Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To thoughts

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Developer: Soft Not Weak
Publisher: Soft Not Weak
Year: 2025
Genre: Puzzle

two people standing next to columns of blocks

Recently I played through Spirit Swap, an incredibly polished match 3 that I got a few months ago from backing it on Kickstarter. I had backed the game because the artwork looked great and I wanted to support queer games, but I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting it is mechanically. The game has a story mode that breaks into a dating sim and there’s powers you can use during the puzzling parts. The powers add a nice twist to the gameplay. When you configure blocks into specific shapes, like a diamond, you can use one of your three powers and those will have effects on your board and your opponents. Each character has different powers and you can also specify what powers you want. It’s a nice way to add some variety to this style of game, which I think has existed for 30+ years.

I love that you “complete” the story mode very quickly and most of the game’s story mode takes place “post-ending” and it becomes a dating sim. If I did have any criticisms, I guess it would be that it throws so many characters at you in a short time span that it felt a little tough having much of an attachment to any of them by the first time the game ends. Some of this is on me since I have been and will always be terrible at remembering names, but that and the lack of any major conflicts and drama in the game means that some of it blends together. I really wish it introduced them more gradually or cut one or two characters from the game, which pains me to say since I like them, but I think it was too much.

It’s also just a great looking game. The effects for the blocks matching and disappearing look nice and the character design and animation while you play is very well done. Everyone in this game is beautiful and actually in a variety of body shapes! It’s great to play a game, or honestly experience any art, that doesn’t just see only skinny people as beautiful.

The soundtrack is fantastic and I recommend both of the soundtracks available on Bandcamp, here and here.

The only other real gripe I had with the game is that there were some typos in the dialogue that I wish got caught. There’s a lot of text so it’s easy to see how it slipped through but it stood out.

The game got some criticism for the “everybody is beautiful but no one is horny” trope but it doesn’t really bother me with this game. I guess maybe because I don’t know if it would have worked if the game was more adult and had characters fucking in it? I don’t know, maybe it would have, what do I know. Usually it’s something I wish for more of as well but I’m not bothered by it here. This isn’t the same thing as what we see in basically every Marvel film. I don’t even know if I completely agree with the criticism to be honest. It would also be great if some of the people throwing the criticism around were covering the queer adult games that do exist. There’s quite a few and they’re great.

I’m one of those annoying people that played Tetris Effect 30 years ago and still goes “hmm this is a good match 3 but it’s no Tetris Effect.” but I really enjoyed my time with this game and it’s nice to finally have a Match 3 that doesn’t require me bringing up SNES emulation if I want to recommend it. Nice work Soft Not Weak!

Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To is available on Steam, Itch.io, and Xbox

RIP AdventureGamers 1998 – 2025

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

A few days ago I made a post about how the forums for AdventureGamers, which had existed for over two decades, were suddenly deleted with no warning. There was speculation it was from a bad site migration but no, it looks like they were intentionally deleted and the site is in the process of being converted to a gambling site. Here is my attempt to recap everything that happened.

It sounds like earlier this year the previous site’s owner Ivo had sold the site to a company that made an offer, based on this message in the AdventureGamers Discord from a moderator who had reached out to the former owner.

text from discord saying "Just passing this on: '"Hi, Earlier this year I sold the site to a another organization, was running the site by myself and the costs of doing so started to become too much. They approached me with a good offer and I transferred ownership a while ago. They've just migrated to another platform apparently and decided to remove the forums. I wasn't aware that was a plan or intention, but then again as I no longer owned it I guess they didn't have to. Still very disappointing. Trying to see if I can bring the forums back elsewhere now."'

The site had been struggling for money for a while now. The site’s editor Jack, who had been here longer than Ivo, was let go a few years ago and went on to start Adventure Game Hotspot, and many of the staff who were working for free left to help with that. I believe an offer to buy the site then was also declined. So I’m not completely shocked the site was sold, but was definitely not prepared for the site to be bought by a gambling company that would delete the forums, break tons of links in the process, and replace huge amounts of text with gambling crap, like this deeply cursed About Us page.

Adventure Gamers has long been recognized as the largest English-language website dedicated to the adventure game genre. Since our founding, we’ve provided trusted, in-depth coverage of puzzle-driven narrative games, from classics like Zork, King’s Quest, and Monkey Island, to the latest releases redefining the genre for modern players. But as the digital entertainment world evolves, so do we. Expanding Into the Gambling Industry Recognizing the growing convergence between gaming and gambling, Adventure Gamers has expanded its coverage to include the online gambling sector.

So I suppose that if you wrote for the site or you’re a developer who wants to save a positive review of one of your games, now would be a good time to grab it. I understand having to sell a site but it makes me angry that a place with so much history was just sold off to a gambling company with no care for the history or community there. In addition to everything here, AdventureGamers had also grabbed all the assets for another old adventure game site, Just Adventure, about a year ago with the intention to preserve that. Is that going to be wiped out for gambling info too? Who knows!

