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.
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!
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!
Developer: katbrush Publisher: katbrush Year: 2025 Genre: Adventure System: Windows
Landlord Quest is a short point-and-click adventure game where you play as a landlord who must do a task for one of your tenants but as expected in a comedy adventure game, this goes off the rails very quickly. It features multiple endings, with an extended ending if you do all the goals and max out your Landlord Score, but all of them are “good” unless you like landlords for some reason. It’s always a little goofy to try to write a longer review for any game that’s 30-45 minutes long but I wanted to write some kind of log since I thought it was a fun adventure game and always appreciate when a point-and-click adventure takes an anti-capitalist stance. It’s definitely not a pro-landlord game.
It features all the stuff you would want in a comedy adventure like good jokes, puzzles that are fair, and a mini game as well. The only criticism I have is that some of the inventory items are used in an odd way for the 9-verb scumm interface, with you generally clicking on the item itself and then the object you want to use it on and not clicking the Use verb first, but once you figure it out then it’s not a big deal.
The art is very nice too. The verb panel has the aesthetic of early Windows and I was really impressed with the animation, especially for a solo dev project. It’s good stuff! Sometimes it’s nice to just play through a short adventure game in one sitting and watch a landlord eat shit. It’s only $2 too! Other than the content warning of a possible violent suicide depiction not being for some folks, I feel very comfortable recommending it to adventure game fans who want a short comedy adventure. It’s available on Steam but if you buy it on Itch.io then you get the files to run it in ScummVM, making it playable on basically every platform.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It snowed a lot here last night, which seems to be exciting for me and literally no other adult. From looking at the week ahead, it seems like it won’t melt soon and we may get some more on top of that. Again, only a thing I enjoy but I will enjoy it quite a bit. As I write this I am listening to the last episode of the Reggae Schoolroom radio show on WFMU. Public radio is great. This week is going to be extremely heavy on video games posts but maybe you’ll find something new to add to your RSS feed reader or feel compelled to share things you’ve enjoyed lately in a post. The internet might feel small because of it revolving around a handful of social media sites but there’s still lots of folks with their own websites.
Video Games
Chuck Jordan, one of the writers of Curse of Monkey Island as well as many other games, praises the new point-and-click adventure Foolish Mortals despite not actually being a big adventure gamer. He also just got around to, and enjoyed, Her Story and Return of the Obra Dinn.
Speaking of adventure games, the adventure games convention AdventureX just happened and a few folks have posts about it. Jana from Rat King wrote about showing Mops & Mobs and The Point n’ Clicker has a few posts covering the event. Both have lots of photos.
Remember Valve’s Ricochet? Well, erysdren digs into the release date listed for it.
Retro XP reviews Bonk’s Adventure for the Game Boy. As a child I was weirdly really jealous about the Turbografx folks having Bonk, despite owning a Nintendo console? I don’t really get it now that I think about it. Yes, clearly Bonk games did come to Nintendo consoles but I didn’t consider them to be “real” Bonk games.
Indiepocalypse has started hosting writing features. This one is about Hana’s Light and Blink and how they relate to the ways we view the world through technology.
It’s not a blog post but I liked this article at Eater about writers talking about growing up with parents who owned a Chinese restaurant at Christmas time. One of the writers is Curtis Chin, who wrote the very good memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, which was about growing up in Detroit during the 80s, being gay, and working at his parents’ restaurant.
Technology
Someone just published a simulator of a 1961 relay computer that runs in your browser.
Developer: MOKKOGRAD Publisher: MOKKOGRAD Year: 2025 Genre: Platformer System: Windows
Virtue’s Heaven is a 2D Metroid-like where you explore a world that has been ruined by capitalism and you set out to eliminate those that caused that destruction and free your friends. Unlike a lot of games in the Metroidvania genre, you do not get powerups that allow you to explore new areas. You have all of your abilities at the start of the game and destroying bosses will give you keys to open new areas and make you stronger. My experience with the game was one where I didn’t initially click with the game, but when I figured out how I was playing the game incorrectly it became one of the most satisfying gaming experiences in a long time.
