Ween: The Prophecy thoughts

Developer: Coktel Vision
Publisher: Coktel Vision
Year: 1992
Genre: Adventure
System: DOS

two weird humanoids with giant mustaches saying "We're UKI and ORBI"

To be a fan of French DOS games is knowing that mechanically the game may not be the tightest thing, but it could be weird enough and take enough swings to be worth it. Some of my favorite games are French DOS games and include: Alone in the Dark, Little Big Adventure, Lost Eden, and The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble. I’m a huge fan of Coktel Vision so it was unfortunate that I mostly found Ween: The Prophecy to be a frustrating experience.

The game has a plot about you stopping an evil wizard, but it’s mostly an excuse for you to move to various rooms, in an almost puzzle room level-based format, and solve the various inventory puzzles before moving on to the next room. This is one of those games that quickly wraps up with a block of text when you beat the final puzzle. Unfortunately I frequently found these puzzles to rely heavily on moon logic or sometimes broken, which meant mostly doing trial and error and trying every item on everything, or just pulling up a walkthrough because I got tired of the sluggish response from every action. I took notes while playing and there’s many instances where I just did not understand what was happening in the game or instances of me trying an action, checking a walkthrough to see that I was doing the right action, but was just not trying it enough times for it to actually work. The entire game consists of these inventory puzzles so the game quickly became a huge slog to play. There are one or two points where there are multiple solutions, but those were the only clever bits in the game’s design.

an illustration of a boat and text at the bottom saying "Bad idea..."

Even worse than a game consisting of trial and error puzzles is that the game tells you that you had a bad idea, or that your character is getting frustrated, or something isn’t working. It’s aggressively hostile in a genre called Point-And-Click Adventure, where you often just want to click on something to get a description or to see what happens. Instead of either of those things happening though, you are just scolded. It’s immensely frustrating to play an adventure game where you are actually discouraged from clicking on things. I wasn’t even trying to solve a puzzle. It is just common practice to play around in an environment and click around but this is a game that does not want you to do that. I suppose to the game’s credit, I didn’t come across any softlocks.

It’s so frustrating that the game is so unfun to play because the parts surrounding it are nice. Like just about every other Coktel Vision game, I like the art and music. Charles Callet does a fantastic job on the soundtrack like he did on every other game he worked on. There’s also some really weird FMV in here that other people online seemed to find disturbing but I liked how weird it was. The weirdness is why I usually play French DOS games.

So unfortunately, I can’t really recommend this game. I generally love Coktel Vision’s games, even when the gameplay is a bit clunky like in Inca, because there’s usually a lot of really interesting stuff going on and the game has something to say. Ween: The Prophecy just does not have enough to justify playing through the game.

Ween: The Prophecy is not available for sale anywhere but is probably on your favorite abandonware site and playable through ScummVM.

The Lost Oregon City Gold thoughts

Developer: Oh, a Rock! Studios
Publisher: Oh, a Rock! Studios
Year: 2022
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

a dad thinking while his two daughters look. It's asking you what "25 cents" means.
Photo from Itch.io page

The Lost Oregon City Gold is an adventure game where a dad and his two daughters stumble across an old letter from an ancestor with clues pointing them to $25,000 in lost gold. It’s up to you to explore Oregon and find it. Most of the game is played in a first person view where you click on arrows to navigate various spaces in Oregon, made up of photos, and talking to people or solving puzzles that will point you to the next clue in your treasure hunt. Occasionally you make choices in dialog but they’re pretty low stakes decisions and there are parts where you can answer questions about Oregon’s history that you learn by playing the game. I suppose that technically this makes the game an edutainment title, but that might be a stretch.

image of a hand on a computer screen and text saying "Day 153. Got slapped for mispronouncing "Oregon"

As you can see, it’s not a very serious game. Photos of people, played by the devs and family and friends, are used for all of the characters and the plot itself is very silly. It all works for me though. Something I really like about the games by Oh, a Rock! Studios is that they all feel like a group of folks having lots of fun making games for each other but without all the inside jokes so they’re still very approachable for folks outside the group. They’re all just like a nice, relaxing, and goofy hangout session and would also recommend Internet Court and The Awkward Steve Duology for the same vibe. They don’t take themselves seriously but the games aren’t doing any sort of ironically bad FMV either.

