We made it through January. What a year. If you enjoy these roundups, please consider donating to people in Minnesota, who are struggling in the fight against fascists. A donation to help folks with rent would help them a lot

To all the rocks that bear me is a game where you explore Coruña both during the day and night. As a sicko for FMV, it was great playing a game that documents a place through an interactive medium and would love to see more of this.

It’s not a game but I really liked this free zine about cooking for others.

Fuck Ice is an arcade game for browsers where you tell ice to fuck off. Something a lot of us need right now.

Second Hand Computer is a toy that lets you make and play text games. I’ve only played Swords of Freeport in this collection but I feel that even that alone is worth the price. People that grew up with these sorts of games (old people, me) will probably really enjoy this collection.

I’m not actually sure what vextro is, but it looks like they had a game jam and now there’s 4 experimental games and writing by folks I like.

The Ocean Welcomes You is a murder mystery/horror interactive fiction game for browsers with inspirations like the visual novel Umineko When They Cry, the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and the TV show Poker Face. I’m a big fan of the VIDEOTOME game engine and love seeing works like this being made for it.

The 48-word RPG Jam also wrapped up and now there are hundreds of minimalist ttrpgs for you to check out.

MeowGun: Hell Denizen is a new fast paced FPS that has just entered Early Access on Steam. You play as a catgirl and run around shooting demons, zombies, and other monsters in an aesthetic heavily inspired by the Quake 2 era of FPS. There’s a demo available if you want to give it a try.

Adam Saltsman continues doing great work by making little games in PICO-8. KOLYDR is an arcade game for browsers where you fly a little ship around into blue circles to make explosions and get points. It’s a really lovely arcade game that I should play on something better than a macbook keyboard.

Lost Cave is a pay-what-you-want fan sequel to the classic arcade game Bubble Bobble on the Commodore 64, featuring 100 new levels.

Earth Must Die is a new comedy point-and-click adventure on Steam by the creators of Ben There, Dan That. The clever gimmick behind this one is that your character doesn’t want to touch anything himself and must make minions and other folks do everything for you.

Chromatic Conundrum is a first person adventure game where you solve puzzles by manipulating light and mixing colors. It has a colorblind mode as well. Recommended if you liked doing puzzles in games like Antichamber and Portal and want a shorter experience based on light-based puzzles.

Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator is, and it sounds weird to say this, what it says on the tin. You are a space warlord, and you trade babies on a stock market like interface. It’s by the folks at Strange Scaffold, who have made a variety of wonderful games including the previous game in this series, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. I also just really like the art in these games.

ABIDE is the new stop-motion game in development by the folks that made Judero. This one is a horror game and actually reminds me of the 90s experimental game The Dark Eye. It’s currently in crowdfunding and think you should give it a look.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! If you haven’t already, consider adding this site to your RSS feed and sharing with a friend.

Once again I am starting one of these posts with “what a week.” Solidarity with Minnesota. I try to do one GoFundMe or whatever in each one of these because I just do the roundup posts for fun but ICE is just kidnapping multiple children a day so here are two GoFundMes to help with legal fees and food for families in Minneapolis here and here. It would mean a lot if you could send a few dollars to whatever one has less money at the time you’re reading this. Anyway, Minneapolis is winning and will defeat ICE and one day ICE will be crushed everywhere else. Help people around you if you can.

There isn’t really a good way to transition to talking about video games after that, sorry, but maybe you’ll find something to distract you from things or be compelled to post about things you’ve been excited about on your own blog.

Video Games

I guess I’ll start with some self promotion. The British Game Generator is a silly thing in development that spits out ideas for video games inspired by 80’s British computer games. Even though I didn’t grow up with that era of games and live in the US, I’m a big fan of a lot of them, especially Llamasoft. They have a very unique feel to me that I have a hard time describing but I feel is quirky and charming in a way that is unique to that scene.

Speaking of British games, Go-Go BunnyGun is a new game for the ZX Spectrum available for Pay-What-You-Want. Itch.io is home to so many good ZX Spectrum games and this looks like a lovely arcade shooter. It was highly recommended by Davey Sloan on Bluesky, who has also made quite a few ZX Spectrum games you should check out.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is now on Steam. It’s a point-and-click adventure where you are a woman named Mara and must deal with all of the issues of being a young adult and features non-linear exploration and branching narratives. I was a big fan of the original game because of its art and how accurately it depicted being a teen in the early 00s, even the awkward and painful parts, so I’m looking forward to how this will recreate the experience of being a young adult in the same awkward and embarrassing ways I did. While it is a sequel, the game is designed so you don’t have to play the original game first. That said, I highly recommend that one too.

