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The 50 Indie Game Challenge

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

There’s a trend happening on bluesky that came from The Game Awards discourse where someone said if you post “play more indie games” then you need to also post 50 indie game recommendations. I assume this was because the person was tired of the performative posts just vaguely gesturing at indie games. But it worked. People have actually been posting indie game recommendations. However, because I cannot be a normal person, I got annoyed that people were only linking to games on Steam. I posted a list of 50 recommendations on Bluesky but thought I would do the list here as well, where it’s a lot more readable and I can add some nice screenshots. There’s probably a fun theme I could have done instead like 50 Amiga or ZX Spectrum games, or adventure games, but here’s a batch of 50 games I liked and maybe you’ll feel compelled to do a post recommending indie games.

a guy in sunglasses saying "Perseverence: If you can believe a sports car, you can achieve a sports car"

Landlord Quest – Short point-and-click adventure game where you can see a landlord eat shit. Buying on Itch gives you files to run in ScummVM on everything

DOSember Game Jam – Did you know a game jam just wrapped up where we got 39 brand new games for DOS? So many great games here

santa's arm stretching out to catch presents

SANTA SACK – Tom Hall, of Commander Keen/Doom/Anachronox fame, does so much for the PICO-8 community on Itch, organizes game jams, and makes a Christmas game ever year. This one is an arcade game where you catch presents and avoid coal.

a boy looking at another boy that is stuck in a tree

The Round-about Orchard – Julia Minamata, creator of the amazing adventure game The Crimson Diamond, made a fan game for Over The Garden Wall along with people that worked on the show.

a first person view of five people fighting four monsters

Minerva Labyrinth – Just a really good first person dungeon crawler!

Egg by Terry Cavanagh – The best platformer where you play as an egg. Eat shit Dizzy

Everything by DOMINO CLUB – An anonymous game dev collective. No one is doing more interesting experimental games than them

Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation – An incredibly interesting take on the 4X genre, like an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist take on Civilization

Eulogy for Nonno – Very funny short adventure game where you delivery flowers to a home and are mistaken for a long lost cousin and must escape

Maura & Ash – Nice, short queer point-and-click adventure set in space and runs in DOS

first person view looking down a giant tree

FALLSTRUKTUR – Free first-person platformer where you must make your way down a giant structure. Very challenging

top down view of someone in a dungeon

The Chambers Beneath – Challenging but easy to pick up roguelike for DOS, available for pay-what-you-want

pixel art of someone on a building's rooftop

Neon Hearts City – Cyberpunk point-and-click detective adventure with nice pixel art. I actually wrote more about this one here.

Root Bear – An arcade game for the Playdate where you pour root beer for bears. My kids love it!

a river at sunset

Atuel – A free surreal documentary game about the environment with beautiful art. Wrote more about it here.

deer laying in the grass

Backwater Eulogy – A short visual novel memoir about growing up in a rural area. Wrote more here

Rainbows Are Carnivores – The newest game by Robert Yang. A good gay fishing game.

pixel art of guy in his bedroom

Billy Masters Was Right – A pay-what-you-want point and click adventure with Maniac Mansion-inspired art and a story inspired by The Burbs. Wrote more here.

You Are Generative AI – Twine game where you are a Generative AI consuming power and being useless

Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny – A great, free Castlevania fan game made in GZDoom

CorgiSpace – An excellent collection of PICO-8 games by Adam Saltsman

Mixed Feelings – A ttrpg with mechanics based around making playlists

Type Help – An excellent deduction adventure game made in Twine

two columns with rows of different shapes filling the columns

Spirit Swap – A Match 3 combined with a queer visual novel. I like the spells/powers you can use during the Match 3 part too. Fantastic soundtrack. Wrote more here.

museum with board game photos hanging on walls

Museum of All Things – Explore Wikipedia in the form of a 3D museum

little cartoon guy playing a pinball table that has candy as obstacles

Pinboll – Very cute pinball roguelike

Hardcoded – Very NSFW cyberpunk dating sim

Indiepocalypse – Incredible games compilation featuring new indie games every month and excellent curation. New issue each month!

low poly bowling lane floating in the air with stone heads next to it

Super 10 Pin – Bowling game that absolutely nails the aesthetic of N64 games

green girl collecting big ornaments in the snow

Madvent 5 – Advent calendar of horror games with the aesthetic of PSX games

surreal clouds floating over water

ocean::ephemera – Beautiful space to explore for 7 minutes

Shindig – Cute point-and-click adventure for kids

A Short Hike – Everyone knows this one but my oldest loves it so much

carved pumpkins on pedestals

The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival – Same author as A Short Hike. You must play this in October. It’s a small Halloween MMO and I had so much fun playing it with my kids

Frogsong – Very cute action adventure game where you play as a frog

Kitsune Tails – Amazing Super Mario Bros 3-like platformer!

