indie games

Caper in the Castro thoughts

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: C.M. Ralph
Year: 1989
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

menu screen for caper in the castro showing someone leaning against a lightpole and text saying "It's not just a game, it's a gayme!"

Caper in the Castro is a short point-and-click adventure game created in Hypercard and the earliest known queer game, so I thought it would be fun to check it out during Pride Month. You play as the lesbian detective Tracker McDyke who must find her friend, the drag queen Tessy LaFemme. It’s a very straightforward adventure game where you navigate up and down a street, going into buildings and poking around for clues. Since it was a simple game built in Hypercard, it doesn’t have any inventory items and progress is gated by various notes you take in the game that you will need to use elsewhere. There are death scenes that will force you to restart the game but it’s incredibly quick to get back to where you were before.

game screenshot set outside a bar at night. The bar is titled "The Gayme Room"

I have known about the game for a while but never actually sat down to play through the entire thing and I’m so glad I did. Any flaws the game may have from the lack of depth or the fussy parser, which you briefly use at a few points, was easy for me to overlook because of how charming the game is. I am an absolute sicko for this era of Macintosh games and Hypercard and I loved the art. The game was obviously made at a really dark time and the game encourages people to donate to AIDS charities as a form of paying for the game. I get very emotional seeing people creating queer art during this time and the fact that this was created to be charityware to help others was very moving to me. I was a baby during this time so I also always appreciate any queer art and writing that lets me see what the queer community was doing at this time. The game itself is very campy and messy in a way I really enjoyed (other than the dated language the author apologizes for on the Archive.org page) and I think it would fit in very well with what a lot of experimental queer games that folks are making on Itch.

I’d recommend it, especially if you are interested in queer and/or retro adventure games. It’s not the tightest puzzle design given that the author was working with a limiting tool they didn’t have a ton of experience working with, but I think the art and writing are very charming and it’s an interesting time capsule.

Caper in the Castro is available for free on the Internet Archive and you can repay the author by donating to your LGTBQ+ charity of choice.

The Manifesto Jam

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

The Manifesto Jam, where folks write manifestos on game design, is about to wrap up in two days and there’s already a lot of great stuff submitted. I don’t have a manifesto in me but I’ve been enjoying reading the entries. Some I agree with, some I don’t, but that’s kinda the fun of going through them all. I’m surprised none of the sickos (complimentary) in the adventure games community have made a manifesto. It’s a little fascinating seeing a couple people who don’t make games get mad at the jam when it’s not a thing that impacts them at all, unless people start taking these manifestos very seriously. Throw it in the pile of all the other stuff on Itch that Aftermath will continue to ignore I guess.

Maybe I should have posted about this earlier so that anyone who sees this can write their own manifesto but there’s still two days left, you can do it!

A Lost Man adventure game demo explores life during World War 1

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment
a soldier in an old church

Maybe I should play more adventure game demos. I almost never do because I figure that if an adventure game looks interesting to me and people like it then I’ll probably get it at some point and playing a demo would just spoil a chunk. But that seems a bit silly now after trying a few recently such as A Lost Man, a point-and-click adventure where you are a lost soldier during World War 1. The demo (available on Steam) gives a very brief look at the game and one or two puzzles but it made me far more interested in the game. I felt the game does an excellent job of conveying a place that is close to the front lines but isn’t quite pulled in yet. There is some dry humor but it’s not a silly game and everything felt tonally like it should. I wasn’t sure how I would have felt about the art but it looks really good in motion. My only real complaint about that is that I think it needs a run animation instead of making the player walk fast, but it’s a unique style I haven’t seen in other adventure games.

I’m curious about the stuff I see in the trailer that wasn’t in the demo. Everything I played felt very grounded, so I’m not sure how the more puzzle-like parts will work but I’m guessing that it feels more natural when it’s all spread out over an entire game and not in a very short trailer.

Anyway, the demo is very short (about 15 minutes) so consider giving it a shot if it sounds interesting to you. Maybe I’ll try to do some demo roundups on here during the next Steam demo event.

Enigma Heart Demo Bring Back Zelda 2 Style Adventuring

~ mpklamerus ~ 3 Comments
a woman in a temple by a pool

I have always loved Zelda 2. I realize it’s a flawed oddball in the series. It’s nothing like the rest of the games, other than the CD-i games (a post for another day), and it’s a bit too obtuse and difficult for its own good, but I always loved that it combines rpg elements with 2D platforming and weirdness of the boss design. So I was very happy to see that the Zelda 2-like Enigma Heart now has a demo. This isn’t really a review since I’ve only played for a little bit so far (and liked it), but since this style of game is so rare, with the only other Zelda 2-likes I can think of being the Gunmetal Arcadia series (Steam/Itch), I thought I would let people know about it. It’s very gay as well. You can get the demo on Steam and Itch.io.