Screenshot from Steam
My initial experience with the game was that I was very impressed with the art and music, and thought the combat system, which is based entirely on melee attacks, was an incredibly interesting approach. However, soon it felt like the game was becoming too difficult. The combat started to feel like a slog because the character was not doing much damage and enemies were too strong. I knew it was me doing something wrong though, since the game had put so much thought into every other aspect, that I just got annoyed with myself for missing what was probably an obvious detail and then got distracted by other things and put the game down for a month.
Cut to a month later and I finally came back to the game to see how I would do with the game this time. Pretty quickly I saw that I was correct and missed an obvious detail. The game expects you to go back to town after defeating bosses to get an upgrade to get more health and be able to use more of the powerups you’ve obtained, which you get from freeing your friends. This time the game really clicked with me and I was so happy with how great the game felt. The combat was still challenging but very fair and it was immensely satisfying to keep getting more upgrades after beating bosses. I kinda hate the term juice for describing the feeling of sound effects and other effects that happen when the player interacts with the world, like an explosion after defeating an enemy, but folks, it’s got very good juice. Some of the best explosions in a video game to be honest. The game’s anti-capitalist theme was obviously a big selling point to me too. It feels very rare to see it in a setting like this so I really appreciate the developer taking the big swings with the story it’s telling. It’s not really a game that sets itself up for a sequel but I think there’s some really interesting directions that it could go in if they do decide to make one, which I would certainly be the first in line to buy.
I should point out that the initial bounce off the game was entirely my fault. The game is very generous with reminders on other aspects of the game and I was probably playing the game and not feeling very patient, which is the wrong mindset when going into a new game. I could have also played the game at the wrong time, when I wasn’t in the mood to learn a new ruleset. This has happened to me before. One of my all time favorite games, Morrowind, is one that I had initially bounced off of but when I came back and was more patient, it really clicked with me and I loved it. I think this was a similar experience. I don’t necessarily like to say that it needs to be appreciated on its own terms, because that might make it sound like you need to accept the shortcomings of something. These weren’t issues with the game. I had just played it at the wrong time. I think it’s even harder now when there’s just so many games that it’s hard to be patient and understand what the game is doing. It’s not like it’s doing anything radical here, I’m not expected to learn a brand new number system like in Riven, but it was still very easy for me to get distracted to jump to something else.
It feels a little silly to write about this massive journey I took with a game that’s ultimately only 4-5 hours long but if a game takes you on an adventure, you have to write about it folks. I’m so glad I came back and recognized what I was doing wrong because it’s a game that I now love and hope more people check out.
Virtue’s Heaven is available on Steam and Itch.io. This review was made possible thanks to a key from the developer.
Today is the Black Friday day on Itch.io, where the site is not taking a cut from sales. Technically you can adjust the scale on your page so they never do this, but it’s fun to have a day where it’s enabled by default. Plenty of people have put their games on sale like mine, but I probably have more respect for people that have increased the prices on their games for today. I suppose you could always scan through this list I made on Itch to see what games that have been covered in these roundups are on sale.
There are still lots of new indie game releases happening every day too and here’s some of the ones I’ve noticed. Apologies for today’s post being a little low effort but for me today is a day where I don’t do much and mostly eat leftovers.
The Games
Endless Stairwell (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want system-neutral TTRPG one page dungeon inspired by surreal horror games like P.T. and MyHouse.wad. Throw it into your campaign if you want to mess with players.
TRANSMORFIGATION (Itch.io) is a solo lyric ttrpg about transmorfigation. It’s a new game by Maria Mison and that’s always exciting news.
erysdren released a free compilation of MS-DOS demos (Itch.io)
The fantastic Moonring is now on Switch. My understanding from comparing the DX version on Switch and the Steam DLC to the free version is that it comes with a massive dungeon? In any case, Moonring! People should play it on either platform.
Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved (Steam) is a new visual novel/detective game in the style of older adventure games from Japan. Look at it! It looks great. It reminds me that I need to play Famicom Detective Club too.