The Lost Oregon City Gold is available on Steam and Itch.io for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Indie Game Roundup (September 6, 2025)

After taking a break from these for a while, I’m finally doing another one. I don’t know if I’ll go back to the weekly format I was doing because that was a lot, but I missed doing them. I think Blaugust kinda burned me out a little and I had a lot going on anyway. I couldn’t think of a clever bit where I go on about it being a quiet week and ignoring Silksong, but pretend I did I guess. It’s probably not a game I’ll play for a long time since I haven’t really played the first one much but I’m glad it’s doing so well. Don’t really have a spicy take on the reception of that.

This post is going to be weird since I was missing so many weeks and there’s been a ton of bundles I’ve missed and just generally out of the loop on things, so there will probably be some really weird obscure things listed in here and also missing some bigger games, but I think that happens quite a bit with these anyway since I mostly just play adventure games. Speaking of, there’s a ton of those in this post.

IF Comp just started for its 31st year, and you can play and vote on this year’s entries. It’s wild to think about how this started 31 years ago, when Interactive Fiction was “dead” after Infocom was shut down. I think Legend Entertainment was just pulling away from text adventures at this point but there was still some commercial IF coming out. It’s always weird thinking about the time spans of adventure game companies and how companies like Wadjet Eye have been making commercial adventure games for a longer period than Infocom and Lucasarts. Time is weird!

a few people standing at a trainstation in the late 1800s at night

Speaking of adventure games, it was fun seeing two of them coming out on the same day as the new Hollow Knight. The GTA 6 of Indie Games thing was always silly because not everyone is going to play the same genre! Like I generally play more casual stuff and Silksong is probably too hard for me. Casebook 1899 – The Leipzig Murders (Steam/Fireflower Games) is a point-and-click adventure set in late 19th-century Leipzig, Germany where you are a detective solving murders.

a person at the front of a space ship looking at space

The other adventure game I was excited about on Silksong day was Maura & Ash (Itch.io), a free point-and-click adventure that runs in DOS! It’s just a really solid sci-fi adventure game and it’s fun to see that there’s a new engine for making adventure games and can build for DOS!

a guy in a sci-fi looking room looking at you and talking

Another one I’ve been excited for is Neyyah (Steam), which came out earlier this week. It’s a Myst-like with prerendered graphics and the amount of FMV in the trailer made me happy too. This one has been in development for quite a while.

I get excited about seeing old games being rereleased on Itch.io too. One of those is Dr. Blob’s Organism (Itch.io), an arcade game from 2003. I remember enjoying this one and it’s available as Pay-What-You-Want.

Checkout Blitz: The Shopping Dead (Steam) is an arcade game where you complete shopping lists while fighting off zombies. I remember playing a demo for this one a year ago and having a good time. It’s also got a co-op mode.

a guy standing in a prison with a skeleton

I’m a huge fan of Octavi Navarro’s games and I’m always happy to see another one. The Supper: New Blood (Steam/Itch.io/GOG) is a horror point-and-click adventure featuring great pixel art. I don’t believe it’s a direct sequel to The Supper (Steam/Itch.io), but that one is very good, free, and short so I recommend playing that anyway.

a person looking out the window at night and saying "a cold night outside"

Yet another point-and-click adventure game to come out last month was Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken (Steam), a horror game by the developer of Don’t Escape: 4 Days to Survive. This one leans more in a survival horror direction and has some very nice isometric pixel art.

There’s a new batch of LITHOBREAKERS games on Itch.io! Sorta like DOMINO CLUB, it’s a collective of anonymous game devs and no one knows who worked on each one, except me because I know everything.

a space ship shooting at a lot of little space ships

I haven’t played it but Blast Rush LS (Steam/Switch) looks like a fun shmup with lots of explosions.

