I follow about a billion different blogs and sites right now through my RSS feed reader and I feel like once in a while, but not too often, I’ll see a post where a person has a comment in their post where they wonder who this is even for or assume no one is going to read it, and I just wanted to say that I think it’s the best. If anything, this site is too focused on video games and technology. It brings me a lot of joy when I see someone post on their site about what they’re up to, art they’ve been enjoying, and also incredibly specific things like their bookshelves or whatever.
There’s also just something about reading it on someone’s personal site, instead of on social media, that makes it feel more personal or real and not focused on brand building, since it can’t really get shared through retweets. That isn’t to say that people are posting about the sandwich they liked on social media to build their brand, they’re clearly excited about that sandwich and posting to social media is the fastest and easiest way to mention it. But if they do that blog post about that sandwich then man, they must have really loved it if they’re putting that much effort into it.
Anyway, just wanted to say that I like reading the personal posts like that if you ever feel self conscious about that stuff or feel like you’re going off topic.
Every year I’ve been doing a post on the games I’m looking forward to. It’s a little bit late this year and some of the stuff I was planning to mention, like The Roottrees are Dead, are already out. Oh well, it’s my blog, I can post stuff late if I want. I think all the links on this post are going to Steam page if you want to wishlist. Like every year, it’s usually something I don’t know of that catches me off guard and becomes my favorite thing but maybe you’ll discover something new anyway.
Ron Gilbert put his rpg project on hold but said he has a much smaller game we should be getting soon. I have no idea what that is but it’s….something?
Tony Warriner is working on a game for that modern ZX Spectrum thing. I kinda don’t understand what makes a modern computer a ZX Spectrum but the game itself looks like a fun top down shooter thing.
New Inkle game this year. No idea what it will play like but it’s an Inkle game so I’ll probably like it.
Spirit Swap is a Match 3 game that comes out in a few days. I backed it on kickstarter a while ago so it’s already paid for and I can just enjoy this neat little queer game.
Trails and Traces: The Tomb of Thomas Tew is a point-and-click detective adventure. I liked the dev’s previous game from a few years ago so I’m happy to see them making another.
Old Skies! It’s a new Wadjet Eye game! I’m technically a beta tester on it, but haven’t really found that many bugs so I’m a pretty lousy one, but I am allowed to say that what I’ve played has been fantastic and at the level of quality you would expect from one of their games.
Citizen Sleeper 2 comes out in a couple hours but I published it before it came out so I can still say I’m looking forward to it!
A Chamber of Stars looks like a trippy visual novel or adventure game. I just really like the art and it has a demo.
The Ape Painting is an upcoming interactive fiction by an author I’m a fan of.
Peripeteia is an immersive sim coming out next month. I’ll always take more of those. It has a demo I haven’t played yet.
Rosewater! This one has been on a list or two before. It’s a western point-and-click adventure that has been in developer for quite a while and looks great. I love the rotoscoped art. We’re definitely getting this one this year since it was just announced that it’s coming out in March.
We’re getting a new Heroes of Might and Magic this year. There’s actually a couple of HOMM-likes floating around or entering early access so this might not even be necessary, but I’m still cautiously interested in it since it’s set in an older M&M world, Erathia, instead of the universe that Ubisoft has been putting their games in since they took control. Ubisoft’s setting has been boring as shit so I’m happy to see them return to this.
Quantum Witch looks like a fun and queer platforming adventure game. This one has a demo too.
Operation Zero just looks like a fun retro-looking arcade top-down shooter.
The Drifter has been on a previous list and I’m hoping we get it this year. I just really like Powerhoof’s shorter adventure games and think a long one would be good too.
We have a new game by the creator of Midnight Scenes. I will keep buying their short horror adventure games as long as they keep making them.
Nivalis is some sort of bar simulation set in a cyberpunk world. It’s by the developer of Cloudpunk, which I thought was very good.
Agent 64 is a FPS inspired by Goldeneye. Really liked the demo of it and hope we get the full game this year.
Super Cucumber is a cute platformer by the creators of Down the Drain. I thought that game was a fun roguelike and this is a dev local to me so I’m looking forward to this game.