There’s also an AdventureGamers patreon that is still running. I have no idea if money is being made off this and if so, is the money going to the previous owner or this new gambling site? The idea of either grosses me out. Like I said at the top, this info was grabbed from the AdventureGamers Discord, which was basically inactive, so it seems very unlikely they know about it. I’m glad that Adventure Game Hotspot is going and is basically AdventureGamers in everything but name, but that doesn’t make up for the history getting wiped out by this sale. I don’t necessarily want people looking at forum posts I made when I was 14, but there was also a lot of history in that community during a very specific time for the genre. That said, they’ve been planning a forum at AGH for a while, before this AG forum deletion happened, and it should be up very soon. I hope that the community can land there and events like the community playthroughs can happen again.

I know it’s not the same as a forum, but I’ll also mention the Adventure Game Club Discord I run, where we do monthly playthroughs and discussions of adventure games, new and old. If you’re curious, feel free to join. There’s no intro channel, so no one will know if you join and spam you with welcome messages. It’s totally fine for you to join, see if it’s your vibe, and leave if it isn’t.

It’s a shame this happened to such a long running community, a site that started in 1998, during a time when the internet continues to feel a little smaller every year.

Indie Game Roundup (June 13, 2025)

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

Hey it’s another one of these things that I do every week. This one is a bit shorter. I doubt that there were less games this week, I think I was just too busy to notice them all, but feel free to let me know if I missed something that you or a friend worked on so I can include it next week. Even with it being a little shorter, it’s still plenty to keep you busy for a while.

two bears sitting by a fire, talking, and one saying how the moment they like most is the quiet time before bed

Fireside Feelings (Steam) is an online game where you sit around a fire with other people to tell stories and share your feelings. The idea reminds me a lot of Kind Words and it looks like they did some cross promotion with each other.

top down view of robots flying around a screen

Robo Attack (iOS app store) is a top down shooter game for iPad, iPhone, and iWatch. I thought this one was interesting since it’s by the developer of classic computer games like Halloween Harry and Flight of the Amazon Queen.

lots of little circles inside a big circle

Circlet (Itch.io) is a free arcade game where you have balls bouncing around and you try to avoid them with the line or circles you are controlling. It makes more sense in motion. Very fun little arcade game and the music kinda has a goth chiptune vibe to it.

A new Indiepocalypse is out, filled with experimental indie games.

I think it’s nice we still get games made with ZZT. BombPT (Itch.io) is a puzzle game made for a recent jam and is playable in the browser.

view of a cemetery statue at sunset, probably in the fall

Seasonala Cemetery (Steam/Itch.io) is a free game where you explore a cemetery as it changes with the seasons.

Thank you to Josh for recommending Tametsi on Steam. It’s a Minesweeper game from 2017 that uses odd level shapes and is just $3. I love Minesweeper-likes so this was a nice one to hear about. Always feel free to recommend games to me, even if they aren’t brand new.

That’s it for this week!

Poco thoughts

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Developer: Whalefall
Publisher: Micah Boursier
Year: 2025
Genre: Adventure

a tiny clown sitting next to a home made from garbage

Poco is a short and free point-and-click adventure game released earlier this year where you are the world’s tiniest clown and have been kicked out of a floating circus, only to find yourself in the undergrowth below and must find a way back. From looking at the Kickstarter, it was a university thesis project that needed some additional funds to cover some costs and get it into festivals.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this one. I didn’t know of it at all until it came out and people started posting it in various Discords, but it’s a very solid point-and-click adventure. I love the music and art. The art sorta reminds me of late 90s games with pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D models, although these are illustrated backgrounds and look very nice. The movement feels great, which may seem like a weird thing to say about an adventure game but so many point-and-click games don’t get it quite right.

The game starts with you failing some clown activities through the form of mini games before getting kicked out of the circus, and more fair versions of these come into play later. I get the feeling they’re a little divisive but I think the mini games in this are actually good. The fishing one in particular was nice, short, and satisfying to play.

Overall the game is very silly and whimsical, but some of the background design is very dark. For example, there’s a series of “rooms” where you can see the skeleton of the dead clown and also need to enter its rib cage. Yet, I would still describe the game as “cute.”

The game consists of inventory puzzles that weren’t difficult and felt fair, with the exception of a minor amount of annoying pixel hunting. Some of the puzzles had nice rewards too like a musical sequence. It’s just a nice, little point-and-click adventure that should only take you 1.5-2 hours to play and I recommend it if you want an adventure game you can play in one sitting.

Poco is available for free on Steam.

