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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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
Developer: Grundislav Games Publisher: Grundislav Games Year: 2004 (Deluxe version: 2006) Genre: Adventure
I just installed ScummVM on my new MacBook this weekend and have started loading as many games as I could on it. After seeing how many early AGS games I put on there, I thought it would be a fun excuse to revisit some of the games from that era since I have some nostalgia for that time. This includes the first game in the Ben Jordan Paranormal Investigator series. The first game just turned 20 last year, which is also a bit weird to see. I played the Deluxe version, which came out in 2006. I thiiiink it’s the first game by Grundislav Games? You play as a dude named Ben Jordan on your first case as a paranormal investigator and check out a series of murders of park rangers by a creature known as the Skunk-Ape. It’s a horror comedy series, which I don’t think you see too often in video games either.
It still holds up! The puzzles aren’t too difficult but don’t feel like a waste of time either, and it’s only about 60-90 minutes so you can easily do it in one sitting. Some of the puzzles make him seem like more of a sociopath than I remember, but I guess that’s kind of the whole deal with this style of adventure game. Plus it’s a comedy so it works in the game anyway. Obviously the developer would go on to do bigger and better things but I think some of the fun with revisiting these early AGS games is seeing how they got started. Even if they didn’t go on to make commercial games, early AGS games are fun to check out because you get to watch a whole community figure out how to make these after Lucasarts and Sierra collapsed, and the lack of polish in the art and voice acting is really charming to me. That doesn’t mean that I think it’s bad, it’s still lovely stuff and I think it’s worth playing outside of its context, but it’s a different kind of nostalgia than what you would get from revisiting a Lucasarts or Sierra game.
Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator Case 1 – In Search of the Skunk-Ape is available for free/pay-what-you-want on Itch.io
I was supposed to write into Quest! Quest! about this but dropped the ball so now it’s a blog post. So first I’ll say that if you enjoy adventure games, you should listen to the very good and funny Quest! Quest! podcast. The topic of co-op adventure games had come up and there’s not a ton, but they exist. This post is also going to ignore the escape room games out there. It seems like there’s a few of them and people like them, but I just know nothing about them because I’m more focused on traditional adventure games. But Escape Academy and Escape Simulator are out there and seem nice. This is also ignoring that really any adventure game can be a co-op game if you just share your screen and work together to solve puzzles.
We Were Here Together
The We Were Here series has you and a partner split up as you walk through a series of puzzles in a location such as an old castle and communicating through walkie-talkies about what you see. The game wants you to communicate through the in-game chat and not a voice chat outside of the game like Discord because of how walkie-talkies work and only one person being able to talk at a time. The first game in the series is free if you want to try it out.
The Last Night of Alexisgradis an asymmetric, two-player interactive fiction where each player takes on the role of a leader of a nation on the last night of a war. It’s built in Twine and the way this one works is that you each play up until a certain point, the game provides you with a code, and the other player inputs the code that you received to see where the game takes you next. I wouldn’t say this one is co-op at all, but it was interesting to see a multiplayer Twine game and I really enjoyed the writing in it.
And of course there can’t be an adventure game article by me without mentioning Myst Online. It’s one of my favorites. It’s still up and completely free too!
The rest of these I haven’t played but hope to some day. If you’re reading this and we know each other, let me know if you want to play one of them.
Tick Tock: A Tale for Twois a 2D point-and-click adventure where you are both trapped in a magical world and must escape. It features cross-platform play and the artwork looks nice.
Operation: Tango is a first person 3D adventure where it looks like you and a friend are doing spy stuff to save the world. A nice thing about this one is that it looks like only one player has to buy the game and the other player can play for free.
Whispers in the West is a point-and-click western murder mystery that supports co-op for 2-4 players. The base game includes a tutorial, mini mystery, and full length one with DLC for additional mysteries. This is another one where only one person has to buy the game and everyone else can play for free.
