indie games

Indie Game Roundup (October 11, 2025)

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Apologies in advance for this being a big one. Even with how massive this list is, I am missing a ton of stuff. Everyone released a game these last two weeks so this one is probably focused mostly around who I follow on Itch.

Video Games

two people sitting on blocks saying "no, nothing will ever top that" "lmfao"
New Eyes Cycle from the DOMINO Club Boneyard Collection

A new collection of DOMINO CLUB games is out! No one is doing experimental games better than this anonymous collective. You can check out all the games from the Boneyard Collection for free on Itch.io

a man saying "perseverence: if you can believe a sports car, you can achieve a sports car"

Landlord Quest (Itch.io/Steam) is a new point-and-click adventure where you play as a landlord. This is not a pro-landlord game. If you buy it on Itch.io, then you can run the game on any platform you want using ScummVM.

I think most people reading this know about Unfair Flips (Steam) but in case you don’t, it’s a short incremental clicker game about flipping a coin and getting 10 heads in a row.

Indiepocalypse #69 is now available (Itch.io)! This nice issue features another collection of games including a new game commissioned for this issue.

Detective Daydream (Itch.io) is a free stealth puzzle game for browsers where you sneak through rooms without being seen

a person looking at a bridge and tree on a sunny day

Messenger (website) is a relaxing browser game where you explore a city, doing tasks for folks living there, and you can see other folks running around the city as they play.

Radar Rally (Itch.io) is a fun take on the Rally-X style of arcade game for browsers. This dev has made quite a few remakes of old arcade games.

time down view of a woman fighting a big monster in a mansion

House of Necrosis (Steam) is a turn-based horror rpg where you explore a haunted mansion with art inspired by the original Resident Evil. I have never played Mystery Dungeon but that’s an inspiration, so if you’ve played it then maybe that’s very exciting to you.

Hoop Dungeon (Itch.io) is a basketball turn-based strategy game currently undergoing testing. Give it a shot and fill out the feedback form.

I’m a fan of Akril15’s adventure games and they made another one! Like the others, this one is free. I recommend checking out the rest here.

screenshot of a fps playing on a crt
I Made a Game for You from the BRIEFS 2025 collection

BRIEFS 2025 (Itch.io) is a collection of three games that were created for the Australian art collective gold extra, with this year’s theme being cheese.

a dragon character looking at a series of floors with obstacles like spikes and cars

SloanySoft makes plenty of cool games for the ZX Spectrum and they’re back with another one. BubbleBack: The Story of Forward to the Past 2 (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want sequel to a platformer. If you’ve never played a ZX Spectrum game before, consider downloading an emulator and trying a few out on Itch.

a woman looking at the camera on a tv show and the headline says "Clone Trois"

Blippo+ is out on Itch.io/Steam/Switch! I was a big fan of this one on the Playdate and it’s fun seeing it come to more platforms and in color. You basically uncover a storyline by flipping through channels on tv.

a fox in a creepy mansion with a monster and other fox in sight

Videonauts (Steam/Itch.io) is a new game by resnijars where you must escape from a haunted mansion with your friends while solving puzzles. I’m a big fan of their previous games so I’m looking forward to this. The developer lists Illbleed as an influence, which is super interesting to me too.

Tabletop

Melisma (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want ttrpg created by Adam Bell that is part character generator and part music trivia game. It was created for the minimalist jam, and you can check out the rest of the entries for that here.

Monster Truckers (dev site) is a ttrpg by Table Cat Games where you play as truckers that just happen to be monsters. It’s also on Itch and DriveThruRpg.

VOID_SHIFT (Itch.io) is a deckbuilder where you are the captain of a corporate-owned salvage and repair ship and need to put together a deck to complete jobs.

Jazzmanji (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want card game for 1-4 players where you explore a jazz dungeon and fight The Jazzman.

Not Games

There were also a few things released on Itch that weren’t video games but I think are still worth a mention.

Star Sword Nemesis (Itch.io) is a new book by Christine Love, developer of games such as Digital: A Love Story and Get in the Car, Loser. Girls in mechs!

Cats in a Frame (Itch.io) lets you have pictures of cats sitting on your desktop.

Moosadee released a tutorial for learning how to program for the TIC-80 virtual machine with either Lua or Python (Itch.io). Since I’m learning Python right at this moment, this is very interesting to me.

Rose made a Lovely Lodgings character generator for browsers (Itch.io) based on the recent batch of Domino Club games.

The Works of Egan put together this nice template and tutorial for creating your own blog (Itch.io). I’ve said it a million times before but I can’t recommend having your own site enough, where you have more control over the platform and this tutorial will help you setup a RSS feed too so anyone following you can see your posts through their feed.

Wurm Fud made a nice pay-what-you-want asset pack of folk magic pixel art icons (Itch.io)

CGALIB 2 (Itch.io) is a free library for making CGA DOS games and includes a sample game.

That’s it for this week! Thank you for reading this and making it to the end. Always feel free to comment or email me if there’s stuff you’ve worked on.

