I was going to write a post recommending adventure games to play during winter but it looks like the Adventure Games Podcast has done a series of episodes doing just that and doing a much better job than I ever could have. I highly recommend the series, which is still going on, that recommends games based on regions. I’ll link to each episode below. Each page has a link to the podcast audio but also lists all the games mentioned and links to their pages.
There’s only a couple of games I’d like to add to this list. It’s possible they’ll come up on the podcast too since the series isn’t done yet but I think they’re worth a mention.
Heroine’s Quest is an adventure rpg inspired by the Quest for Glory series and my favorite of all the ones that have come out since that series ended. Like Quest for Glory, you choose between one of three classes, with each class giving you different solutions to puzzles. The game also adds some survival mechanics since you are in a snowy climate, but these can be turned off with the difficulty slider. It’s a really nice game and best of all, it’s free. I’m glad that the Steam page basically has tip jar DLC though because it’s a really impressive and long game and I felt like I should give them some money while playing it.
Watch Over Christmas is a nice one to check out if you’re looking for something with a Christmas theme. It’s just a solid adventure game that’s family friendly and never felt too frustrating since it had some nice features like hotspot highlighting and the puzzles weren’t too difficult.
The Puzzle Agent series is a great one to check out if you’re looking for something focused entirely on puzzles, without the exploration elements. The games feature fantastic artwork by Graham Annable and a wide variety of puzzles that always felt fair to me. It’s unfortunate there aren’t more games in the series but at least Graham is still creating a lot of great art on social media and through his shop.
If you have a friend to play adventure games with, the We Were Here series is a nice choice. You and a friend must talk through walkie talkies as you work together to explore a frozen castle and solve puzzles. The first game is free and short so it’s a nice way to try this style of game out before buying more.
It’s the first of December and this year is coming to an end. Hope it’s been going well for you all. There was some really exciting stuff this week.
Not indie game related, unless you count indie game soundtracks, but today is Bandcamp Friday so consider buying some music. Spotify really doesn’t pay anything and buying music (or at least use a streaming service that pays better royalties) is the only way they can really keep doing this for a living.
The Lawnmower Man In the early 90s it felt like the film adaptation of The Lawnmower Man had a video game on every single platform so it makes me happy that there is now one for PICO-8.
Markus Ritter – Ghosts of the Past Markus Ritter – Ghosts of the Past is a FMV point-and-click adventure game described by the developers on the Steam page as “queer cheesy trash” and that is a 100% accurate description. Fortunately I am a goblin for FMV trash, especially ones inspired by Gabriel Knight 2, so this is absolutely for me. That said, it is EXTREMELY cheesy and might be too much for some people, so I would maybe recommend playing the free prequel game first to see if it’s your thing.
Madvent Calendar 4 – End of the Line Since it’s December, we also have a new Madvent calendar from the HauntedPS1 community. Every year they release a free anthology of small horror games with a Playstation 1 aesthetic, with a new one unlocked each day. They’re really nice collections and it’s impressive that they manage to put together one of these every year and for free.
Here’s a quick collection of retro gaming things that I found interesting this last week.
The 1997 MMO The Realm is back. It was originally published and run by Sierra and the rights have been sold to various companies since then. A new publisher has gained the rights and has launched the game again. The article goes into more detail about how the previous owner mismanaged the license and what the relaunch means for the game. I’ve never played it before but it makes me happy whenever I see a MMO that has kept going even after decades.
DOSember starts next month! DOScember is an event where streamers play tons of DOS games. It’s a fun way to watch people play classic games and the people involved are very lovely.
And to end with some self promotion, the next DOS Games Jam starts next month. Come join if you want to try making a game in a casual, unranked jam. Even if you have no interest in making a game, the page for the jam links to entries from previous jams if you want to discover some new DOS games.
It’s Itch.io’s Creators Day, where they aren’t taking a cut from sales today. I’ve put all my paid games in a little bundle you can pick up if you want some solo TTRPGs.
In Stars and Time looks like a very nice time loop rpg that’s now available on Steam.
There’s a new Indie Tsushin, highlighting indie games from Japan.