Folks should check out the indie game collective Cutie Collective and see all the games they’re making.

SEBI 16 is a collection of sixteen games of various genres made in PICO-8. I’m a fan of PicoMix and CorgiSpace, so it’s fun seeing more PICO-8 compilations coming out.

Karous is a rerelease of a shoot ’em up originally released back in 2007 for the Dreamcast. Don’t know anything about it, it just seems neat and I think it’s interesting that it is a port of a Dreamcast game that is almost 20 years old but also well after the console “died.”

TR-49 (Steam/iOS) is a narrative deduction game by the fine folks at Inkle. I’ve been a fan of all of their interactive fiction games so it’s fun seeing them do a game in the deduction subgenre that’s been picking up in popularity in the adventure game genre. People like mysteries! According to their founder on Bluesky, it’s been their biggest launch in the company’s history. As an adventure game fan, it’s always nice that I can post about multiple games in the genre coming out in the same week and they’re being critically well received and selling well. People are still going to do the lazy “adventure games are dead” narrative but it feels like a golden age for the genre.

Tabletop Games

I’ve posted about the mech tragedy ttrpg Dragon Reactor before but now you can pre-order the print version on the Dinoberry Games website. Even if that one doesn’t seem to be for you, take a look around their site, read some blog posts, and see what else they’ve made. I’m personally a big fan of their games Sprouts and Dinocar.

Breathing Techniques Against Monsters is a lyric game about dealing with negative thoughts via breathing exercises and intended to help you with your anxiety and stress. Available for Pay-What-You-Want.

Demos

Uncle Lee’s Cookbook is an upcoming point-and-click adventure where you play as the teen Ines as she tries to save the world caused by the fallout of her Uncle Lee’s experiements. There’s a demo playable in the browser on Itch.io.

Wishlist

Oh!Ware looks like a very neat Mancala roguelike to me. I don’t think I’ve seen Mancala in any video game form before outside of pure recreations of the game itself.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. If you’ve got a game you’re working on and it doesn’t use AI, feel free to send me an email about it. See the About page here for contact info. I just like to hear about what folks are working on. Or feel free to send an email or post in the comments to say hi. That’s fine too.

It really does feel like I start half of these with a variation of “man, what a week” but jeeeezus. This one is two days later than I’d like because I wasn’t feeling great but I clearly wasn’t feeling that bad because I went and made a Gubble website yesterday. Anyway, if you enjoy these posts, donations (if possible) to any of these Minnesota based groups would be nice.

Adventure

Pathologic 3 is now out on Steam. You play as a medical doctor who has 12 days to save a town from a mysterious plague. I still haven’t played any of these games because I’ve had difficulty finding the time to play a very stressful video game when I’m also in a good headspace, but I’ve heard all 3 are very good and you do not need to play previous entries to do later ones.

Abyssal is a browser game created in PICO-8 inspired by the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive Ecco the Dolphin. You explore the water and use sonar to locate gems.

WHODUNNIT is a pay-what-you-want/free visual novel on Itch.io and Steam where you must investigate who you hooked up with last night. The first episode is available now.

Laugh Track is a dark comedy horror visual novel where you are the lead writer for a sitcom. Available for free on Steam and Itch.io.

Arcade

Froggo is a new-ish (a few months old) arcade game for the Apple II that is influenced by both Frogger and Crossy Road. It’s available for free on the dev site, along with the source code and a link to play it in the browser.

Books

Game Poems is a new online literary magazine dedicated to exploring the artistic and poetic potential of short-form video games by publishing new games directly in a playable format. Visibility with short poetic games made in Twine and Bitsy is so difficult so I think it’s fantastic this exists. It’s free and I’m really looking forward to seeing more issues. Books probably isn’t the correct category for this but at the same time it reminds me a lot of literary anthologies so maybe it is?

Technically not a game itself but reading is good! Mages & Modems is a memoir involving tales of growing up with emerging technologies in the 80’s and 90’s. You can get a digital copy on Itch.io but the page has a link to where you can get physical copies if you prefer that.

Bundles

There’s a bundle running on Itch.io for the next 14 days to raise funds for disaster relief in Jamaica. For $6 or more you can get 100+ games. I’m personally a big fan of co-open.

Game Jams

Wonderville did their monthly 2 hour game jam and I want to give a shoutout to drip for doing their first solo game. It’s a VN about being a tattoo artist. You can check out the rest of the games here.