Death to a Merry Car (Itch.io) is a short visual novel you can play in the browser by the creator of Rodeo Clown.

a guy looking at a mannequin on a foggy street

Carnival (Steam) is a horror point-and-click adventure released last month. I don’t know a whole lot about it but Buried Treasure seemed to really like it.

a polar bear standing in a bedroom

And finally, I’m a fan of Howdy Riceball’s Game Boy games and they just made another one, it’s a cute puzzle game called Polar Peril and you can play it for free on Itch.io.

That’s it for this week. Again, apologies if I missed something you made. I was out of the loop for a while as I was on vacation and also busy with school stuff.

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me

Developer: Taylor McCue
Publisher: Taylor McCue
Year: 2022
Genre: Visual Novel
System: Game Boy

pixel art I did of the game's box of ghosts hugging a girl

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is a short Game Boy visual novel created in GB Studio about the developer’s experiences being a transgender sex worker and the trauma that came from doing that work. The player advances the story by walking around different scenes and talking to various characters and is about 40 minutes long.

a woman saying to a ghost: He's waiting for us. I'll see you inside"

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me was one of my favorite games of 2022 for many reasons. It’s incredible to see someone put out a semi-autobiographical story like this where where they are so vulnerable. The game uses the limitations of the Game Boy so well and I think the artwork in this game is fantastic. Another thing I loved about it was that it was for a platform created by Nintendo. Even today, Nintendo is known as a company that does not approve of adult queer content on their platforms and I loved seeing someone use one of their consoles to tell a personal story. It’s inspiring seeing retro consoles and computers being used to create experimental games and tell stories that we didn’t see very often in games thirty years ago, when queer games like Caper in the Castro and GayBlade were a rarity.

Unfortunately this is one of the games that has been hit by the Itch.io deindexings, making it harder to find. I know the developer has put it on the Internet Archive and encouraged other people to host downloads of it, but it’s still heartbreaking that queer stories like this are under attack because of pressure by Mastercard and Visa. I hope that one day people will be able to create their art without capitalism trying to stamp it out.

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is available on Steam, Itch.io, and the Internet Archive.

Mystery House (1980) thoughts

Developer: On-Line Systems
Publisher: On-Line Systems
Year: 1980
Genre: Adventure
System: Apple II

I finally played one of the first graphic adventures (the first I know of but I thought “this”very first” was under debate?) and the first game by Roberta Williams and Sierra and: It’s cute.

Mystery House is a text adventure with very basic line graphics where you are locked in a house with other folks and must find some hidden jewels. You start seeing dead bodies showing up and need to figure out who the murderer is and stop them before it’s too late. The actual design of the game is very basic, as you would expect for an adventure on home computers at this time, and you type in commands to walk around the house, find clues and items, and use them to progress elsewhere. It’s a pretty short game where you restart a few times since it relies on learning through failure a little bit but it’s not as cruel about it as a lot of later adventure games. The biggest thing I actually fought with was the parser. Even though it’s incredibly early in the genre’s lifespan, other text adventures already had better parsers at the time. I also found that the graphics also make the game harder since pure text tells you everything you can interact with, this game needs you to guess what the correct object name is to interact with it. Sometimes it’s also just hard to see what you should be trying to use. The game also features a pretty annoying maze. So maybe not a game I would really recommend to folks for the plot but I still had a fun enough time playing something of historical importance. Renga in Blue has a very good writeup of the game and I definitely liked it more than him, but I agree with all of the criticisms of it.

a person laying on the floor that has been strangled with pantyhose

One of the weirdest parts of the game to me is that there is an optional person you may never see, a grave digger named Joe. You can walk to a graveyard outside of the house (so I guess you aren’t actually locked in?) with six graves dug in the yard. If you walk into one of the graves, he buries you alive. But you don’t actually need to see him or go into the grave to complete the game so I have no idea why this screen exists. You can also stab him and kill him, which seems a bit excessive. But he does try to kill you if given the opportunity so I guess he deserves it? It’s all really weird.