The Past Within (Steam/Itch.io) is a co-op first-person point-and-click adventure in the Rusty Lake series. Puzzles involve one person being in the past and one in the future and communicating in whatever way they want. I haven’t played it but it looks like they aren’t directly connecting to each other over the internet in-game and just rely on what the other person sees to solve puzzles. Both players need a copy of the game to play but it sounds like both paths are very different.
A Lively Haunt is a horror graphic parser game in the style of early Sierra adventures like King’s Quest and Space Quest where you walk around and type your commands. This one supports two players on the same machine by having two keyboards plugged in, but I imagine that playing through something like Parsec would work too? I learned about this one from WilcoWeb!
I suppose all the games like It Takes Two and A Way Out by Hazelight Studios could count as well. They aren’t my thing but good luck to all game developers I guess.
Shivers 2 and Zork: Grand Inquisitor also shipped with multiplayer. I believe they just allowed a player to connect and use a mouse cursor to point at stuff and type comments to help solve puzzles. The online services for both shut down a long time ago but I think it’s interesting they were attempted. I’m guessing they were pressured to insert online multiplayer into their games since they were the hot new thing, and it feels like a proto version of sharing your screen over Discord. The demo for Quest for Glory 5 also shipped with co-op and it would have been interesting if that made it into the full game. My understanding is that you can still play that one but it’s a massive headache to get working.
Well, that’s all I could think of but I would love to hear other recommendations!
EDIT: Since this post a month ago I’ve discovered some more!
Things have been tough lately and I’ll probably get into that in a later post, but writing about games has been a nice distraction so I will keep plugging away at indie games posts because I think they’re nice and maybe they help you too. If you enjoy these posts, consider commissioning some art from Rose. You could get a vTuber model or a nice little character pop for $30.
Video Games
AriaCoffee (dev site) is a free arcade browser game where you have become a demon girl and must drink coffee to survive in hell.
City of Voices (Steam) is an upcoming Golden Idol-like that just launched a free demo.
Decade (Steam) is an interactive fiction game where you send children back into the past to change the future.
Kerplunk (Itch.io) is a 4-player Pong-like playable for free in the browser, but I think developers will be interested in looking at the Godot source code and tutorial if they are just getting started in the engine.
Mythic Mire (Steam) is the latest game from resnijars. It’s a surreal rpg inspired by 90s console rpgs. I’ve always loved the 90s aesthetic this developer’s games have, whether it’s an arcade or adventure game.
Near-Mage (Steam/GOG) is a 2D point-and-click adventure where you find out you come from a long line of witches and enter a magic school. I already mentioned this one a few days ago about how many adventure games have come out this year but yeah, it’s a wild time to be a fan of the genre.
Nowhere Belonging (Itch.io) is a free 15-minute long browser game about the feeling of not belonging. Great game but please read the content warnings before playing.
PaperKlay (Steam) looks like a really cute 3D platformer where the world looks like it is all crafted from household materials.
Pity This Busy Monster (Steam/Itch.io) is a physics-based narrative game where you carefully deliver donuts.
Poco (Steam) is a free point-and-click adventure where you are the world’s smallest clown and solve puzzles to return to the circus. Thank you Mike for telling me about it!
Project Warlock 2 (Steam/GOG/Epic) is now out of Early Access. It’s a fast-paced FPS inspired by early games in the genre like Wolf3D and Doom. I haven’t played it yet but I loved the first game and this looks like more of that.
Happy new PUNKCAKE Délicieux game day to those who celebrate. This month’s game is a 10 year anniversary edition of their arcade game Serpentes. It’s available on Itch.io and is getting a Steam release later on.
to a T (Steam) is a new adventure game from the creator of Katamari Damacy where everyone is stuck in a T-pose. I always feel a little bit about putting Annapurna stuff in here but whatever. It’s an adventure game so I’m excited about it.
Where’s That Clown?! (Steam) is a free arcade game where you are a clown keeping kids entertained at a party.