Dragonsweeper – Took over my life at the beginning of the year. Great combination of dungeon crawling and Minesweeper

KIDNAME: ICEBOY – Incredible parody of Sierra’s Codename:Iceman and other games by Jim Walls

Stair Quest – Another great parody of Sierra games. An intentionally frustrating game where you navigate stairs. Also has a Winter Edition of the game

Alone on a Journey – Trilogy of solo ttrpgs focused on exploration that were influential to me. Wrote more here.

VIDEOVERSE – Beautiful visual novel inspired by the Wii online community stuff

Enclosure 3-D – Remake of an adventure game inspired Sierra classics and the 3D engine presents that retro art style in a really interesting way

black and white pixel art of a woman next to a downed power line

Midnight Scenes – Looooove the Midnight Scenes series. Anthology horror series with each game being playable in one sitting. Wrote more here.

He Fucked the Girl Out Me – Short visual novel about being a sex worker and trauma for the Game Boy. Wrote more here.

Hunger – Another influential solo ttrpgs where you are a vampire. Uses a really neat blackjack-inspired mechanic. Also has a companion game called Thirst. More about it here.

Dinocar – Very cute ttrpg where you build a city for dinosaurs driving cars. Loved playing it with my kids

Parsely – If you are a text adventure fan and want a similar experience with friends, check this out. One player is the “parser” and the rest say commands to solve the adventure

Songs for the Dusk – Great Forged in the Dark ttrpg where the players try to build a better future

Co-open – Really nice game about a child’s first time buying groceries on their own

Cartomancy Anthology – Another influential one. An anthology of games inspired by tarot cards

I hope this helps you find something new on Itch.io!

DOS Games Are Alive and Well on Itch.io

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment
people investigating a safe
Quid Pro Quo


Despite the Industry moving on from DOS decades ago, Itch.io has an incredibly active community of folks making games for DOS, that folks to play on their retro computers and emulators. DOSember, the annual streaming event on Twitch where people play DOS games, just wrapped up their first DOS game jam on Itch.io. The jam received 39 submissions, which I think is a fantastic number of new games for something the games industry and tech world decided was “dead” decades ago. There’s a lot of fantastic stuff in there for you all to play with. They’re all free but if a game is taking donations, consider tossing a dollar or two to the games you like and consider streaming them.

top down view of someone shooting at monsters
Europa Panic

If that wasn’t enough, there’s been DOS games being published on Itch before that. THP put together a list of DOS games made for jams I hosted and there’s so many good games in here. There’s a few paid games as well that I think are worth supporting. THP also made this free DOS demo disc, like in the old days of shareware. Go check the list and demo disc out!

person skiing down a hill
Did you know the original version of SkiFree isn’t actually a DOS game? It’s true!

Finally, there’s plenty more for you to check out on Itch. Poke around the site and check out tags such as the msdos and DOS tags and games like The Aching and Hibernated 1. You’ll find many more DOS games to play and enjoy!

pixel art of an office and some wizard stuff like a staff and monster head hanging on the walls
Quest for Erasmus

Updated the Button Wall

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Today I remodeled the Cool Site Zone part of the site, where I had a giant wall of buttons linking to various sites, and made it a more traditional list of links. The buttons are still there, but now have a lot more context so it’s a bit more useful and hopefully less overwhelming. The more traditional links part of the site is still very outdated and I’ll be continuing to work so it matches more closely to what I have in my RSS feed reader so if you thought I followed your site and don’t see it there, that’s probably why. But I’m making this post so maybe folks can let me know that do in fact have a little 88×31 button I can add to my page.

Weird Gamer Thoughts I Had in the 90’s

~ mpklamerus ~ 5 Comments

Quest 64 has become kind of an ironic internet meme but here’s the thing, I remember getting that game when it came out and actually enjoying it a lot at the time. I don’t even complete that many RPGs but that’s one of them. This led me to start thinking about other weird things I thought about video games as a kid. Obviously most of these will be goofy since I was a child but I do remember thinking that it was a mistake for everything to keep moving away from 2D to 3D graphics and dangit, I was right. Unfortunately I had a N64 and not a Playstation at the time, or else I could have kept rolling with 2D games for quite a bit. Anyway, here’s some random thoughts that no one was asking for:

  • There’s a few games like Quest 64 and Gubble (I’m guilty of pushing this one) that have become a joke on the internet but I actually played both when they came out and had fun. Not even fun in the sense of not knowing that a game could be bad but it’s what you were stuck with so you may as well make the most of it, I just liked them.
  • For some reason I was very jealous that TurboGrafx owners had Bonk’s Adventure despite having access to plenty of great games on pc and Nintendo consoles.
  • Was also jealous that Philips CD-i owners got those Zelda games, even after I played two of them at CompUSA.
  • Was very impressed with how Bug! looked on the Sega Saturn. That was the game I was focused on for that platform and was sad my computer wasn’t powerful enough to run the demo on the pc.
  • Mortal Kombat was too violent for me but Doom was perfectly fine.
  • Couldn’t get enough of pre-rendered graphics in games. Thought Donkey Kong Country was the best looking thing ever and thought this box art for Kyrandia 3 was Very Good, Actually.
  • Games with lots of cds filled with fmv were better than games with less cds. In fact, graphics were never going to get better than fmv so why bother with other stuff.

