Pilgrims is a short adventure game by Amanita Design, the folks who made Samorost and Machinarium. You play as a guy exploring a land so you can get the resources you need to get on a boat. The hook of the game is that each playthrough is very short and you come across a variety of puzzles that have multiple solutions, so the game requires multiple playthroughs to see it all. These playthroughs can also have different solutions based on the people that have joined your party. I’ve played through the game a few times and I was shocked by how different my playthroughs were. The game is only an hour long, which is great, and according to my Steam achievements, my playthrough was very different than the one I did three years ago.
The game uses a deck of cards to represent the inventory items and people in your party, and the deck grows and shrinks in size and you gain items and people, or use them and they leave your deck. I think the card inventory mechanic is great. It’s a very easy and quick way to see everything that is available to you without having to open a separate window. Switching between characters that drop in and out of the game through your playthrough is a fun mechanic too. I really enjoyed seeing how each character would react to puzzles and NPCs.
Since it’s a game by Amanita, it features the excellent artwork and sound design that you would expect from their games. I really appreciate how so many of their games have a different art style but also feel like something only they would make.
Anyway, if you like the studios other games, you’ll enjoy this one too. If you’ve never played a game by this developer, consider giving it a shot. It’s fairly inexpensive and goes on sale a lot, and it doesn’t take long to get through but you’ll probably want to play through it again one or two more times.
Pilgrims is available on computers, mobile platforms, and Nintendo Switch. All of these are linked to on the developer’s site.
Developer: Outsider Games Publisher: Outsider Games Year: 2022 Genre: Adventure
Since AdventureGamers has decided to become a gambling slop farm and is slowly deleting all their old content (and was apparently stealing content from other sites before that anyway), I have decided to repost the review I sent to them a few years ago here. The key for the game was directly sent to me so I don’t think the site really deserves any loyalty since they didn’t do anything to enable this opportunity. It’s a good time to repost it anyway since the game just got a release on the Nintendo Switch
Throughout their ups and downs, adventure games have had a devoted following for decades, partly because of their willingness to tell stories where the players can see themselves represented in ways they may not in other genres. Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries by Outsider Games continues this tradition by exploring themes of queerness that I rarely get to see in other games. Despite occasionally frustrating issues with the controls, Jennifer Wilde is a well-crafted adventure game that features a unique story and beautiful black-and-white art.
Jennifer Wilde tells the story of a young French artist named Jennifer Chevalier living in Paris in 1921. Suspecting that the recent death of her father was not an accident, Jennifer investigates her father’s apartment. After finding a locket in his room, she attempts to use her childhood gift of talking to ghosts to summon his spirit. She accidentally summons Oscar Wilde’s ghost instead, with whom her father had an affair many years ago. The two team up and travel across Europe to find the murderer and uncover a massive conspiracy along the way.
The controls, as in your typical point-and-click adventure, feature clicking on parts of a room to walk around, interact with an object, or talk to someone. I thought the speech text moved too fast, and the dialog controls didn’t feel as responsive as they could have been when talking with people, but there were various options that allowed me to resolve both issues. I also appreciated that this game let me play with a controller and found it a very enjoyable way to play.
The primary mechanic for solving puzzles is a fun innovation. Throughout parts of the game, you will come across obstacles, like a police officer not letting you pass a crime scene while they are doing an investigation. To progress, you must gather clues by talking to people and interacting with objects relevant to the mystery. Each time you get a clue, it shows up in your inventory, resembling something that looks like a comic panel. Once you get three or four of these, you must organize them in a linear order that recreates the sequence of events of the mystery you’re trying to solve. I had some issues with this mechanic a couple of times because I wasn’t sure if I was missing a panel or just putting things in the wrong order, but overall I thought it was a commendable concept and would like to see something like it again in the future. I believe some feedback, such as Jennifer saying a line about how that doesn’t seem like the right solution, would have helped me learn the mechanic and know if I had the wrong answer or wasn’t following the procedure correctly.
At first, I thought the game was too easy and linear, but eventually it opens up a bit more and introduces more challenging puzzles. You can switch between Jennifer and Oscar to solve puzzles due to their different abilities, which adds complexity. This never feels too difficult though, and I didn’t get stuck on any puzzle for too long. The game has an objective tracker that helps manage everything you’re investigating, so the process never gets overwhelming once additional goals are added. There’s also some nice variety in the types of challenges later on that keeps the experience from ever feeling tedious.