Windowpane (Itch.io) is a free, new tool for creating sequential art by Bagenzo. Maybe YOU can create the next great multimedia project that I will never shut up about.
Without a Dawn (Steam) is a horror visual novel with some really cool ASCII art.
Wizard Garden (dev site) is a free platformer in a bookmarklet by the creator of Bitsy.
Playdate
Fineliner (Itch.io) is a daily drawing game available for Pay-What-You-Want
Playdate Season 2 (dev site) has launched. Every week you get two new games.
TTRPGs
Liberate Property (Itch.io) is a free supplement to introduce liberation into your ttrpg of choice.
Infinite Seas Under the Same Stars (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want collaborative storytelling game for 2-4 players about souls fatefully linked over multiple realities and lifetimes.
Crowdfunding
UrbXWarriors (Kickstarter) is a new game for Spectrum Next and PC by Tony Warriner (Broken Sword, Beneath a Steel Sky) and Stoo Cambridge (Cannon Fodder, Sensible World of Soccer). It’s a top-down action game and has a demo on Itch.io
That’s it for this week! This one was a little half-assed because of real life and it just being such a massive list of games. It’s only been a week since the last one! How are there so many games? I always appreciate comments. Let me know if there’s anything you’ve played lately that I’ve left out or you’ve just really enjoyed.
If you’ve been following my indie game roundups, you’ll know that I’ve been in shock at how many adventure games have been coming out lately. I’ve never been an “adventure games are dead person” but even as someone that’s a bit touchy about that subject, I feel more comfortable lately saying it’s a great time to be a fan of the genre. If you like this post, both Adventure Game Hotspot and Adventure Gamers (EDIT: Just kidding, as of 6-13-2025 AdventureGamers is now a gambling site!) do a much better job of covering new adventure games than I do and you should add them to your RSS feed reader. You can even check out the calendar on Adventure Game Hotspot for more games released this year. You may also like ChoiceBeat for Interactive Fiction and Visual Novel coverage.
I also think Fireflower Games deserves a shoutout. If you’re looking for DRM-free adventure games, consider picking up a game from their store. Itch.io doesn’t get every indie game and this site has done a pretty good job building up a catalog of games from various adventure game folks. Plus a chunk of their proceeds gets donated to environmental groups (see their FAQ).
Anyway, here have been some of the ones I’ve come across this year. Some of the descriptions will be recycled from previous roundups (reusable content baby!) just because this list is massive and is already taking a long time. It’s also not even counting all the great interactive fiction games. Please leave comments with other games that you’re excited about because there’s definitely a lot I’ve left out. I was going to also include upcoming adventure games and others that have entered Early Access, but this post is already too big so I’m splitting that into a separate post along with one featuring adventure games I’ve enjoyed in the past few years before 2025.
Amerzone (Steam) got a remake and it looks great. I was a fan of the original and from looking at the Steam review, it looks like the remake does the game justice.
Asterism (Steam) is an interactive concept album by Claire Morwood, filled with lovely music, but the highlight for me is this stop-motion art. Everyone probably knows by now that if a game has stop-motion art I’m required to put it in here. Look at it! Incredible. It also has a demo.
After being in development for over a decade, horror point-and-click adventure ASYLUM (Steam) is now available. I’m a fan of the developer’s previous game Scratches, which is no longer on Steam due to a fallout with the co-designer, although they have said it’s fine if people find that game….online. They also have a free adventure game they released 10 years ago called Serena.
Au Revoir (Steam) is a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure described by the HauntedPS1 curator page as “Blade Runner Point and Click with a Haunted PS1 coat of paint. The puzzles ask you to really pay attention to the environment around you, but luckily that environment is a treat to take in.”
Do I even need to post about Blue Prince? I think everyone knows about it at this point. I’m not sure if a roguelike adventure game is for me personally but it sounds great and even the developers of Myst are very into it, so consider checking it out. It’s fun seeing a roguelike adventure game being such a massive hit vtoo.