RIP AdventureGamers.com Forums I Guess

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

I didn’t realize it until someone said something in the basically dead AdventureGamers.com discord, but apparently the forums for the site are gone after being around for 25+ years. I haven’t posted there in a very long time, but it used to be a place I hung out a lot about 20 years ago when the genre was struggling commercially and in a very weird place. The site itself is still up and posting, I suppose they just decided the forums weren’t worth the cost anymore. The last time I checked, maybe about a year ago, it was still active. It certainly wasn’t as busy as it was a decade or two ago, but people were still posting there and doing their community playthroughs. It was definitely more active than the AdventureGamers discord and it doesn’t sound like the mods were aware that it was going to happen because they were in the middle of holding a vote for their next community playthrough.

It was a weird place since it happened to be a very weird time for the genre. I had moved there from the Just Adventure forums (also gone), which were getting a bit too grognardy for me. My memories of the adventure game community at the time were that a lot of hope and pressure was placed on every notable game as “The One” that would make the genre commercially big again. So stuff like Broken Sword 3, a game that I think is perfectly fine, getting so much hype behind it because it was one of the bigger releases. I guess this is ignoring stuff like Professor Layton and the Ace Attorney series, which were far more popular but just didn’t seem to get as much attention in the community from what I recall? There was a massive thread at one point because The Moment of Silence, a game that was hyped up at that point and one that I ultimately didn’t care for, got a negative review in PC Gamer and attitude at the time was that critics just “hated” adventure games and that’s why they were getting negative reviews. This was ignoring that some of the better ones got better scores but that would destroy the narrative. Anyway, one or two critics had jumped in to try to explain things and it just turned into a lot of arguing before the thread was locked because it was a ridiculous argument in the first place.

Ultimately I ended up moving on to the Idle Thumbs forums because I don’t stay at communities longer than 5-10 years but the forums kept going until now, so it’s a little sad to see it gone. It’s a weird time for forums since people seem to mostly use Discord now, but that’s a company that controls everything and no one can see what any Discord community looks like until they join it, so that isn’t great either. The other community I was very active on during this time was the Shacknews chatty, where I recently learned that also imploded in the last year (possibly from management decisions, not sure) and looks to be essentially dead now. Oh well. At least Paper Cult Club, a ttrpg forum, launched this year and has been nice.

Billy Masters Was Right thoughts

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Developer: Postmodern Adventures
Publisher: Postmodern Adventures
Year: 2020
Genre: Adventure

Billy Masters Was Right is a short adventure game inspired by 80s films like The ‘Burbs and has an aesthetic inspired by Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, but does not use the same verb system as those games. This one does the standard left/right mouse button system you see in most adventures these days, with the left mouse button for using/picking up objects and the right mouse button to look at things. I’ve always been a fan of the big head character design of those games and it always makes me happy to see people make them. I even made one myself. It’s the first game I’ve played by Postmodern Adventures, who has made a bunch of adventure games this point and has moved onto making commercial games for a while now. It’s good stuff! All the puzzles felt very fair and while I have 80’s pop culture exhaustion at this point, I enjoyed it here and it fit with the style of game. It’s certainly not used as a “remember how much better the 80’s were?” and even has a little dig at Reagan. There’s one or two plot threads that maybe felt a little out of place to me, but it’s a nice little adventure game that will take you about 30-60 minutes to play through and I can’t complain about the Pay-What-You-Want price tag. I’ll have to play more games by Postmodern Adventures in the future.

Billy Masters Was Right is available as Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io

Blog Roundup (8-6-2025)

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Fuck ICE. I have so much love to everyone pushing back on them in LA right now and hopefully one day ICE will be abolished.

Well, here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

Technology

A few days ago I posted a list of everything I follow in my RSS feed reader and it looks like some other folks were doing that too. Maybe you’ll find some new sites to follow through LunarLoony and reidrac. They’re better organized than my post too.

Andrew Plotkin has posted some data points connected to how AI data scrapers have been hitting his site. I don’t believe I’ve been getting hit like other folks but it’s been more than zero and I’m not happy about it.

Here’s a guide and thoughts about making your own personal archive of the web.

Video Games

The story of how the classic puzzle game Boulder Dash was created, with an interview with the creator.

The Lords of Midnight was a little before my time and I haven’t made the time to play it yet, but here’s an article about the history of the game and why it’s great.

I loved reading about this baseball series I never heard of, Diamond Mind Baseball.

The Imaginary Engine Review has an interview with SEQUENCEBREAK// curator Nilson Carroll. SEQUENCEBREAK// is an in-person exhibit of “artist’s games.”

Adam Le Doux wrote about making games in bookmarklets and how you can do it yourself.

Not Blog Posts

These aren’t blog posts but here’s some other things I liked:

I really vibed with this video titled there’s no such thing as a bad game.