Jennifer Wilde features incredibly detailed 2D black-and-white artwork that often evokes a comic book style. This is appropriate since it’s based on a comic mini-series released in the early 2010s. Characters have speech bubbles when speaking, and captions appear on the page when describing new locations. The game reminds me of a motion comic; characters generally only have animations when walking, and other actions have a slideshow effect. It all works very well in-game and suits the comic book style.
Aside from the catchy, period-appropriate music on the menu screen, there isn’t much music in the game, and most of what you’ll hear are ambient sound effects that fit the room you’re in.
I was initially skeptical about the inclusion of Oscar Wilde, but I felt it was a good fit with the story they were telling. There aren’t many commercial adventure games that explore queerness, so I thought it was nice to see. I appreciate that this shows a kinder and deeper portrayal of Oscar Wilde than we usually see in media. He often just seems to be portrayed as some guy with witty one-liners. He shows a lot of empathy towards others here, which is also a rarity in a video game. I thought Jennifer was a well-written character, and I liked her interactions with other characters and the arc she goes through. At a few points, you are allowed to make minor decisions that don’t affect the outcome but help make it seem a little more personalized, which was a nice touch.
The core mystery is fine, but it felt rushed towards the end. It took me about 3.5 hours to complete, which usually would be the perfect length since I generally prefer shorter games, but I think I would have preferred some more time in the end to allow the plot elements to unfold more slowly. Where the writing shines is in the character development and the interactions between Jennifer and Oscar, and that is where the majority of the focus remains. Aside from some quirks with the controls and feeling a little rushed toward the end, Jennifer Wilde is a good adventure that explores themes you don’t see too often in commercial games. I enjoyed playing it, and I hope we see these two engaging characters in a game again soon.
Developer: Soft Not Weak Publisher: Soft Not Weak Year: 2025 Genre: Puzzle
Recently I played through Spirit Swap, an incredibly polished match 3 that I got a few months ago from backing it on Kickstarter. I had backed the game because the artwork looked great and I wanted to support queer games, but I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting it is mechanically. The game has a story mode that breaks into a dating sim and there’s powers you can use during the puzzling parts. The powers add a nice twist to the gameplay. When you configure blocks into specific shapes, like a diamond, you can use one of your three powers and those will have effects on your board and your opponents. Each character has different powers and you can also specify what powers you want. It’s a nice way to add some variety to this style of game, which I think has existed for 30+ years.
I love that you “complete” the story mode very quickly and most of the game’s story mode takes place “post-ending” and it becomes a dating sim. If I did have any criticisms, I guess it would be that it throws so many characters at you in a short time span that it felt a little tough having much of an attachment to any of them by the first time the game ends. Some of this is on me since I have been and will always be terrible at remembering names, but that and the lack of any major conflicts and drama in the game means that some of it blends together. I really wish it introduced them more gradually or cut one or two characters from the game, which pains me to say since I like them, but I think it was too much.
It’s also just a great looking game. The effects for the blocks matching and disappearing look nice and the character design and animation while you play is very well done. Everyone in this game is beautiful and actually in a variety of body shapes! It’s great to play a game, or honestly experience any art, that doesn’t just see only skinny people as beautiful.
The soundtrack is fantastic and I recommend both of the soundtracks available on Bandcamp, here and here.
The only other real gripe I had with the game is that there were some typos in the dialogue that I wish got caught. There’s a lot of text so it’s easy to see how it slipped through but it stood out.
The game got some criticism for the “everybody is beautiful but no one is horny” trope but it doesn’t really bother me with this game. I guess maybe because I don’t know if it would have worked if the game was more adult and had characters fucking in it? I don’t know, maybe it would have, what do I know. Usually it’s something I wish for more of as well but I’m not bothered by it here. This isn’t the same thing as what we see in basically every Marvel film. I don’t even know if I completely agree with the criticism to be honest. It would also be great if some of the people throwing the criticism around were covering the queer adult games that do exist. There’s quite a few and they’re great.