News

IGF announced their nominees. The IGF is probably the only award thing I care about because it’s not just nominating the big indie games that get mainstream press coverage and I discover new things from it every year. I’ve been following it since 2002, where games like Bad Milk and Pencil Whipped were very excited to a very young me who didn’t know experimental games existed.

Platformer

Big Hops (Steam/Switch/PS5) looks like a very cute 3D platformer where you explore a large 3D world as a frog and do frog things like jumping around and using your tongue to catch stuff.

Puzzle

Space Corgi 2 is a puzzle game created by Adam Saltsman in PICO-8 where you control two dogs that must get to their dog bed and overcome obstacles. I was a big fan of Adam’s CorgiSpace and I’m happy to see him continuing to make tiny PICO-8 games.

I’ve been very into enclose.horse, a browser puzzle game where you need to enclose a horse in the largest possible space with a limited amount of walls. You only get one attempt at each puzzle.

RPG

Sunless Isle: Keep of the Mad Magus is a first person dungeon crawler where you explore three levels and fight monsters all while maintaining your health, sanity, and lantern oil. A prototype was created for a game jam a few years ago but it just got reworked and completed. It’s available for Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io.

TTRPGs

Swords Without Master is currently running a Kickstarter. It’s blown past its goal and still has quite a few days left but I think it’s worth a look. It was a game that was previously in Worlds Without Master Issue 3 for years but is finally getting an expanded standalone version. It’s a fantasy game where a DM and 2-4 players, who are rogues, tell a story in a few hours using two Tone Dice. I’m happy to see it doing well and Epidiah Ravachol is just a fantastic game desiger.

New in Town is a solo ttrpg inspired by Animal Crossing about arriving in town and reminding yourself of all the possibilities that can bring. I got to playtest the game and thought it was lovely. In fact, I will steal the blurb of myself on Itch. “Playtested the upcoming solo ttrpg New In Town by @cutestpatoot.itch.io and I’m looking forward to the final version. I think it’s great at recreating the feel of starting a new town in Animal Crossing and it’s just a nice, chill game. Will probably play it again with my kids, who are big AC fans.” You can find a digital copy on Itch.io and a print zine on Plus One Exp.

CLINCH is a 1v1 dueling dice game inspired by films like The Princess Bride and A Knight’s Tale. You are two dueling sword fighters who must do whatever it takes to win. Available on Itch.io

Wishlist

Sparrow Warfare is an upcoming mahjong-inspired deckbuilder where you lead a bird army to freedom. If you are interested in trying it out now, there is a playtest you can join.

That does it for this week. If you’ve got a game you want to post about and you don’t use AI, feel free to send me an email about it (see the About page for contact info). Don’t need to send me a key for it either. I just like to hear about stuff folks are working on.

First roundup of the new year! If you enjoy these, share with a friend and consider giving to the GoFundMe for Renee Good’s wife and son after she was murdered by ICE earlier this week. Also if you’re still on X/Twitter, get some help. Why are you on the child porn generator site? Jesus Christ. Ok, here’s some games.

Booze Elroy (Itch.io) is a Pac-Man clone with a billion customizable options to choose from. Even if it was just Pac-Man it would be a good clone of that, but it adds so many options you can enable that change the game quite a bit and I think it’s fantastic. I really can’t recommend grabbing this one enough, it’s pay-what-you-want, before a big site like Kotaku or PC Gamer covers it and gets the game pulled like they always do.

We just got Indiepocalypse #72 on Itch. Each issue features a collection of tabletop and experimental video games, as well as a game commissioned for the issue. You can buy physical copies of the compilations here.

Gardenloom (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want collaborative tool for building a tarotesque oracle deck for 1+ players. It’s still being worked on so give a try and give some feedback. TTRPG designers always appreciate playtesters.

Celestial Coffee Quest (Itch.io) is a short point-and-click adventure available as Pay-What-You-Want. It’s by Wavey Games, who made the great adventure Melon Head, so it’s nice to see a new free adventure game from them. I really love the retro EGA aesthetic that all of their games have too and just how odd and goofy the games can get.

Bimbo (Itch.io) is a static site generator by Izzy! I’m a big believer that people should make their own websites, even on something like Neocities, so I full support this. No it’s not a video game but social media sucks, people should have their own homebase where crappy moderators can’t limit what you say, and it’s my blog so I can put whatever I want in here.

Solo But Not Alone 6 (Itch.io) just went live. It’s a charity bundle featuring 90 single player tabletop rpgs for just $10. All proceeds go to mental health charity Take This.

