FMV game by a larger studio would have but it’s an interesting game and I enjoyed the writing. Sadly it’s rare for queer relationships to be depicted in FMV games so it was nice to see a game entirely about one. I was confused by how some of the choices led to various endings. I did get a little frustrated by the inability to skip previously seen scenes too, especially in a game that needs multiple playthroughs to see all the endings, but I appreciated that the playthroughs were only 30 minutes long so it was easy to see it all and repeat scenes weren’t a big deal. Despite my criticisms, I had a good time with the game and appreciate that it explores themes that are unfortunately rarely seen in adventure games.
Developer: iD Software Publisher: Softdisk Year: 1991 Genre: FPS
I am a fan of the incredibly inaccurate box art for the game
Catacomb 3-D is the third game in the Catacomb series and the first in the series to be a first person shooter. I feel like people sometimes claim it’s the first FPS, but that’s incorrect and it’s not even the first FPS by iD Software. In this game you play as a wizard named Petton Everhail and must explore a series of catacombs to defeat the evil lich Nemesis and rescue your friend Grelminar. Different releases of the game switch the names around but that makes no sense to me and the later games refer to the lich as Nemesis so that’s what I’m sticking with.
Today the game is pretty simplistic compared to even FPS that would come out a few years later. You wander around maze-like levels and shoot fireballs at a variety of monsters that you would expect to see in a fantasy setting. The fireball is the only weapon you have, but you can pick up two different powerup types that shoot multiple fireballs at the same time but in different patterns. It still has a little bit of a rpg influence since you pick up healing potions that you choose to use when you think you need them.
Even though it’s dated, I still had fun. It’s very interesting from a games history perspective and I liked seeing what id software dropped and what they carried to their later FPS. Walls can be destroyed by shooting at them, adding more of an exploration element to this game compared to Doom. There’s also some puzzles that you need to figure out from reading scrolls. I think the enemies are charming too. I really enjoyed the pixel art for them and their animations.
I would recommend the CatacombGL source port if you want to check it out. It adds a lot of nice features like widescreen and smoother movement.
Developer: House of Tomorrow Publisher: Netflix Year: 2018 Genre: Interactive Movie
Bandersnatch is an interactive episode of Black Mirror where viewers make decisions at key points to determine the outcome of the story. The episode is about a young man who is developing an adaptation of a novel but feels he is starting to lose his grip on reality as he develops the game. Through various points in the story you are offered a choice between two options and each one will lead you down a different branch. I wasn’t very impressed with the options offered and felt very railroaded during the whole thing. That’s probably part of the point of this thing and the story it’s telling, but it also just kinda meant I became bored with the idea of it all pretty quickly. Often when people criticize Black Mirror, it’s for making really basic statements like “what if technology was bad?” I don’t think this is always the case but it certainly felt like it with this episode, while feeling very smug at the same time. I’m not a fan of Black Mirror in general though so this may have been something I was never going to enjoy. There are many other games that do a much better job having meta commentary about choice in games that you can play instead. However, it does get some points for the Jeff Minter cameo.
I guess it doesn’t really matter that much about how I felt about this game. It was delisted earlier this year and as of this writing, I don’t believe any of Netflix’s interactive movies are available anymore. It’s a big shame because I’m not opposed to the idea of them and I heard some of them were good, but Netflix will dip its toes into games and then get distracted and decide it’s not really worth the focus. It feels like they’re going through something similar with their mobile games offering and dropping a bunch of games from their service on there as well. I can’t imagine it helps that no one knows Netflix even offers their games.
It’s not all doom though. People have figured out how to preserve these interactive movies and with some searching online, you can find the preservation efforts pretty easily. Even though I didn’t enjoy Bandersnatch very much, I’m glad it was preserved and will be available for people to check out for years to come.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is no longer available on Netflix but is easy to find through your favorite search engine.
Developer: Christina Stone-Bush Year: 2019 Genre: Solo TTRPG
THIRST and HUNGER are two tabletop rpgs created back in 2019 for a game jam where the rules must fit on a business card. Both games are erotic solo ttrpgs about a vampire biting a human, but each game is played from a different perspective. The games are played with a deck of cards and something to write your notes with. You answer some prompts at the beginning, and each card that is drawn is another prompt to describe what is happening or how you are feeling. The game ends in a way similar to blackjack, you must keep drawing cards if your total is under 14, if it is over that then you may stop. If it over 21 then the game automatically ends. The two ranges where the game ends also have different prompts. Both games are very short and should only take a few minutes to play, but can be replayed many times. The layout of the games is great, with everything cleanly organized to fit on a business card without feeling cramped. The rules are very concise due to the business card limitation, which makes it very easy to pick up. As everyone knows, vampires are hot and this game succeeds in its goal. In addition to the games being effective at being erotic, I just think it’s mechanically interesting to use the Blackjack limitation of 21 for a ttrpg. It inspired me for my game Navigator, so it’s also very important to my own creativity as well.
While they have been delisted on Itch, THIRST and HUNGER are still available for download on Itch.io
Black Hole Havoc is a puzzle arcade game created for Playdate’s Season 2. Black holes have opened up in the sky and it is up to you to close them by creating black holes of equal size and shooting them into the holes to close them. You do this across a series of 80 levels, with animated cutscenes regularly appearing between levels.
The core gameplay loop of creating black holes and shooting them is great. The crank is used very well to grow and shrink the size of the black holes before you shoot them. There’s a combo system you can take advantage of for more points if you shoot faster, which I didn’t really use too much, but I’m glad it was there. The game introduces so many variations in the levels as you play so the game never felt like it got tiring for me. I saw one or too criticisms, probably on backloggd, that each mechanic wasn’t used more but I loved that. I feel like a lot of games overuse a new mechanic once it’s introduced and this game often only sticks with them for a few levels or at least rotates through it. The game ends with a boss level, which I didn’t really care for but it’s pretty quick and when 79/80 levels in a game are good, I can’t really complain. I know games are often tempted to add a big finale like that but it often doesn’t work for me. There’s an arcade mode too. It’s fine! It’s what it says it is but I felt very satisfied after playing through all the levels once.
I’m always surprised at how good games can sound and look on the Playdate and I was really impressed by the animation in this game. The animation style reminded me a lot of flash cartoons from the 00’s. In fact, my only real complaint about this game is that it feels like internet humor from the late 00s in how the characters talk. I didn’t really care for it and felt dated with the jokes about people posting too much on social media or taking selfies, but it was harmless and unlike the actual humor from that era, it wasn’t obnoxious or trying to be edgy.
It was nice to see Season 2 end on a high note. I wasn’t familiar with these devs at all so this game was a very pleasant surprise.