Unpacking

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Developer: Witch Beam
Publisher: Humble Games
Year: 2021
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

isometric view of a dorm room with a desktop pc

I think at this point everyone has heard of this one. It’s a game released in 2021 where a story is told through a series of relaxing puzzles where you unpack boxes in a new home and need to fit all your stuff in each room. This is one of those games that had been sitting in my backlog for a while despite it being relatively short. I think everything about this game has been covered by folks smarter than me but I did enjoy it. It’s one of those things where there had been so much universal praise for it for years that when I finally got around to it, my first thought was “well yeah it’s good but that’s it?” It’s not fair to the game but it’s so simple and straightforward that I had expected there to be more to it when I finally played it. In fact, if I did have an actual criticism of it, it’s that I had felt like I had “got it” after I played just a few levels. I remember people complaining it was too short at the time but I think it would have become a slog if it was longer.

Anyway, glad I played it. Sometimes you like a thing and think it’s very good, just not as much as everyone else. Like everyone says, it’s a good time and the pixel art is fantastic. Something I didn’t expect would be that my 5 year old would see me playing it, ask to try it out, and fall completely in love with it. She now says it’s one of her favorite games.

It was fun looking up the studio and seeing that they had made Assault Android Cactus+, which I think is brilliant and deserves to be just as popular as Unpacking. It looks like they have one game I haven’t played yet, Tempopo, which was released earlier this year. I’ll have to check that one out too given that I’m a fan of their other work.

Unpacking is available on basically every platform.

Indie Game Roundup (September 26, 2025)

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It’s Friday! How are you? How was your week? There’s been a billion indie games that have come out in the last week so there’s going to be a lot that this post leaves out. Also if you’ve written me an email and I haven’t responded yet, sorry, I have just been super busy. I even saw Devo and the B-52s last night and had a good time. But please feel free to let me know about your indie game through my contact info on the About page. Or even just to say hi! That’s always nice too.

imagine of blocks falling into a cauldron
Spirit Drop, an entry in the Falling Blocks jam

A few game jams wrapped up this week with many wonderful games created for each. If you like games like Tetris then I highly recommend the Falling Blocks Jam on Itch.io. There’s a lot to dig through there but it has lots of interesting takes on the falling blocks genre. If you like adventure games, you may enjoy the $109 Adventure Game Challenge. I’m a bit less enthusiastic about this one since it allows AI art, especially since it has a cash prize, but there’s some good games in there like Eulogy for Nonno or Intern’s First Day.

cartoon of someone saying "What should I do with my free time?" and a big to-do list on the left side.

I think one of the biggest releases this week is Consume Me (Steam), an semi-autobiographical game about being in high school. It won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival!

top down view of a little blue guy surrounded by spiky enemies and text saying "Don't die"

3D Don’t Die Mr. Robot (Steam) was one of my favorite indie arcade games from last year so it’s fun seeing it get a demake for the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Well I guess technically it’s a demake of the first game but I only played the 3D one. Also on Itch.io if you prefer that

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 got a standalone expansion? Prequel? Anyway, the Puzzle Quest-like Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 1 Re-Raptored is now available on Steam.

Arctic Awakening (Steam/PS5/XBox) is a first-person sci-fi thriller about surviving in the arctic after a plane crash.

gif of a woman hitting a light to jump even higher

Waste Your Wedding (Itch.io) is a free platformer about trying to eat a giant cake.

first person view of shooting at robots

Mala Petaka (Steam) is one of those retro shooters but look at those colors! It’s made in the GZ Doom engine too. If you want to try it out, there’s a demo on Steam.

That’s it for this week! Like I said, feel free to let me know about your game in whatever way works best for you. Nothing with AI art please!

Play an Old Indie Game?

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a screenshot from Yip Quest showing 3 kobolds outside a jail cell
Yip Quest

I’ve now put all the indie games covered in the indie game roundups that are on Itch in a single Itch list and will add things to this going forward. This isn’t a perfect list, sometimes my posts covered an entire jam or collection of games. For cases like this, I kinda just included one or two games from the list. Not an ideal solution but oh well. Of course it’s missing anything that didn’t have an Itch.io release. It’s also missing all context for why I thought the games were interesting that I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I just think it’s a fun way to check out small, experimental indie games from a year or two ago since the memory on games feels like it’s extremely short lived and people move on extremely quickly unless it’s a massive hit. Search on Itch.io has also always been flawed. So I guess consider checking out the list, scrolling down a ton, and opening a random game?

There’s probably better ways of highlighting indie games that are older than a year but aren’t old enough to be considered “retro” and I think it would be fun to poke at that more. I think point-and-click adventures and interactive fiction seem to have a pretty long tail to them for maintaining interest after they come out, despite having smaller audiences, but who knows.

an image of a cartoon snake
SNAKE Lucky Laugh, one of the games that’s already been delisted from Itch

The biggest bummer about going through the list was that there’s been a few games that have already been delisted even though I’ve only been doing this for a few years. It’s good stuff so it kinda stinks I wasn’t able to save them. I thought I should start submitting this stuff to MobyGames as I do these roundups but I tried to submit one just not and got hit with a message about how I hit the limit on pending new game submissions because it takes mods there months to look at anything. You’d think with Atari owning the site it would have a bigger budget to deal with this but I guess not. I have no interest in submitting anything to IGDB since it’s owned by Amazon and Backloggd, which uses the database, just feels like another harassment vector at times. So the only documentation of some of these games is just my half assed weekly posts, and nobody deserves that.