It also got a release in Japan a little bit later with some slightly better graphics. I don’t know how the rest of the game or its parser is.

Anyway, glad I played it. It’s dated and simplistic but it’s also short enough that I think if you’re a little generous with the walkthrough to deal with the clunky parser, you might have some fun with the novelty of playing the first Sierra game.

Mystery House is public domain and available for free to download such as the ScummVM website.

Dark Seed thoughts

Developer: Cyberdreams
Publisher: Cyberdreams
Year: 1992
Genre: Adventure

pixel art of the darkseed box art, showing a cybernetic like face staring at you

Players control Mike Dawson (played by lead designer Mike Dawson) who has a nightmare, while living in his new mansion, of an alien embryo being shot into his head by a machine. While exploring his new house and the town he lives in, he learns of a parallel universe called the Dark World and must stop the aliens that plan on invading our world.

man with a mustache in a run down bedroom

The game features incredible artwork by H.R. Giger that makes it stand out from other adventure games at the time. Unfortunately, this is the only highlight because the actual design of the game is a mess. Mechanically the game is very dated and features an incredibly aggressive timer. If you aren’t doing the right thing at the right time at the right place, you are stuck and must restart the game. Many times you will have no idea that you missed an important step and the game never informs you, leaving you to flail around until you decide to look up what to do in a walkthrough. I am endlessly amused that the game’s main character is played by the lead designer and has the same name as well, but that is not enough to recommend this game. The art of Giger is a wonderful fit for a horror game, but the horror in this game is undercut by Mike Dawson’s performance and his line readings.

pixel art of a man with mustache in a bedroom
Did you know there is also a bootleg NES version of the game?

The lead designer left the industry after this game, deciding to focus on writing for television. Dark Seed was enough of a success that the developers made a sequel without him, leading to the odd situation of Dark Seed 2 being about a man named Mike Dawson, who looks like Mike Dawson from the first game, but is played by someone else.

Dark Seed is unavailable today and will probably be for a while because of the licensing situation with the H.R. Giger estate. My understanding is that Night Dive came very close to working something out with H.R. Giger and then he unfortunately passed away. If you are interested in playing it today, it’s not too hard to find it online using ScummVM or DOSBox.

Dark Seed is available on your favorite abandonware site.

The 7th Guest thoughts

Developer: Trilobyte
Publisher: Virgin Interactive Entertainment
Year: 1993
Genre: Adventure

pixel art of the box for the 7th guest, showing a house on a hill with lightning in teh background

The 7th Guest was an early cd-rom game that became such a massive hit that it helped lead the cd-rom drive to becoming a common feature of PCs. It’s a first-person adventure game where you play “Ego,” a faceless character who explores a haunted mansion and figures out what has happened by solving puzzles that will reveal cutscenes of ghosts showing what they did when they were alive. Even early on in development the developer and publisher knew they were making something big. The game was originally proposed to the CEO of Virgin Games, Martin Alper, by Rob Landeros and Graeme Devine. Martin was impressed and “fired” them so they could found their own company, Trilobyte Games, and focus completely on the game instead of letting company politics get in the way. The game was technologically groundbreaking in many ways and was being talked about by others in the industry at conventions and pitch meetings. Sierra On-Line talked to the developers about publishing the game at one point and when Myst was being pitched around, the developers were asked if they could make something that would look as good as The 7th Guest. The GROOVIE game engine allowed continuous streaming of data from CD-ROM and it was the first adventure game to have 640×320 graphics with 256 colors. 