Vaporwave Pinball is a pinball game with a vaporwave theme. Pretty straightforward! I like the demo so I’ll probably like more of that.
Legends of Castile is a historical point-and-click adventure set in Spain. I just think the art is very nice and reminds me a tiny bit of Curse of Monkey Island. It has a demo too.
Soup Rooms is an upcoming anthology game where you explore various rooms. It’s inspired by an old game I’m not familiar with but the opportunity to walk around a variety of weird spaces sounds like a good time to me.
Having a little bookstore is a fun little dream I have so a game about that, Tiny Bookshop, where I can do that without all the actual stress of running a bookstore sounds nice.
Generation Exile is a game about humanity’s only generation ship. I’m sure it will be an emotional experience that will make me feel like crap. Can’t wait.
I don’t know much about Usual June but I like the art and I’m a Finji Fan.
Promise Mascot Agency just looks like a wild adventure game and I’m very excited to see Alpha Chrome Yayo doing the soundtrack.
Sleight of Hand is a stealth game with a really fun looking mechanic where you have cards you draw from and each one has an effect to help you stay hidden and dispose of enemies.
Angeline Era is a new game by the Anodyne devs featuring bump combat!
Acronia is a platformer inspired by old DOS games. It has a demo on the Itch page that runs in DOS.
I think Roman Sands comes out this year? I was a fan of their previous game Paratopic and really like the Y2K aesthetic this has.
We’re getting a new Halloween Harry this year! By the same dev as the original game.
Heir of the Dog is a new adventure by the creator of Lucy Dreaming. That was a fantastic point-and-click adventure and I’m sure this will be a good one too.
Dream Settler is the sequel to Hypnospace Outlaw, one of my favorite games!
Zid Journey is a sequel to Zniw Adventure and looks like another point-and-click adventure that the whole family can play.
I really like the vaporwave aesthetic that the puzzle game Axyz has.
Tiny Garden is a game I backed that looks like a chill gardening game set in tiny Polly Pocket-like containers.
Usually I put all my indie game stuff in the roundups but there was enough here that it deserved its own post.
EEK3, a virtual showcase of horror games inspired by the PSX era, just wrapped up and you can watch it all on YouTube. Overall it was good, I discovered a lot of new upcoming games from it, and we got a new HauntedPS1 demo disc that you can now download on Itch. I thought I would highlight and link to some of the ones I’m most interested just to get some extra eyes on them, but you should just watch the showcase and download the demo disc. This might be a weird list anyway because I like creepy stuff, but not games that are actually scary or have jump scares.
Angeline Era is a new bump combat game by the developer of games such as Sephonie and Anodyne 1 and 2. Bump combat is back!
Ticky’s Tower of Time just looks like a nice 3D platformer from the PSX era. Sure, I’ll play another one of those. The music in the trailer is pleasant too.
I’m not quite sure what Of Love and Eternity is, maybe an adventure game? But it looked interesting and it has a demo so I should probably go play that.
Eclipsium looks like a horror adventure game and man, I get so excited about digitized sprites.
Axyz looks like a fun puzzle game with a vaporwave theme.
The art in Juice is so fun and Colorfiction has made plenty of cool games before.
I didn’t know until now that No Players Online was getting a commercial release but I was a fan of the original free game.
Spyrit Walker looks like a fun retro FPS and has a demo too.
Children of Saturn is really exciting to me. I will always be into stories about teens trying to get by while it feels like the world is ending. It’s an interactive fiction game that doesn’t seem to be horror, and it has a demo.
Prison of Husks looks like a combination of the slower, difficult combat in Dark Souls with an aesthetic inspired by ICO.
Scissors in Hell is a first person turn-based dungeon crawler so yes, I will be playing that.
Death in Abyss looks like a Star Fox-type game but horror themed and set under the water.
Morn is another horror retro shooter and it’s got a demo so you can see if being a priest and shooting demons is for you.
Shrimp Game is a roguelike where you are a shrimp under the water. Wonderful.
