indie games

TOWNSQUEER Zine And Games Bundle Available for Limited Time

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment
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

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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.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station thoughts

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Developer: Three Bees
Publisher: Three Bees
Year: 2026
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is a point-and-click adventure where you play as Mara, an eighteen year old woman who has just started college. You experience all that college has to offer you while obtaining new ideas and applying them to papers and other forms of writing. This will be a slimmer and more rambling post because I feel like everything I have to say about the game has already been said by other outlets such as Unwinnable but I thought the game was brilliant and is now one of my favorite adventure games.

a woman saying "Hey, no need to be embarrassed. There was a whole summer I read nothing but computer game novelizations I found in a box behind a grocery store."

One of the many things I was pleasantly surprised by was how much of an improvement it was over the first Perfect Tides, a game that I also thought was very good and well crafted. I was just so surprised by how much more confident this game was in its design, willing to drop more conventional things people expect in adventure games like the multiple verbs and puzzles the first game had, in order to focus more on the choices Mara can make and ability to learn new things. I think having difficult puzzles in this game would have just killed the pacing and wouldn’t fit in with the grounded story this is telling.

Learning new topics was also a really interesting thing to see in an adventure game. It’s been done before of course, this game cites The Dagger of Amon Ra as an influence, but in a way that feels so natural and continuing to explore and talk to other people will improve your knowledge on a topic. It’s masterfully implemented.

Everyone that is of a certain age who plays this will probably relate so much to the references this game makes as well as just what it was like to be a college student and they’re right! For better or worse, I could relate to Mara and just the experience of being a bit of a walking disaster in my late teens. If you don’t relate to that, well, it must be nice to not have that experience.

Anyway, I loved the game and hope it is very successful since it has some of my favorite writing in an adventure game and hope it inspires others to tell personal stories as well.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is available on Steam and Itch.io, and is coming soon to Nintendo Switch.

Text Adventures Still Rule in the Year 2026

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I think a lot of folks who follow this site already know this but people still make text adventure games like during the days of Infocom and they’re still very good! In fact, I think many of them are even better than the classics. That’s not to say the classics are bad, they’re very good, I just think many made post-golden age of text adventures are even better. You can download many free ones on IFDB.

Some that are friendly to beginners that I happen to enjoy are Lost Pig, Galatea, Bronze, and The Dreamhold, but there’s a nice list of more interactive fiction on IFDB’s top 100 list if you’re looking for more to play. Not all of these are text adventures but I also love interactive fiction in the form of Twine games and other forms so no complaints there. I think the commercial text adventure Thaumistry is a good intro to text adventures as well.

If you want to download these free games instead of playing them in a browser, you’ll probably need something to run the files. I think Gargoyle is neat but there’s plenty of options. Some games are also easier to play if you map out the rooms. Personally I love writing these down in a notebook but Trizbort is a nice app for mapping rooms on your computer. I use a desktop version for Windows but apparently there’s now a browser version available.

If you want to see what else folks are up to in the scene, I recommend exploring the rest of IFDB and checking on competitions like IF Comp and Spring Thing. IF Comp has been going on since the 90s. While I stopped following that one for a while because they allowed AI stuff, it seems like they’re starting to clamp down on it so that’s nice.

Anyway, if you’ve never played a text adventure before, give it a shot! Maybe you’ll discover a new genre of games you really enjoy.

DAWN CHORUS [DEMO]

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Developer: haraiva, isyourguy, unseconds
Year: 2026
Genre: Interactive Fiction
System: Browser

pop up windows describing hums and a conversation between people texting
Screenshot taken from Itch.io page

DAWN CHORUS is an upcoming interactive fiction game that recently had a demo put online after being shown at ALT: GAMES 2026. The 30 minute demo tells a story about two friends and a band named Dawn Chorus while the world is falling apart. I loved how it uses links that pop up new windows to expand on the world the game is set in, and the art and music do a fantastic job of contributing to the melancholy feeling of trying to live your life while the world is ending. I think the influences section is worth reading too. The sad feeling the game has reminded me a lot of Kentucky Route Zero so it was fun to see that listed after I had played through the demo. It also lists a few DOMINO CLUB games if you want to see the Jupiter Engine and make a game yourself that uses the popup window functionality this game has.

game screenshot saying how a hum can be heard in some parts of the world including Windsor, Ontario

Something that caught me by surprise was the brief mention of the Windsor Hum. I always get excited about things local to me appearing in video games so that was a fun reference. It was a humming noise that people in Windsor, Ontario could hear from 2011 to 2020 and probably came from a factory on an inland between Canada and the USA but was never completely confirmed. You can read more about it on Wikipedia. There’s also a song by Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr that references it.

There’s not much else I can say about the demo without spoiling it but I think it was very well written and I’m looking forward to the full game.

DAWN CHORUS [DEMO] can be played in the browser on Itch.io.

The Dissident by Wavey Games

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Developer: Wavey Games
Year: 2026
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

a woman at a table with a lit cigarette
Screenshot taken from Itch.io

As a longtime (3 years) fan of Wavey Games, I was very excited to see that they just released a new game. The Dissident is a short pay-what-you-want first-person point-and-click adventure game where you must assist someone escaping the authorities by helping her get into her own dreams by fixing and using an altered tape recorder. It’s a very surreal plot and the whole game follows this vibe but not at the expense of the puzzles, which all felt very fair. They were the right level of challenge for this type of game, where I did have to pause and think for a minute but nothing too tough, which I think is good in a game like this where the draw for me is exploring the world. The game’s puzzles also provide a few points where it makes the most sense to map something or write some notes, which I enjoy doing in adventure games.

One thing I really enjoy in the works of Wavey Games is the use of retro aesthetics that people generally don’t think about. Their previous games Melon Head and Celestial Coffee Quest (highly recommend both) both used an EGA-palette and this one has a CGA-palette. Even though I considered the CGA colors to be incredibly ugly at the time when DOS shareware games were coming out, it’s fun seeing it intentionally selected for the look of a game and I think it’s used very well here. Most of the game has a nice jazzy soundtrack too, which all fits in very well with the weird but relaxed mystery vibe the game is going for. It’s just a nice little adventure game that you can play in a sitting so go check it out and then play some of the other adventures by Wavey Games if you like this one.

The Dissident is available on Itch.io for Windows and Mac.