I’m one of those annoying people that played Tetris Effect 30 years ago and still goes “hmm this is a good match 3 but it’s no Tetris Effect.” but I really enjoyed my time with this game and it’s nice to finally have a Match 3 that doesn’t require me bringing up SNES emulation if I want to recommend it. Nice work Soft Not Weak!
Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To is available on Steam, Itch.io, and Xbox
Hey it’s another one of these things that I do every week. This one is a bit shorter. I doubt that there were less games this week, I think I was just too busy to notice them all, but feel free to let me know if I missed something that you or a friend worked on so I can include it next week. Even with it being a little shorter, it’s still plenty to keep you busy for a while.
Fireside Feelings (Steam) is an online game where you sit around a fire with other people to tell stories and share your feelings. The idea reminds me a lot of Kind Words and it looks like they did some cross promotion with each other.
Robo Attack (iOS app store) is a top down shooter game for iPad, iPhone, and iWatch. I thought this one was interesting since it’s by the developer of classic computer games like Halloween Harry and Flight of the Amazon Queen.
Circlet (Itch.io) is a free arcade game where you have balls bouncing around and you try to avoid them with the line or circles you are controlling. It makes more sense in motion. Very fun little arcade game and the music kinda has a goth chiptune vibe to it.
A new Indiepocalypse is out, filled with experimental indie games.
I think it’s nice we still get games made with ZZT. BombPT (Itch.io) is a puzzle game made for a recent jam and is playable in the browser.
Seasonala Cemetery (Steam/Itch.io) is a free game where you explore a cemetery as it changes with the seasons.
Thank you to Josh for recommending Tametsi on Steam. It’s a Minesweeper game from 2017 that uses odd level shapes and is just $3. I love Minesweeper-likes so this was a nice one to hear about. Always feel free to recommend games to me, even if they aren’t brand new.
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.
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
I could argue that instead of buying a Nintendo Switch 2 game, you could buy all the games here, but these are two very different things and I may as well argue that you should buy $80 worth of books or Doctor Who audio dramas or prosciutto. Do you know how much prosciutto you can get for $80? Not that much if you buy the good stuff! Maybe I’m just bitter that I don’t have a Nintendo Switch 2 and can’t join the rest of you in taste testing the cartridges.
There’s also been a bunch of summer games fests happening this week. I have not followed these at all. Don’t care! I will let other people do the work in figuring out what I should be looking at.
This week’s shoutout is for Graceless Games. I’m a huge fan and think you should pick up some of their games on Itch.io
Anyway, here’s the games. As usual, if you worked on something that you’d like included, just let me know. I miss plenty of stuff.
I think everyone knows Deltrarune is out. It’s not for me but I’m happy for everyone else.
HardAF (Steam) is a Meatboy-like but the entire level is dark and you use the blood from your previous deaths to figure out where the obstacles are at. It’s good stuff. There’s a demo that I think people should check out.
As a child of the 90s that played a lot of multimedia cd-roms made by musicians, I get very excited about musicians making video games. We got two of them this week! Aesop Rock’s Black Hole Superette Experience (Steam) has you listening to his music while exploring a convenience store and The New Flesh (Steam) is a game where you explore a surreal space in a city while listening to upcoming songs by Red Vox. I haven’t played either so I can’t tell you if they’re as good as Peter Gabriel’s Eve, but both are free.
The Lego RPG Jam is a game jam where you write ttrpg systems inspired by your favorite Lego sets.
astoryinpieces keeps making great experimental and adult games for the Game Boy and she has another! Four of a Kind (Itch.io) is a horror anthology featuring 4 short stories.
Gaurodan (dev site) is a shmup inspired by 80s arcade games where you fly around as a dinosaur and blow shit up. It’s free but the dev does take donations. This is an old game but it got an update and it’s new to me
DOMINOID (Itch.io) is a pay-what-you-want puzzle game where you stack dominids and create combos.
Kabuto Park (Steam) looks like a very cute bug catching game and has a demo.
A weirdly specific thing I get excited about is using a yo-yo to fight enemies in video games. Don’t know why, just is. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo (Steam/Switch) is a top-down action game where you get to do that and even has a demo.
Name Change Simulator (Itch.io) is a free visual novel all about getting rid of your deadname.
Anyway, that’s it for this week. Hope you found something nice to play!
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!