On a related note, I also started poking at a Zelda 2 romhack called Zelda 2 Redux. It makes a lot of little tweaks like improved translations and adjusting the difficulty a little and it’s amazing how much these small changes can improve the game. If you bounced off the original game, maybe give this one a shot. If the changes in that are too drastic, there’s this one that just improves the translation.

TOWNSQUEER Zine And Games Bundle Available for Limited Time

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two columns of text describing pressure inside someone's head
PARA//LAX

TOWNSQUEER, a bundle containing games and a zine put together by the folks at gamedev.lgbt, is now available on Itch.io for $20. It made me happy to see this community put together a bundle of wonderful games and immediately picked it up when it went on sale last night. I’ve played a few of the games before so it was nice to support those, as well as have a whole new batch of games to play. I wrote about PARA//LAX before, but I also really enjoyed other games in this bundle like the fmv documentary To All the Rocks That Bear Me, platformer Nice Disc, and the first person interactive fiction Breathe. Not only is it an excellent collection of games but I was impressed with the production of the zine as well. A great amount of effort was put into the layout and it contains a lot of writing from the bundle contributors about game development and other topics. I really can’t recommend the bundle enough. It’s good to support queer art of course, but I also just think it’s a very good deal for the amount of high quality games you’re getting and I think it coming with a few Steam keys is a nice little bonus too. Go check it out! It runs until June 15.

I hope the bundle is very successful and we see more volumes of this, even though the organizers have run into some headaches with Itch. I also hope it inspires other communities to do something similar. I know some Discords have organized bundles before but it feels extra special to me when a community that hosts their own site, whether it’s a mastodon instance like this or a forum, has their own projects like this.

first person view of someone riding a bike
To All the Rocks That Bear Me

Exit 8

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

Developer: KOTAKE CREATE
Publisher: PLAYISM
Year: 2023
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

a business man standing in a long hallway

Exit 8 is a short first-person horror game where you are trapped in an endless repeating hallway and must escape. I was curious about the game after seeing that it got a film adaptation and was glad I finally checked it out. The core gameplay (literal) loop has you looking for any differences in the repeating hallway. If you see any, then you need to turn around and go back, otherwise keep walking forward. You have to successfully repeat this pattern eight times in a row, so you can get to Exit 8. If you fail a loop, it resets the counter back to zero. None of this is a spoiler, it’s all listed on the very first sign you see in the game. There’s really no plot here and it boils down to a Spot the Difference game where you are occasionally placed in danger. I’m being reductive in my description of the game but it mostly works for me. The game successfully creeped me out without doing any jump scares.

The main issue I have with the game, and one that I see plenty of other folks also state in their positive reviews, is that when you find a difference/anomaly, it’s temporarily removed from the game. This happens until you find them all, and then they’re all returned to the game and it becomes very easy to solve the game since you’re an expert at recognizing them. The part where this becomes an issue is that it eventually turns the game into a bit of a checklist of things to look for since you probably have entered a loop of spotting some of the obvious and more interesting differences, removing them from the game, and then missing a more subtle one and the counter being reset to zero. After repeating that a few times, you get into a flow that feels like a bit of a slog where you find one or two subtle differences, miss one, repeat until you find them all and everything is added back to the game and you win. It’s certainly possible that players do not run into this and beat the game before seeing everything, but if you do stumble into this cycle it makes the game very tedious for about 15-20 minutes. It’s unfortunate because most of the game does work for me and I’d still recommend it. It was very nice playing a horror game that only took 90 minutes and was creepy without stressing me out with health systems and monsters I need to fight. It just needed a little more to elevate it to being a great horror game.

Exit 8 is available on Steam, Switch, Playstation, Xbox, and smartphones

Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard

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Developer: Grace Bruxner, Thomas Bowker
Publisher: worm club, SUPERHOT PRESENTS
Year: 2019
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

a rhino named Mary saying "Have you heard of extortion?"

I continue to replay the Frog Detective series but this time with my middle child. This one has you investigating a parade in a small town prepared for the arrival of an invisible wizard that has been ruined and it’s up to you to find out who did it. It plays very similar to the first game, which is not a complaint at all because I really enjoyed that one. The mystery itself has a cute resolution and I liked exploring the small town at night more than the island in the first game. There’s a bit more to look at in this one so I felt it was a more interesting environment to explore. The game also features a little notebook that tracks clues for you and you can mark who you think is suspicious or not. None of this is essential to completing the game but it’s all very fun to play with and my 6 year old treated it all very seriously as she would change who was suspicious or not after talking with each person. It was the perfect game to play with her since it let her roleplay being a detective without having to make any actual decisions on who ruined the parade, which has a happy ending anyway. The game only takes 60-90 minutes to play too, the perfect length for something to play in a sitting. I always liked these games but I appreciated them a lot more after playing them with my kids.

Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard is available for Windows and Mac on Steam and Itch.io, PS4/PS5, and XBOX.