It’s kind of funny seeing something with the Wholesome tag make it into the showcase but VORON does seem like a nice adventure game where you are a raven exploring the world.
MOTORSLICE is a non-horror platformer that actually reminds me of the PS2 era of games and the movement in it seems really well done.
Please Insert Disc is a horror adventure where it seems like you explore a haunted PS2-era disc? It’s by the devs of Home Safety Hotline, which I never played but people seemed to love.
Tamarindos Freaking Dinner looks like a very trippy and silly adventure game and was a nice way to mix things up with all the very serious games in the showcase.
RADIANT ELUSION seems to be a 3D platformer with a vaporwave theme.
And then finally, Soup Rooms sounds fascinating to me. I guess it is inspired by a 2007 game from Japan. It’s 100 rooms that I think you just explore and will be free. That sounds pretty great to me.
I’ve decided it now, 2025 is the year of Asheron’s Call. It’s a game I’ve always wanted to play since Asheron’s Call 2 was the first MMO I ever played and I’m taking the time now to revisit it. That might seem a little odd since it was a MMO that started in 1999 and shut down for good in 2017, but fans have managed to keep it alive!
If you would like to play it, the instruction on this website are actually very straightforward and were easy for me to follow. The page has a warning for it at the bottom, but a few folks including myself have run into an issue where the game crashes when you sign in and it’s easily fixed by just playing in Windowed Mode.
Once you have this all setup, you just need to pick a server to play on. A couple of us in the Discord for Twitch streamer BogusMeatFactory (Twitch link) are going to be playing a retail release Asheron’s Call fan server called Levistras that also enforces a strict, no-bot policy. This means we will experiencing the retail game experience around the era of 2004-ish. If you are interested in playing with us, you can download the launcher through the link here.
This is an easy executable that is your hub portal to all of the different servers available now and is incredibly easy to use! The server we will be playing on is the Levistras server, whose information can be found at the link here.
I also highly recommend checking out the manual. The game actually has a solid in-game tutorial but the manual provides all the lore and additional info for playing the game. It’s readable in the browser on the Internet Archive.
You’re more than welcome to join me! I will be on Fridays around 9pm EST, but playing other times as well, with a character named TofuPirate. I’ve only played a tiny bit of the game so far but I’m having a good time and very excited to play more of it.
This post is just a compilation of the games I mentioned in my recommendation thread on Bluesky. A lot of folks were doing Steam recommendation threads and thought Itch deserved a mention too. Like the title says, it’s rushed and half-assed since the posts were written right before my baby was waking up. But there’s good stuff in here and I think it’s worth checking out. If you read the indie game roundups then you’ve already seen a few of these but dang it, you should buy these anyway.
I bounce off a lot of space sims because I’m incredibly fussy and like open world stuff but a lot of them are too difficult for me to pick up. Liberation is inspired by 70s British sci-fi and has lots of personality and is easy for me to play
Every month a new issue of the Indiepocalypse games anthology arrives, collecting 10 games, often experimental. It’s an incredible source of games curation and I’ve discovered so many of my favorite game designers through it
Roguecraft screenshot
One of my favorite publishers that’s putting out new games for old platforms is Thalamus. Just earlier this year they published a new roguelike for the Amiga. But there’s plenty of great arcade games for modern platforms like Death Ray Manta and Rainbow Laser Disco Dungeon.
Did you know you can buy the classic adventure game Day of the Tentacle on Itch? Plenty of smarter people have explained why it’s one of the best adventure games. I just think it’s neat that it’s on here.
cybeRRRevolution has a better pitch than I can do so I’ll just copy it. It’s described as “an action-adventure game about talking with monsters, piloting godly mechas, and taking down bandits to secure a prosperous future for a nation in a post-war reality.” Also consider checking out the dev’s interactive fiction game Don’t Wake the Night.
It’s the year of the anthology! Anthology of the Killer is another one that’s worth your time! It’s not on sale but you should still buy it.
No indie dev is doing stealth action inspired by Metal Gear Solid better than Merlino Games. Can’t go wrong with any of these.