End of the Year Music Wrapped….Thing

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

I don’t use Spotify and cannot provide a music summary thing. Nor should you use Spotify either. They stand by ICE recruitment ads, pay artists essentially nothing, the CEO uses money he makes from it to invest in AI warfare technology, it’s getting filled with AI slop, and the audio quality is poor. There’s really no reason to use it. Other streaming services pay artists more and you could probably gain a nice big music collection by just buying music every month with what you would be giving Spotify. I guess I can look at my Plex stats but I don’t wanna. But what I can do is list some of the things I liked that were released this year, with some extremely brief thoughts, and maybe you’ll find something new! All links go to the bandcamp page. I have very basic music taste that’s mostly goth and rock so apologies in advance for that.

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory – I’ve been a fan of Sharon’s music for a while and this has her putting together a band and moving into a much more goth direction.

Promise Mascot Agency Soundtrack – I have also been a fan of Alpha Chrome Yayo for a few years now and it’s been a lot of fun seeing him do his first game soundtrack. I don’t think you need to play the game to appreciate it but I also recommend the game. The soundtrack has a nice variety of sounds and use of Japanese instruments. There’s also a soundtrack album by Ryo Koike that I mean to pick up soon too.

gloomy june – I guess I would call this alternative or emo pop? Lot of fun. It’s their first album since they switched from being The Y-Axes. The new name is much better. One of the members makes tabletop rpgs.

andwhichstray by Mint Mile – Tim Midyett of Silkworm’s current band, although Silkworm has reunited so I guess that’s his current band too. They’ve done a few albums by this point and they’re all very solid rock albums. This is one of the final albums Steve Albini produced and one song was written by Jason Molina for the surviving members of Silkworm, the day after Michael Dahlquist was killed in 2005, so it’s definitely a heavy one.

The Squirrely Years Revisited by Ministry – Horrible album art but it’s fun to hear Ministry revisited the very early stuff, which I actually like the most by the band to be honest.

Trouble by NUOVO TESTAMENTO – Fun early 90s dance sounding stuff. Earlier stuff was more goth and darkwave sounding.

Dead Channel Sky Plus by clipping. – Technically a rerelease of an album from last year with new track but I think that still counts. A little embarrassing that I haven’t really listened to clipping before this year since they’ve been around for ages but there’s some massive gaps in my hip hop library.

New Dawn by Marshall Allen – The debut solo album by the 100 year old (yes really) bandleader of the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Physical by youryoungbody – Just some fun goth dance music

Evergreen Plaza by Previous Industries – I’ve been a fan of Open Mike Eagle for a while and this supergroup is new to me. All the songs by them are named after defunct spaces, mostly retail.

Phantom Island by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Heard about this band for a while and knew they had a really devoted following. I didn’t quite get obsessed when I heard them for the first time this year but they’re good. Sometimes you can just enjoy rock music a normal amount.

Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan by The Mountain Goats – I’ve liked everything by TMG and I like this album too. Nothing too interesting to say about them. I think it’s kinda funny Tommy Stinson played on this album knowing that Jon Wurster (the drummer) previously made fun of him on a call to The Best Show like 8 years ago after Tommy canceled an appearance at the very last minutes (30 minutes into the show). I don’t think there was any actual grudge though. Not a big Lin-Manuel Miranda fan but it’s just backing vocals.

I’m sure I left out a ton since I was just looking at stuff on Bandcamp that I have. Sorry if I left you out. Whatever you made was probably great.

My Micro Fiction Games Jam 2025 Entry

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday I mentioned the Micro Fiction Games Jam, where folks make a ttrpg in 280 characters or less. It’s just a fun little unranked jam that lets you quickly make a game and not feel like you’re stuck in a rut if it’s been a while since you made anything. I could have sworn I entered the jam before but maybe it was a different but similar jam. I’m too lazy to look up my previous blog post about it. Anyway, this time I made a game based on the 7th Guest microscope puzzle. It’s kinda become infamous because the difficulty of the AI was apparently determined by the processor speed and quickly became way too difficult. This has nothing to do with my tiny ttrpg. Not my best work, but fine enough for a 280 character jam, and technically the first ttrpg I’ve made in a few years.