inside of a dark mansion with stairs going up to a second floor

While the game was ahead of its time when it was released, it’s a little hard to recommend now. Conceptually the game isn’t a bad idea, you wander around a haunted house and do puzzles, and successfully completing a puzzle means being rewarded with some fun FMV. Unfortunately many of the puzzles you are required to do require lots of trial and error, or they’re just not fun to do. I don’t think the maze puzzle in the basement is quite as poorly designed as its reputation says it is, but even once you figure out how to get the solution it’s still incredibly tedious to solve because of the slow walking animations between each scene transition. The slider puzzles in the game aren’t too difficult either but are also an incredibly boring puzzle style. I think that’s the main issue with the puzzle design, not all of them are incredibly difficult but even a lot of the ones that are solvable are just boring. There’s still a few gems in the game, such as the famous cake puzzle where you need to divide a cake into equal sizes with the same number of pieces. Many of the puzzles were pre-existing ones from previous sources like puzzle books, explaining why they’re almost all standalone. I don’t think this is necessarily an issue though. Both the Puzzle Agent and Professor Layton series have self-contained puzzles and are a lot of fun. So the idea works, it just needed some better puzzles in places and snappier movement for the other puzzles that relied more on trial and error.

The parts of the game outside the puzzles are very charming though. When the FMV was being created, it resulted in video with a blueish aura around everyone and at a lower fidelity than expected, but this resulted in choices being made for the game’s design that I think ended up benefitting it. The developers had to pivot fully to it being a ghost story and the lower quality video meant the actors had to do bigger performances that give the game a camp appeal. The cutscenes are there to advance a story, but it’s a pretty thin story and really just an excuse to see awful people doing bad things to each other. It’s technically a horror game but the cutscenes are schlocky enough that it keeps the game from being scary, which I’m fine with. Robert Hirschboeck is a lot of fun to watch in his over the top performance as the evil Stauf and his scenes in this game are the highlight of the franchise. The soundtrack by George “The Fat Man” Sanger remains a classic and probably what he is still known best for, which is impressive considering that he also contributed the soundtracks to games like Wing Commander and Putt Putt Saves the Zoo.

a ghost wearing a green dress in a bedroom

The game was a massive success when it was released, both critically and commercially, and was responsible for many cd-rom drives being sold. The success kicked off a franchise that is still going today with various ups and downs and even survived the developer Trilobyte going under. Even though the game is a little hit or miss for me in the design department, I would still maybe recommend it if you’re ok with having a walkthrough next to you to get through some of the more annoying puzzles. There’s still some really fun puzzles in here, the soundtrack is great, and the FMV is entertaining too. I would probably recommend going with the original version of the game, which is supported by ScummVM. There’s a remastered version but reviews seem to have various minor issues with it. Fans should also look up the Philips CD-i version of the game. It features higher quality video of the transition animations but also seems to be missing music in some spots. 

A few years ago there was a VR-only remake of The 7th Guest which reimagined the entire game with new puzzles, mansion design, and FMV. I haven’t played it yet but it seems to have received positive reviews and it’s lovely to see that the game is being kept alive by interesting new takes on the idea.

The 7th Guest is available on DOS, CD-i, Mac OS, Windows, iOS, Android, OS X, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5

Phoenix Springs

Developer: Calligram Studio
Publisher: Calligram Studio
Year: 2024
Genre: Adventure

pixel art of a statue bust for the phoenix springs box art

Phoenix Springs is a neo-noir point-and-click adventure game where you play as a woman in search of your missing estranged brother. I knew very little about this game going into it, other than it being developed over a long period of time, but picked it up based on really liking the art and it ended up being one of my favorite adventure games from 2024. It’s hard to explain more about the story, partially to avoid spoilers but also because it’s a very surreal story told in a non-traditional way, but I actually liked that a lot. I was talking about the game on Mastodon and Andrew Plotkin (who liked the game) described the game as “Philip K. Dick took the good acid,” which I think is a good description of the game’s story. Some people on Steam were critical of not full understanding the story but I liked that.

an illustration of a woman looking down

Since the game is a detective story, the game has a really interesting mechanic where you are basically using ideas and memories as inventory items. I loved that you’re using these “items” in a way that you would like an inventory item. There’s a lot of interesting side investigations as well that don’t advance the main plot but do reveal more about the world. There’s also a lot of red herring thoughts that aren’t used and get crossed out once you’re out of an area that is no longer relevant.