Videoverse is a visual novel where you explore friendship and love through a WiiU like interface. Itch purchase comes with a Steam key too.
Screenshot from Midnight Scenes 1
Midnight Scenes is one of my favorite modern adventure game series. Short horror games that can be played in one sitting and feature incredible pixel art. They can be played in any order so just get the one that you vibe with the most.
Looking for a game like Thief but in a cyberpunk setting? Check out NEON STRUCT. But I’m a big fan of everything by Minor Key Games.
If you’ve never played a solo tabletop rpg before, give it a shot! There’s plenty of free and pay-what-you-want ones, but Cezar Capacle has made a lot of great ones too like Against the Wind.
You should also consider playing a GM-less ttrpg. An Altogether Different River is a nice one! In a single session 2-4 players build a town and create the characters who live in it and explore their relationships with it.
There’s so many great point-and-click adventures and I’ll plug away at recommending them in this thread when I can, but one I’m a fan of is Cosmic Void. There’s a game for everything. Classic graphic parser adventures, horror, sci-fi, comedy, cyberpunk.
Kitsune Games made the excellent Super Mario Bros 3 spiritual sequel Kitsune Tails. The difficulty levels make it approachable for everyone too.
That’s it for the recommendations! I hope you find something cool to pick up from Itch.io!
Last week there was some annoying discourse on social media about how no one makes innovative or experimental indie games anymore, but there’s actually a lot of greats folks pointing you to those games so I made a list of some.
This is going to be a very flawed list. I’m probably forgetting a bunch, unaware of others, I can only read English, and this is focusing on places and not specific people at places like PC Gamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun who are doing great work and can be followed on social media, so I want to apologize to you all in advance since it’s incredibly frustrating to see people lament that “(type of game) isn’t being made anymore” when you’re yelling about them every week. I just needed to cut the list off at some point. Hopefully someone smarter sees this list and puts together an even better one on their own site. But I hope this will give you some cool things to add to your RSS feed reader of choice and maybe some new podcasts to listen to.
I’ll also add that since I am an adventure game nerd, this list is going to be leaning more on that genre. Some of these folks cover experimental games than others, but I think they’re all worth a look anyway. I also couldn’t be bothered to separate TTRPGs and video games but you know what, maybe consider giving something other than D&D a try. You deserve better.
Like I said earlier, I know I missed a ton. Please leave comments with links to who you follow!
AllTinker has just released a patch (Itch.io) for the first Gabriel Knight game that fixes the pops and crackles in the audio. They made a video showing the before and after and it’s really quite impressive. The page for the patch also goes into detail how one can fix the mixed resolution effect in the cd version where objects you can interact with are displayed at a higher resolution. I’ve always wondered if you could make a patch for the remake that moves the audio from this version into the remake and replace the new recordings but someone pointed out to me that the remake also has new lines that the original cast did not record. Anyway, thought this was really cool and just wanted to share.
Around this time every year every outlet starts talking about their games of the year, despite the year not even being over. People often get annoyed by The Game Awards since it’s the biggest and most obnoxious one, but I can ignore this one pretty easily since it’s big and dumb and never offered anything of value. The ones that get to me are from the outlets that talk about how much they love indie games but all the games seem to have a large-ish budget and are available on Steam. Places that offer really experimental, solo games like Itch.io and the interactive fiction competitions like IF Comp get ignored.
It just makes me wonder, where are all the indie game outlets run by perverts?
There’s probably a better way to word that, but why isn’t there more recognition of all the fucked up games people are making? Why aren’t they covering adult games and games with upsetting body horror? There’s smaller places like Weird Fucking Games and Adult Analysis Anthology that are doing good work, but nothing bigger seems like they can be bothered to look at that stuff. Why? Is it just a lack of curiosity? Surely an anonymous game collective like Domino Club dropping a free anthology of experimental games twice a year would be interesting to people who like indie games? Adult game Hardcoded (VERY NSFW Itchio link) just came out after years in development and was a big release in that community. It’s not just the fucked up games being ignored. There’s so many games coming out in every niche, even ones that have been declared dead like point-and-click adventures and text adventures that use parsers.