Microscope

You’re a mutated microbe in a petri dish with 10 other microbes
Roll 1d4 each turn
-On 1-2 you infect one microbe
-On 3-4 one of your microbes divides into two and infects one
Repeat until all are infected
Once all are infected, one of them mutates and the process repeats

Who knows, maybe this will motivate me to do bigger and better ttrpgs again. I think you all should consider making one too. There’s a couple days left in the jam for you to make a 280 character ttrpg.

Support Rebecca Heineman’s GoFundMe

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I was originally going to do an indie game roundup but don’t really have the energy for it today. I’d just like to encourage people to donate to Rebecca Heineman’s GoFundMe. It was originally setup to help cover the cost of fighting cancer but is now for covering hospice and funeral costs. She’s done so much for other folks in video games and has always been very generous with her time so please consider donating if you can. If you’re curious about what she’s worked on, MobyGames has listed plenty of her credits but I’m pretty sure there’s quite a few that aren’t on there.

Roller Rinks Are the Best

~ mpklamerus ~ 9 Comments

Just got back from the roller rink with one of my kids and wanted to say how nice they are. I used to go to them once or twice a year when I was in elementary school, but didn’t go to them anymore until my oldest started going because her school started having the occasional night at the roller rink. It’s just a blast skating around on a nice surface while music and lights are blasting away. I’m not the most amazing skater and always have to use roller blades because I’m far more comfortable in those, but it’s still fun. The wild thing is that the one I go to with my kids is the one that I went to as a child and still looks how I remembered it, but still being maintained and all that.

My understanding is that they’ve slowly been closing over the last few decades and aren’t really a thing outside of North America but if you do have one near you, consider visiting. Somehow I live somewhere that has three of them within a 15 minute drive of me, which is nice. I’d love to visit more in the Detroit area sometime. I got to do an outdoor one a couple years ago but that’s it.

If I did have a complaint about my local one, it’s that it’s just top 40 music. Although the DJ was different this time and better so hmmmm, maybe that is getting better. I’m assuming that the music is also better on adult-only nights.

If you would like to know more about roller rinks and African-American roller skating culture, I highly recommend the documentary United Skates.

Well, Never Mind on RetroAchievements Then

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About a month and a half ago I made a post about how I just learned about RetroAchievements and how it was a fun thing to use when revisiting old games. Well, hmmmm, I’m now deleting my account. It has just been discovered by folks that the site has a bit of a Nazi problem, which kills any interest I had in using the site so I put in my account deletion request, which apparently takes them two weeks to process. The quote retweets list other examples of the site’s moderation team not really caring about what users do. They can say as many times as they want that they’re neutral and just care about preservation but folks, they’re adding achievements to video games and that’s it. They can do whatever they want. You don’t need to add achievements to a far right rom hack.

Oh well, one less account for me to think about I guess and I can go back to not using RetroArch.

EDIT: They’ve since put out an apology and stated the right right rom hack won’t be added to the site which is good. I’m still probably going to let my account delete itself because I don’t really need to keep doing achievements for old games anyway, but I’ve got two weeks to think about it and see if they do anything else I guess.

Play an Old Indie Game?

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a screenshot from Yip Quest showing 3 kobolds outside a jail cell
Yip Quest

I’ve now put all the indie games covered in the indie game roundups that are on Itch in a single Itch list and will add things to this going forward. This isn’t a perfect list, sometimes my posts covered an entire jam or collection of games. For cases like this, I kinda just included one or two games from the list. Not an ideal solution but oh well. Of course it’s missing anything that didn’t have an Itch.io release. It’s also missing all context for why I thought the games were interesting that I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I just think it’s a fun way to check out small, experimental indie games from a year or two ago since the memory on games feels like it’s extremely short lived and people move on extremely quickly unless it’s a massive hit. Search on Itch.io has also always been flawed. So I guess consider checking out the list, scrolling down a ton, and opening a random game?

There’s probably better ways of highlighting indie games that are older than a year but aren’t old enough to be considered “retro” and I think it would be fun to poke at that more. I think point-and-click adventures and interactive fiction seem to have a pretty long tail to them for maintaining interest after they come out, despite having smaller audiences, but who knows.

an image of a cartoon snake
SNAKE Lucky Laugh, one of the games that’s already been delisted from Itch

The biggest bummer about going through the list was that there’s been a few games that have already been delisted even though I’ve only been doing this for a few years. It’s good stuff so it kinda stinks I wasn’t able to save them. I thought I should start submitting this stuff to MobyGames as I do these roundups but I tried to submit one just not and got hit with a message about how I hit the limit on pending new game submissions because it takes mods there months to look at anything. You’d think with Atari owning the site it would have a bigger budget to deal with this but I guess not. I have no interest in submitting anything to IGDB since it’s owned by Amazon and Backloggd, which uses the database, just feels like another harassment vector at times. So the only documentation of some of these games is just my half assed weekly posts, and nobody deserves that.