If I do have any criticisms, I do thing the last section of the game is too big and aimless. I had felt like I was doing the adventure game thing where I just try every item on everything and repeating that a bit. It was a little frustrating since the rest of the game moves as a pretty fast pace. The game even includes a builtiin walkthrough which I think is nice.

I think the voice acting also deserves a shoutout. It’s all narrated by the same woman and it has kind of a more deadpan or monotone delivery, but it works really well. Even the dialog from other characters is voice acted from the viewpoint of the main character.

I just think it’s a really solid mystery and think it’s worth a look if you want an adventure game that is willing to experiment a bit more.

Phoenix Springs is available on Steam, GOG, and Fireflower Games.

Morph Girl

Developer: Autumn Knight
Publisher: Autumn Knight
Year: 2017
Genre: Adventure

pixel art for the cover of morph girl, showing a hand reaching out of a bath tub

Morph Girl is an FMV game inspired by 90/00’s Japanese horror movies such as Ringu. You play as Elana, a widow who is unable to move on following the loss of her wife to cancer one year ago. A supernatural being resembling her wife begins to force itself into her daily life and the decisions you make during the game determine if she embraces or rejects the creature. It’s the first game by Autumn Knight, who later worked on D’Avekki’s game Dark Nights with Poe and Monroe as an editor and game tester.

photo of a room with a woman in it and a messy bed with a menu of things to look at on the left side

It maybe lacks the production values that a FMV game by a larger studio would have but it’s an interesting game and I enjoyed the writing. Sadly it’s rare for queer relationships to be depicted in FMV games so it was nice to see a game entirely about one. I was confused by how some of the choices led to various endings. I did get a little frustrated by the inability to skip previously seen scenes too, especially in a game that needs multiple playthroughs to see all the endings, but I appreciated that the playthroughs were only 30 minutes long so it was easy to see it all and repeat scenes weren’t a big deal. Despite my criticisms, I had a good time with the game and appreciate that it explores themes that are unfortunately rarely seen in adventure games.

Morph Girl is available on Itch.io and Steam.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

Developer: House of Tomorrow
Publisher: Netflix
Year: 2018
Genre: Interactive Movie

bandersnatch box art pixel art cover of a guy and a spiral laid over his head

Bandersnatch is an interactive episode of Black Mirror where viewers make decisions at key points to determine the outcome of the story. The episode is about a young man who is developing an adaptation of a novel but feels he is starting to lose his grip on reality as he develops the game. Through various points in the story you are offered a choice between two options and each one will lead you down a different branch. I wasn’t very impressed with the options offered and felt very railroaded during the whole thing. That’s probably part of the point of this thing and the story it’s telling, but it also just kinda meant I became bored with the idea of it all pretty quickly. Often when people criticize Black Mirror, it’s for making really basic statements like “what if technology was bad?” I don’t think this is always the case but it certainly felt like it with this episode, while feeling very smug at the same time. I’m not a fan of Black Mirror in general though so this may have been something I was never going to enjoy. There are many other games that do a much better job having meta commentary about choice in games that you can play instead. However, it does get some points for the Jeff Minter cameo.

I guess it doesn’t really matter that much about how I felt about this game. It was delisted earlier this year and as of this writing, I don’t believe any of Netflix’s interactive movies are available anymore. It’s a big shame because I’m not opposed to the idea of them and I heard some of them were good, but Netflix will dip its toes into games and then get distracted and decide it’s not really worth the focus. It feels like they’re going through something similar with their mobile games offering and dropping a bunch of games from their service on there as well. I can’t imagine it helps that no one knows Netflix even offers their games.

It’s not all doom though. People have figured out how to preserve these interactive movies and with some searching online, you can find the preservation efforts pretty easily. Even though I didn’t enjoy Bandersnatch very much, I’m glad it was preserved and will be available for people to check out for years to come.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is no longer available on Netflix but is easy to find through your favorite search engine.