The Procession of Horses in Motion (Itch.io) is an experimental short software film that runs about 6 minutes long and I think is worth watching. The term software film is being used because it really is a program that you run and watch, with no interactivity, and is explicit in that it’s not a game in any sense. I’m still including it though. Does this make it a cousin of demoscene stuff and the non-interactive demos that you would see released for video games in the early 90s? Anyway, I really like it and think you should check out the other works of INFINITE TEARS too.

Another jam for Decker just wrapped up on Itch. Decker is a Hypercard-inspired tool for making little apps and games for browsers and now there’s 37 new things made with Decker for you to check out.

And finally, every December Tom Hall, of Commander Keen/Wolfenstein 3D/Anachronox fame, runs a game jam where he makes lots of assets for folks to use and an optional ARG to participate in. It’s a lot of fun and great games are made for it each year. That jam just wrapped up and now there are 94 games for you to play. He’s a massive PICO-8 fan so the assets are built for that but the jam welcomes games made with other engines too.

That does it for this week. If you’ve got a game you want to post about and you don’t use AI, feel free to send me an email about it (see the About page for contact info). Don’t need to send me a key for it either. I just like to hear about stuff folks are working on.

I meant to do a few of these each week during my break and uhhhhhh oops, I guess that didn’t happen. So now I’m going to put all of them from my notes into one giant post and hopefully you find one or two neat things to play. I’ll try to sort this a bit more by genre so it’s a little less overwhelming. I hope these posts were useful to folks. Even during Steam and Itch sales, people are still releasing games! I even made a free Playdate game with my kids. If you enjoy these roundups, consider adding your own game or other small indies to MobyGames so they’re covered elsewhere too. There’s already been a few games covered in these that are delisted and that’s always weird to see. And consider blogging about small games you like in the new year too! There’s not much coverage of a lot of these games and there should be better writers talking about them. There’s plenty of games that never come out on Steam that are worth your time.

Adventure

After being in development for a very long time and then Early Access for a while after that, SpaceVenture (Steam/Itch) is finally out. This is a point-and-click adventure by the creators of the Sierra classic Space Quest. I’m just happy to see it come out. They had to deal with health issues and the worst Kickstarter backers I’ve ever seen, so it’s a miracle at all that it’s out. It’s nice to see that Steam reviews are positive too. I played a very early version and it was buggy but I think the people I know that are massive Space Quest fans have been fairly happy with it.

The Itch page for SOUP ROOMS (Itch) describes it better than me so I’ll just copy that. “SOUP ROOMS is a SOUP-like room tourism experience directly inspired by SOUP, an obscure Japanese minimalist art-game from 2007 where you walk around a series of small abstract rooms and generally soak in the atmosphere. Think of it as a sort of digital art gallery.” There’s 100 rooms from a variety of indie game devs AND a tool for making your own rooms. Plus it’s all for free!

jfrisby has a new horror adventure called MALLICIOUS (Itch) that is available for Pay-What-You-Want. It was made for the monthly game jam on the Adventure Game Studio website. I always like how jfrisby’s adventure games look and love that this has the aesthetics of a C64 game.

The Simogo Legacy Collection (Steam) is a collection of games released by the developer Simogo for mobile devices from 2010 to 2015. The most famous one is probably Device 6 but there’s some other big ones here too and it’s just really nice to see these games preserved on a platform that’s a bit more stable than the iOS App Store.

Arcade

Death in Abyss (Steam) just looks like a really solid arcade shooter with a low poly aesthetic, and I feel like I don’t see many arcade games taking place in a horror setting. A demo is available to try.

Unbeatable (Steam) doesn’t really need a mention on this site because it’s done so well already and everyone knows about it by now, but it’s going on here anyway. I joked elsewhere about how a game about a fascist government making music illegal is basically the Aerosmith video game Revolution X, but it looks nice anyway.

FPS

One Rotten Oath (Steam) is an interesting looking one to me. It’s an adventure game/FPS hybrid that uses tank controls and has FMV for all of the enemies. I realize that is probably not for most people but there’s a handful of us that go wild over FMV so I’m including it here. It’s got a demo too. The developer of this previously made a FMV game/interactive movie called A Trip to Yugoslavia.

I can’t believe ROUTINE (Steam) is actually out after being announced like 13 years ago. It looks great! FPS probably really isn’t the right category for this since it’s more of a survival horror thing that happens to have a gun. But it’s here, reviews have been positive, and it seems to be selling well so good for them. It’s weird that this roundup has two games (see: SpaceVenture) that started development over a decade ago.