I don’t think this is the same thing as the tired discourse of “places are covering indie games” because they do. There’s a lot of great outlets that cover them and deserve the support. I just wish a lot of these places dug deeper and were more willing to cover experimental games that didn’t have the time or budget to be really polished. I love UFO 50 as much as the next person, but it’s not the only games anthology to come out this year, and they certainly didn’t invent the games anthology. I just feel like these game of the year awards from people who talk about how much they love indies turn someone even as dull as me into John Waters, and have me asking where are all the people talking about the indie games about people fucking and eating dog shit.
At this point I think everyone knows about the Myst series. It was a gigantic success at release, becoming one of the best selling computer games of all time, and the sequels have done very well too, including the recent (and very good) remakes of Myst and Riven. What a lot of people don’t seem to know about is the MMO spinoff Myst Online. Back in 2003 there was a game called Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, set in the modern day where players create an avatar and explore various ages in 3D. While I was a big fan of the game, it sold below expectations. It was going to have an online component where people got to explore ages together, but it got shut down by the publisher Ubisoft very quickly after release. In 2007 it came back online as part of the games subscription service GameTap, even receiving new content, before shutting down again.
However, it went back online around 12 years ago and has run on a Cyan hosted server, remaining free to download (Myst Online website) and play, and relying on donations for server fees. In recent years it has even received new content that was created by the community. I wrote about one of these updates a year ago and the game has had some big bug fixes lately and a new content addition planned for the beginning of next month.
What I want to talk about in this post is how the community is still very active despite it being a MMO that has died multiple times. Last Saturday night I had the pleasure of playing the Myst universe’s version of Rock, Paper, Scissors called Ahyoheek. It uses a Beetle, Pen, and a Book instead. The Beetle beats Pen, Pen beats Book, and Book beats Beetle. The additional twist is that up to five people can play the game at once. For the last year, people have been meeting up at 11PM EST every Saturday night and meeting in the Competitive Myst Neighborhood to play Ahyoheek. The meetups were started by streamer BogusMeatFactory, although he doesn’t stream the meetups since they’re just folks casually hanging out, playing the game, and talking about their week.
People playing a round of Ahyoheek
I’ve known about the meetups for a while but never made the time to attend one until now. I can easily say it was a delight and I will be going to many more. It was so much fun to play a part of the game I’ve never really experienced, despite occasionally hopping on a few times most years since its revival because it’s a frequently empty game. A few of the folks who played in Ahyoheekwere actually pretty new to the MMO and only decided to check it out in the last year because they were Myst fans but never actually played this spinoff. I played a few rounds and then decided to just sit and hang out to talk to folks while playing, since the table only supports five players and the total turnout was 12 people. Conversations included Myst Online of course, but people also talked about other things like cooking or whatever else they were up to. It was just a pleasant time and it was nice seeing people hanging out in the world like you would expect from a MMO that was doing well and hasn’t been shut down multiple times.
It turns out that the Myst Online community actually does quite a few meetups and events. Every other week someone hosts a radio show inside of Myst Online called Radio Free D’Ni, a big meetup on the first Saturday of every month, tour groups of the game’s ages, and story times. These are all listed on The Guild of Messengers calendar page. I could probably be clever and make a reference to Myst about how the ending has not yet been written but it really is the case for a lot of MMOs. Asheron’s Call 2 was my first MMO and there are people making good progress bringing it back, with the first Asheron’s Call already having community servers. Even Sierra Online’s online community from the 90s is still going thanks to fans. Just because a game has shut down doesn’t mean it’s gone forever.
Photo from the end of the end at the most recent Ahyoheek meetup
I have fun posting any and all Gobliins 6 related news on here so here’s another update. Gobliins 6 has just launched a Kickstarter to fund development and finish the game. I enjoyed Gobliiins 5, which I had backed on Kickstarter, and this lists quite a few improvements on that. The rewards are pretty interesting too if you’re really into the artist’s work. I don’t recall any roadbumps or big delays with the campaign for 5 so it seems like a pretty safe one to back if you were thinking about it.