Loved the Incredibly Ambitious Interactive Fiction Game PARA//LLAX

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two columns with separate stories being told about men feeling pain

Developer: Stanwixbuster
Year: 2026
Genre: Interactive Fiction
System: Browser

PARA//LLAX is an interactive fiction game created by Stanwixbuster for the Videotome 3 Jam about two men who wake up with a hole in their chest. The story is told by two separate columns with the men describing what they see, and advanced asynchronously by advancing one column at a time using the left and right arrow keys or both at the same time by pressing down. My limited experience with games made using Videotome is that they’re linear and the story is advanced with a mouse click or keypress until you finish the story. That’s certainly not a criticism. I think even a limited interaction like that changes the reader’s relationship to the story compared to if it was a book or post, but it really surprised me to see that you could do asynchronous storytelling using the engine. It’s not something I’ve seen before and the implementation was far more ambitious than I had expected.

When I saw that you could advance the story on either column, I figured that it was still going to be a linear narrative and they eventually end at the same point but the game has 27 end states. I wasn’t able to find them all but the branching storylines all felt very unique. I can’t even imagine how much work must have gone into writing all of them and building out all the branches, but it was a perfect fit for the surreal body horror story this game is about. I also felt the ambient music and different colored graphics for each side of the screen for each man are used well to immerse the reader.

Body horror probably isn’t going to be for everyone and I do recommend reading the content warnings before playing but I can’t recommend PARA//LLAX enough to anyone who is a fan of interactive fiction.

PARA//LLAX is available in the browser on Itch.io.

Meanderware thoughts

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a skull saying "All it takes to create for the old school web is to know that you can. It never went away. It's still here!"

Developer: alienmelon
Year: 2026
Genre: Interactive Essay
System: Browser

Meanderware: Things I loved about cyberspace is an interactive essay collecting various thoughts on the indie web and how ephemeral the internet and digital art can be. It’s probably obvious from the description that it’s something I would love but it’s so expertly crafted that I want to recommend it to everyone.

a skull saying "It's about the journey This is why the indie web will always matter. We exist on our own terms, and create on our own terms. The internet is for everyone."

The game (I’m still calling it a game) mostly takes place as a first person exploration of a virtual space with you coming across doors that link you to external websites about the internet and dialog windows modeled after tooltips as seen in the screenshots above. The game has an aesthetic inspired by 90s software and internet graphics but is more than just nostalgia bait, with the essay exploring what the internet could be and how we can build that. It references the Internet from the 90’s because it needs to discuss how it has evolved over the decades, but never falls into the trap that things of this nature often seem to. It doesn’t lecture you on how the internet was better and ignores all the issues that the internet had during this period and I felt that all of the themes of the essay were communicated very well through the 3D space you explore.

The essay also addresses one of my biggest gripes with Internet nostalgia. People will frequently lament that the internet just isn’t what it used to be and it’s too bad it’s all gone, but it isn’t! People still use forums (see previous posts on here), and people still make their own personal sites on places like NeoCities. It’s all still there, just being covered up by a heavily commercialized layer of apps that make it harder to discover. What I really love about how this game addresses it is that it provides you with some of the tools to build your own site and weird internet tools. I really appreciate that this essay wants to say that the internet can still be weird if you want it to be.

a green grid with a giant tower coming out of it. Error windows cover the landscape

Part of the game is about discovering little corners of the web that become very meaningful and how short lived they can be. This brought back so many memories of being on forums in the 00’s and how important they were to me at the time, even if they were generally pretty silly places. AdventureGamers.com just died last year after being around for decades, and was a place that I spent quite amount of time at. I still think about these communities quite a bit even decades after I have left them.

On an unrelated note, is this the first game to reference HappyPuppy? It has to be?

To be honest, we all know this review could have been summarized by that overused gif of Meryl Streep pointing and saying yes, but I hope that me endlessly praising it will encourage you to check it out and perhaps even create your own website.

Meanderware: Things I loved about cyberspace is available in the browser on Itch.io

Marges Destimbats (Crumbled Stone Walls) thoughts

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a grandfather talking about olive trees and saying they are in need of pruning

Developer: ferran
Year: 2026
Genre: Visual Novel
System: Browser

Marges Destimbats is a short interactive documentary about the developer’s grandfather maintaining crumbling stone-wall terraces in an olive orchard near Deltebre, Spain. I rarely see games and interactive media these days using FMV, so I was really excited to come across this for the Sant Jordi Jam 2026. It’s about something so specific too. How often do you learn about olive orchards from a video game? I also love that it was the designer’s grandfather who stars in this game. Getting family members to act in a video game can sometimes be tough, as seen from the outtakes for Myst, and you know what? He did great. I’m glad this was made and would love to see more interactive documentaries like this.

Marges Destimbats is available to play in-browser on Itch.io.