Game Jams

Do you like Yuri? Well a whole game jam for it just wrapped up on Itch with 94 entries!

I don’t think I mentioned the 7 day fps jam in the last post either but that was also wonderful and had lots of entries on Itch. There’s also some very good ones that went past the deadline and were released outside of the jam instead like Dronelord Hyperviber. The look of that one actually reminds me of the DOS game Magic Carpet although it plays a bit differently.

Simulations

Tom City (Itch) is a very cute city builder for browsers by Dave Lloyd of Powerhoof and his son. Obviously I’m a fan of people making games with their kids so this gets a 10/10 from me.

Sports

I feel like I’m trolling a bit by putting Skate Story (Steam) in the sports section but it’s gotta go somewhere. Anyway, I’m the last person who hasn’t played it yet but I keep seeing everyone say the vibes are very good. It has a demo too!

Old School Rally (Steam) is exactly what it says it is. It’s a rally game that looks like it’s between the PSX and PS2 in terms of aesthetics (so Dreamcast era then?) and I think it looks nice.

TTRPGs

We Shall Be Monsters (publisher page) is a solo ttrpg inspired by Frankenstein about creating a living being, and now you can buy it in the form of a 20 page zine. I’m a big fan of Good Luck Press and their designers!

Dragon Reactor (Itch) is a mech tragedy game about conflict on a grand scale using d6 and for 2+ players.

I have a very minor cold today which of course means that I’m acting like I am incapable of doing anything and just being miserable all around. The good news is that in a few more days I’ll have a few weeks off work. The bad news is that this means they are some of the slowest days of my life. I am hoping this means I’ll get to play a lot of neat stuff during all that time off and maybe make a tiny game. I actually recommend the post Small Christmas/Winter Indie Games on Syl’s Blog, but here are some more games for you to play after you’re done checking out those.

New Releases

Ken Griffey Jr.’s Horrible Tower (Glorious Trainwrecks) is an incredibly difficult platformer where you try to ascend the floors of a tower while Ken Griffey Jr. taunts you. I am absolutely terrible at these kinds of platformers where you repeatedly try levels until you beat them, but this is a good one of those and it’s free.

Robo Attack 3D (Crazy Games link?) is a free browser game where you save astronauts and shoot robots in a Vampire Survivors-ish inspired game. It’s by John Passfield, who has made games like Halloween Harry, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, and Flight of the Amazon Queen. It’s just a fun little arcade game! I have never heard of the site Crazy Games before in my life!

The 2025 PICO-8 Advent Calendar (Lexolaffle site) is an advent calendar where you get a new game made in PICO-8 every day. I just love playing little PICO-8 games and it’s fun seeing folks like Tom Hall (of Commander Keen/Anachronox fame) making stuff for it too.

Angeline Era (Steam/Itch.io) is a new game by the developers of Sephonie and Anodyne. I’m so excited for this one! I love how it looks and I will always get excited about bump combat, which is literally when you bump into enemies to damage them. There’s a demo if you want to try it out.

Rainbows Are Carnivores (Itch.io) is a short gay fishing game by Robert Yang that you can play for free in your browser. It’s great, as Robert’s games always are, but I think the most fascinating part about the game is actually the blog post about its inspirations and the making of it that you should read after you play the game.

Southeast Asia Games Onward 2025 is a nice showcase of games that you can check out on Steam and Itch.io. They have different games being featured so be sure to look at both!

Light Up The Town (Steam) is a cozy Christmas game where you are a ferret and hang up lights in your town. I watched decafjedi stream it and it looks incredibly cute and relaxing.

The TTRPG Bookmark Jam just wrapped up on Itch.io. It’s a jam where people made a ttrpg (or ttrpg related thing) that fits on a bookmark.

Blendo Games released their second game this year after already putting out Skin Deep earlier in 2025 after a few years in development. Antibody One (Itch.io) is a short shooter where you explore the inside of a human body and it’s only $1.

Sales

I wanted to give a shoutout to the Resnijars XMAS Extravaganza Sale!! on Itch.io because I am a fan of their games and this bundle is an affordable way to get them all. If you like 90s looking first person adventure games then I think Manglepaw is worth a look.

Crowdfunding

Chess Joker (Backerkit) is a tabletop game by Asmadi Games that combines Chess with cards that have effects on the game.

That’s it for today. Hoping to do a few more this week to get any/all holiday games out there. I hope you find something new to play! Feel free to message/email me about anything you’re working on if it’s not using AI.