I fully support people making adventure games with big heads like in the original Maniac Mansion, so THE BRiLLiANT COUP (Steam) is a game that got my attention.
My understanding of the new Carmen Sandiego (Steam) is that it actually does a pretty good job maintaining the spirit of the original games even with it having 3D platforming elements.
Citizen Sleeper 2 (Steam) is maybe I weird one to include here because some people think of it as a rpg, but it’s Interactive Fiction enough for me to include. Absolutely loved the original and just haven’t gotten around to this one yet. I will someday, hopefully soon, and I’m sure I’ll love it.
despelote (Steam) is a game that I’ve heard a ton of praise for in the lead up to its release. I think it looks fantastic.
Discolored 2 (Steam) is a first-person puzzle adventure game inspired by the Myst series, with a focus on puzzles based around color. I was a fan of the first game and this looks like it builds on that to create a bigger game with characters you interact with.
Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping looks like a really cute detective game and the Steam page says it’s only 2-3 hours, which sounds great to me. I guess it’s a standalone sequel to a game that came out last year.
Elroy and the Aliens (Steam) is a new point-and-click adventure where you play as Elroy and Peggie in the search of a long-lost father in an alternate version of the 90s. It looks like a very charming adventure game and there’s even a demo if you want to give it a try. I’m not too familiar with the team other than it has Robert Megone working on it, who has also worked on games like Return to Monkey Island and Thimbleweed Park. A recent video from the Space Quest Historian even has him saying it’s one of the best adventure games he’s played recently.
ENA: Dream BBQ (Steam) is a free first-person adventure game where you explore surreal environments.
Expelled! (Steam/Switch/iOS) is the newest game by interactive fiction developers Inkle. You are a student at a school that has been framed for attempted murder and must prove your innocence or find someone to take the fall in a limited period of time. It follows a similar framework as one of Inkle’s previous games, Overboard, which I was a massive fan of. Hooray for interactive fiction.
Frog Bard (Steam/Itch.io) is a short, poetic experience about finding inspiration in the world around you.
I don’t really know what Ginger (Steam) is but I keep seeing people recommend it and saying how weird it is, so I guess take a look if you like weird adventure games?
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Steam) is the newest game by DON’T NOD, creators of the Life is Strange series. I haven’t played it yet but I imagine if you like those games, you’ll also like this. It’s set in the 90s in northern Michigan so it feels targeted directly at me.
I don’t know a whole lot about Many Nights a Whisper (Steam) but it looks like a beautiful adventure game (or at least adjacent to the genre), has quite a few positive reviews, and it’s described as “A short interactive essay on dreams, pressure, and expectations. Take part in an ancient ritual where one shot determines the fate of a generation.” and that sounds interesting to me.
Metamorph (Steam) is a horror adventure game described by the HauntedPS1 curator as “Fantastic short Kafka inspired game with HPS1 vibes. Discover the ordeal of being known and, if you’re lucky, the rewards of being loved.” Does that make it a Bad Mojo-like?
Near-Mage (Steam) is the newest game by Stuck in Attic, developers of Gibbous. You discover you are a witch and attend the Transylvanian Institute for Magick.
Neon Hearts City (Steam/Itch.io) is the newest adventure game from Cosmic Void. I’m a fan of Cosmic Void’s previous games and I’m looking forward to digging into this one too. I just don’t know how they manage to put out so many solid adventure games so quickly. I know there’s folks helping like Stephen Don (check out his games too) but man, that’s still a lot of games.
Old Skies (Steam) is the newest game by Wadjet Eye Games. I’m so happy this is out. I got to play a beta and think it’s one of their best, if not best, point-and-click adventures, and replaying the game right now confirms that. It’s a time travel story featuring incredible art by Ben Chandler and great voice acting by a lot of the folks that have acted in previous Wadjet Eye Games adventures.
People are still making games for the Commodore 64. Pirates of the Black Seas (Itch.io) is a new text adventure available for Pay-What-You-Want created with the classic IF writing software Quest Writer by Loadstar.