Indie Game Roundup (September 19, 2025)

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Every day I wake up and say “What a week.” But it’s Friday, which means it’s actually near the end of the week so that’s something I suppose. Being back in school while having a full time job means that lately it’s just been free and pay-what-you-want indies I’ve been playing. Nothing wrong with that of course, but if you’re wondering why a lot of the bigger commercial indies aren’t on here, that’s why. Six One Indie did a nice indie game showcase yesterday and that’s probably a better way to become more familiar with those. You could also always look at my list of indie game websites and plug them all into your RSS feed reader of choice.

The Play for Peace – Games for Palestine 2025 Charity Bundle (Itch.io) bundle sale ends in a few days. Foor $8 or more you can get tons of great games

a canoe sitting on a lake at sunset

There’s another anthlogy from the game dev collective I’m in! I didn’t work on this one but Locally Sourced Anthology II: The Timeline (Steam) is a collection of 5 games set in different points in time in different genres.

an inactive mech in the rain at night

_ΩMEGA_POINT (Itch.io) is a Pay-What-You-Want walking simulator where you explore the last moments of a dying world in a mech.

Indiepocalypse #68 (Itch.io) is out. Check it out for a great collection of experimental indie games. Only one more month until we get to the nice number.

martians walking on a planets surface with giant people in glass tubes?

I’m just really fascinated by Mars Attracts (Steam) using the dormant Mars Attacks license to make a sim game. It’s nice to see that the user review for it have been positive too. What a weird thing to exist (complimentary).

first person view of someone in a field and their hand sticking out

Eclipsium (Steam) may not be for me because I’m not a big horror games person but I really like it looks. I just like a game that always has a hand sticking out in front.

person standing on a checkerboard pattern

Toward From (Itch.io) is a short experimental browser game that I think does some neat stuff connected to movement and was created for the Game Poems Community Showcase.

Matt Stark keeps creating really fun browser toys focused on building things and they’ve made another one. Mazegarden (Itch.io) is, as you would expect, a game focused on building maze gardens.

A new PUNKCAKE Délicieux game has arrived! Frontline: War of Echoes (Itch.io) is a capture the flag game where you play against recordings of yourself from previous runs.

a big purple hooded figure telling a man to surrender

Snarl (Itch.io) is a short point-and-click horror adventure set in a diner and available for Pay-What-You-Want. Be sure to check out the developer’s other adventures on their Itch page too if you’re a point-and-click adventure fan.

it's a bird with a space helmet on a planet's surface

A Chirp in Space (Itch.io) is just a cute 3D puzzle platformer available for free!

Finally, have some Bitsy game poems!

The Lost Oregon City Gold thoughts

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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)

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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.

Aran’s Bike Trip thoughts

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Developer: Sokpop Collective
Publisher: Sokpop Collective
Year: 2021
Genre: Visual Novel
System: Windows

box art of aran's bike trip of a guy standing next to a bike

Aran’s Bike Trip is an interactive travelogue where you follow along on a bike trip through the Dutch countryside through a series of 360º photos. The game says it’s a short bike trip but it’s about someone riding their bike for two days, which doesn’t feel short to me. This is a game by Sokpop Collective, a small group that has been making a variety of short games for years, but this one is a pretty big stylistic departure from their other games. I think it would be a stretch to say the game has FMV since all you do is look at the panoramic photos of the Dutch countryside while looking at notes from the designer and listening to calming music, but it’s very nice. Sometimes a game can just be an excuse to look at photos of beautiful places in the world. It even inspired me to make a really tiny game about walking on a trail near my home.

photo of a field and text saying "pretty sure this is where they made the windows xp background

Aran’s Bike Trip is available on Steam and Itch.io.

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me

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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.

Five Years Old Memories thoughts

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Developer: Komitsu
Publisher: Komitsu
Year: 2024
Genre: Visual Novel
System: Windows

a man drinking a beer and sitting in a chair


Five Years Old Memories is a short interactive experience where you listen to people in Japan talk about memories they have from when they were about five years old and interacting with animations that play while they talk. It’s very short and only takes about 20 minutes to play through. I’ve played it a few times now, with my most recent playthrough happening because I thought it would be fun to revisit and also get all the achivements, which rewarded me by stumbling upon an element or two that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. The art is fantastic and it’s really cute seeing this storybook-like pictures animating as you listen to their stories. There’s not a whole lot to say about this one other than I really like it and think it’s worth checking out if this sounds appealing to you since it’s only $3.

Five Years Old Memories is available on Steam, Itch.io, and iOS.