Enjoy this list of Games By Trans People Before 2010. Trans game devs have always been here!

I just learned about this site about forklifts in video games.

That’s it for this week. Hope you had/are having a good weekend!

Saying Goodbye to a Loved One

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

Well I did warn you all that I think of this as a personal blog and not a games site so this one is a bit heavier.

We said goodbye to my aunt yesterday, after she suddenly passed away about two weeks ago. We were very close and she was basically a third grandmother to my kids, so we’ve all been struggling with that since then, and we will continue to miss her very much. I know it’s cliched but if you have loved ones in your life, please make an effort to talk to them regularly and make sure they know how much you love them.

I Don’t Think I’ve Walked This Stretch of Road Before thoughts

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Developer: -hexcavator-
Publisher: -hexcavator-
Year: 2022
Genre: Adventure

a person looking at a large floating crystal in the middle of the road

I Don’t Think I’ve Walked This Stretch of Road Before is a short narrative game, about 20 minutes long, where you walk down a road while ruminating on your thoughts. The gameplay is rather simple, you walk down a linear path, sometimes walking around objects or through buildings while looking at objects from your past and reading your thoughts, but I really appreciated what the game was saying about its subjects like mental health, trauma, and cycles that you can break when you have children. I think a much worse game would have gone in a darker and lazier direction with its focus and I appreciate the game because as careful as it was.

And on a more superficial note, I just think the graphics are neat. The game was built with Gamemaker: Studio, which is an engine that’s not really meant for 3D games, and the Itch page goes into the weirdness on doing something like that.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this one. Treating my blog as a journal of all the commercial (and sometimes freeware) games I’ve played means there’s sometimes really short entries like this. It’s just a nice short game and I would recommend it if you’re fine with paying $2 or more for a short walking sim (complimentary). I also recommend hexcavator’s other games. B-Sides is a nice point-and-click adventure and Stay Home Vol. 1 is a toy where you play around with objects in a room and I wish we got more of those.

I Don’t Think I’ve Walked This Stretch of Road Before is available on Itch.io

Indie Game Roundup (June 5, 2025)

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

I could argue that instead of buying a Nintendo Switch 2 game, you could buy all the games here, but these are two very different things and I may as well argue that you should buy $80 worth of books or Doctor Who audio dramas or prosciutto. Do you know how much prosciutto you can get for $80? Not that much if you buy the good stuff! Maybe I’m just bitter that I don’t have a Nintendo Switch 2 and can’t join the rest of you in taste testing the cartridges.

There’s also been a bunch of summer games fests happening this week. I have not followed these at all. Don’t care! I will let other people do the work in figuring out what I should be looking at.

This week’s shoutout is for Graceless Games. I’m a huge fan and think you should pick up some of their games on Itch.io

Anyway, here’s the games. As usual, if you worked on something that you’d like included, just let me know. I miss plenty of stuff.

I think everyone knows Deltrarune is out. It’s not for me but I’m happy for everyone else.

HardAF (Steam) is a Meatboy-like but the entire level is dark and you use the blood from your previous deaths to figure out where the obstacles are at. It’s good stuff. There’s a demo that I think people should check out.

As a child of the 90s that played a lot of multimedia cd-roms made by musicians, I get very excited about musicians making video games. We got two of them this week! Aesop Rock’s Black Hole Superette Experience (Steam) has you listening to his music while exploring a convenience store and The New Flesh (Steam) is a game where you explore a surreal space in a city while listening to upcoming songs by Red Vox. I haven’t played either so I can’t tell you if they’re as good as Peter Gabriel’s Eve, but both are free.

The Lego RPG Jam is a game jam where you write ttrpg systems inspired by your favorite Lego sets.

image of a sink in a green filter and text saying "I might get that familiar, frustrating sense while I'm just washing my hands..."

astoryinpieces keeps making great experimental and adult games for the Game Boy and she has another! Four of a Kind (Itch.io) is a horror anthology featuring 4 short stories.

side view of a pterodactyl shooting fireballs at a helicoptor

Gaurodan (dev site) is a shmup inspired by 80s arcade games where you fly around as a dinosaur and blow shit up. It’s free but the dev does take donations. This is an old game but it got an update and it’s new to me

stacks of dominos with text describing a combo

DOMINOID (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want puzzle game where you stack dominids and create combos.

a girl in a swamp on a boat with a net looking for bugs

Kabuto Park (Steam) looks like a very cute bug catching game and has a demo.

A weirdly specific thing I get excited about is using a yo-yo to fight enemies in video games. Don’t know why, just is. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo (Steam/Switch) is a top-down action game where you get to do that and even has a demo.

Name Change Simulator (Itch.io) is a free visual novel all about getting rid of your deadname.

Anyway, that’s it for this week. Hope you found something nice to play!