Poco (Steam) is “a 2D/3D hybrid point-and-click adventure game where you play as Poco, a two-inch tall clown who is banished from a giant walking circus, and left to fend for themselves in the undergrowth of the Below World.” The art in this looks fantastic, it has hundreds of positive reviews, and it’s free!
Promise Mascot Agency
Promise Mascot Agency (dev site) is the newest game by the developers of Paradise Killer. It’s an open-world adventure game/mascot management sim and has been a total delight to play. The soundtrack by Ryo Koike and Alpha Chrome Yayo has been a highlight for me. This one was a little bit of a stretch but if Adventure Game Hotspot says it counts then that’s good enough for me.
The Roottrees are Dead (Steam) is an expanded version of the original hit game created for Global Game Jam 2023.
One of the biggest releases for me this year is the point-and-click adventure Rosewater (Steam), a western adventure by the creator of Lamplight City, and set in that universe but you do not need to play that first (but you should also play that). It’s a fantastic game and man, look at all those rotoscoped animations!
Slender Threads (Steam) is a paranormal point-and-click adventure that I’ve seen get a lot of praise by folks in the adventure game community.
Spider Land
Spider Land (Steam/Itch.io) is a short interactive fiction about a doomsday prepper and is available for free/pay-what-you-want.
Spring Thing is a yearly IF competition that’s always worth a look.
Stellar Mess: Operation Kush (Steam/Itch.io) is the second part in the Stellar Mess series. As an enjoyer of the era of Lucasarts adventure games where the art was in EGA and people had big heads, I think it deserves a shoutout.
Sub-Verge is a game where you control a group of deep-sea divers and looks incredibly stressful, haha. I think it looks really good though.
The Talos Principle: Reawakened (Steam) is a remake of the first game and adds the DLC and some new stuff with some snazzy new graphics. I’ve been a long time Croteam fan so it’s interesting to me darn it.
the Devil rais’d the storm (Itch.io) is a visual novel/adventure game about locating a radar signal deep in the canyons near your remote outpost. Available for just $2.
Type Help (Itch.io) is a brilliant Obra-Dinn/Roottrees are Missing-like that is free and playable in the browser. Don’t really want to give too much away but it’s very impressive that this was all done in Twine and critically acclaimed interactive fiction author Andrew Plotkin has also discussed why it’s brilliant on his blog.
I don’t really know where to categorize all of these things but feel like they should be shared, so here’s kind of a link dump of retro gaming stuff I’ve come across in the last month that I think is neat.
The 1986 adventure game Amnesia has a very nice restoration where you can play the game as it was originally released on the C64, Apple IIe, and PC, but it also has a contemporary web mode with tons of quality of life features added.
A new ZX Spectrum fan zine launched about a month ago and it’s available for free on Itch.
denzquix has done a lot of great translations of adventure games and the latest is for Bi-Fi: Action in Hollywood, a promotional point-and-click adventure game from 1994 for Bi-Fi Rolls, a salami-based snack originating in Germany and sold across Europe. You can read more about it here on BlueSky.
The cd-rom TRIPITAKA 玄奘三蔵求法の旅, the sequel to the legendary Cosmology of Kyoto has finally been saved and put on the Internet Archive! It’s incredible that this has been preserved and you can read more about it on BlueSky. If you’ve never played Cosmology of Kyoto, it’s currently abandonware but you can treat yourself to this nice repackaging of it.
This looks like a nice update of the classic DOS game Abuse.
Rex and the Galactic Plague just looks like a fun teaser for an Amiga game and the dog reminds me of K9 from Doctor Who. Sometimes I just get excited about people still making Amiga games and this one is on Itch.
Project Magma is a restoration of the game Myth that’s new to me and maybe it’s new to you as well. If you’ve never played Myth before, it’s great!
Idk, that’s all. This isn’t a recurring bit on this blog. I just wanted to share all these things because I think they’re cool.