Berserk B.I.T.S (Steam) looks like an auto battler/idler game strongly inspired by the Mega Man Battle Network games. While the Battle Network games were never quite for me, I can see why this game would be exciting for other folks. Steam reviews have been very positive too.
Windswept (Steam/Xbox/PS/Switch) looks like a really cute platformer where you are a duck and a turtle. It has a demo to try too!
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.
It’s Wednesday but since I live in the US and it’s Thanksgiving week here, it’s basically my Friday before a long weekend. Hopefully you also have some free time coming up to play games, read a book, work on a little project, or whatever you want. A lot of time sensitive things popped up this week so I wanted to get this one out since I don’t think I’ll be able to do a writeup later this week over the holiday.
New Games
Here, have a bitsy. This one is called Kitten Town (dev site).
The physical version of VOID_SHIFT is out. It’s a solo deckbuilding gameabout doing hard jobs in space in the far future. There’s also a black friday sale on the designer’s site.
Roguelike designing legend Michael Brough just put a ton of their old Windows games in a bundle for Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io
Angel Amore aka Cutestpatoot has been doing a game every day as well as a vlog about the making of the game. I think this is bananas and my body would fall apart but everything they’ve done this week looks amazing, the videos are interesting, and you should check out their YouTube and games on Itch.io.
Spindley Q Frog has made a game that combines Minesweeper and the Monty Hall problem. You can play it in the browser here.
Keys of Fury: Typing Action (Steam) combines retro beat ’em ups like Final Fight with typing games. I haven’t played it but Mike Drucker (review link on TheGamer) loved it. I also liked Mike’s memoir Good Game, No Rematch (bookshop.org). I feel like I’ve been pushing books a lot lately on this blog? If you take one thing away from today’s post it’s that people should go to the library more often and read books.
Here, have a new DOS game. Treasure Hunt II is a remake of a DOS game the developer made 35 years ago. Since they own the site it’s hosted on (DOSGames.com) and feel weird about reviewing their own game, they gave it 2/5 stars but I think people should have more pride in their work. You can also play it in the browser.
The Micro Fiction Games Jam (Jam site) has just started. It’s a jam where you make a game in 280 characters or less. This year’s theme is Absorb, Repose, Recursion.
The IF Short Games Showcase 2025 (Itch.io jam page) also started! It’s just an excuse to show off shorter works of interactive fiction that you made sometime this year. Consider submitting your game if you made a short IF this year.
Bubbled Bugs (Itch.io) is a free browser puzzle game where you drop colored balls and match them with other balls of the same color and it has a roguelike element in that you are picking powerups between levels. All done in PICO-8.
Duskpunk (Steam) is a Citizen Sleeper-like rpg that is inspired by tabletop rpgs. This one seems to have more of a survival focus and is set in a Steampunk world. I don’t know a whole lot about it but startmenu seemed to like it.
Dominic Tarason recommends billions of interesting indie games all the time on Bluesky so here are some you should check out. Consider following him if you want to learn about more games. He’s a far better writer too. This is kind of a lazy dump because I need to mention them now or they’re probably never coming up, despite looking really cool and worth your time.
Morsels (Steam) is a fast-paced creature collecting roguelite
Kingdoms of the Dump (Steam) is a SNES styled JRPG set in a fantasy world of garbage
VORON: Raven’s Story (Steam) is a Norse-inspired adventure game, including puzzle solving, but it has you flying around as a raven and gaining new powers to access new areas.
Wishlist
Here’s some recent indie game announcements that you may want to add to your wishlist on Steam.
Sometimes I just want a 2D platformer where you shoot things. Junk Sec (Steam) looks like a nice one of those. Because I have Amiga nostalgia poisoning, it reminds me of the game Obliterator, despite it actually looking nothing like that and probably being much better too.
I’m so excited for Young Suns (Steam) by KO_OP. A co-op space game with chill vibes and a bunch of great narrative designer/writer folks working on it? Yes, absolutely. That’s 100% for me.
Thank you for reading today’s post. If you’re interested in telling me about a game, feel free to comment or send me an email. Your own games are welcome too as long as they don’t use AI. Comments/emails to say hi are always welcome too.