Tristam Island is now open source and released under a Creative Commons license. It seems like a great reference if you’re looking to build a text adventure game in PunyInform for retro platforms.
The Hand Eye Society Super FESTival, a free virtual festival celebrating the indie games community, is happening this week! There’s a lot of cool talks and games being highlighted along with a neat little virtual world to explore. Today I am on a panel at 6:30 PM ET about small press and anthology games but there’s a ton of other cool talks later this week like Julia Minamata doing an intro to Adventure Game Studio and Taylor McCue talking about creating bundles. Lots of great stuff so go check it out!
This week was bananas so this is a rushed collection of stuff in indie games that I really liked. This week it’s mostly focused on adventure games, since that’s a genre I’m really into in general, but also just a lot of stuff happened this week.
Screenshot from The Will of Arthur Flabbington
The Will of Arthur Flabbington is now out! This is a point-and-click adventure that originally started as a jam game for the AdventureX jam. It got a Kickstarter funded to help turn it into a full game with voice acting and from the little I played of it, seems really neat!
Lake got some Christmas DLC. I really enjoyed playing Lake two years ago and found it was exactly what I needed during a very stressful time in my life. I know a Christmas themed DLC is not going to be for everyone but I’m looking forward to revisiting the game and I think I even have some nostalgia for holiday themed games and DLC just because of the time I spent playing stuff like Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hare and Xmas Lemmings.
This one is much more local, but the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University are doing a showcase of their student games on December 6 at 7pm in Ann Arbor. There’s always an incredible batch of games that come from both schools every semester so if you’re local, consider checking it out!
Excuse Me Sir is a demo for an upcoming horror game made by a bunch of cool folks. I really liked the 90s adventure game vibes it has and it’s really short and not frustrating at all, which was surprising since it’s very heavy on ways to die.
Inspector Waffles Early Days is a game on Kickstarter looking for funding to develop a physical version of a Game Boy game. I never played the original game, a point-and-click adventure for the PC, but I heard it’s very good and liked the Playdate game the developer made, which also got a physical release. I just think it’s fun seeing the Game Boy have a revival because of GB Studio and Analogue.
Midnight Margo is a new adventure game by some of the folks that worked on Whispers of a Machine, a point-and-click adventure that I really enjoyed. From the reactions I saw, the art style seems to be very divisive but I think it’s really neat. The game also seems to have some RPG elements and I think that will be a nice way to make the game stand out from others in the genre.
Screenshot from Midnight Margo
A demo was just released for Heir of the Dog. I believe it was originally a jam game or freeware? Anyway, I really liked the dev’s previous game Lucy Dreaming and it’s nice to see that we’ll be getting more games from them.
The Blathering Keep looks like a really fun free game by Danielle Riendeau. I haven’t played it yet but the art is really cute. I like the concept of a dungeon crawler where you’re attacked by corporate jargon, and I really like her writing elsewhere so I bet it’s a very funny game.
Finally, earlier this week it was announced that Uppercut Crit will be going on hiatus. I was really sad to hear this because I thought it was a great place for games crit and lots of great indie game coverage. It sounds like the podcast Indie Mixtape will still be going on so be sure to follow that and consider supporting other outlets of independent games crit like No Escape, Kritiqal, Into the Spine, and all the other cool places I have listed in my Cool Site Zone.
Here’s some various bits of indie game news and releases that I found exciting this week.
A new version of Risk of Rain is out! I loved the original game and put so many hours into it. The sequel was well designed but wasn’t for me so it’s exciting to see this version revisited.
A new Indiepocalypse was also released. I will continue posting about this every time they’re released since every issue has cool games.
The Playdate is a very cool little thing and it’s nice we’re still getting regular updates showing off new games and other neat things.
Celestial Bodies is a new TTRPG looking for additional funding to make improvements and it looks like a nice space game.
Spritewrench has released a demo for Sunken Stones, a pirate-themed puzzle survivor-like with roguelike elements. I was a big fan of their previous game On the Peril of Parrots and think this is worth a look too.
As an occasional TTRPG designer, I’ll get a lot of ideas for games that I want to make but just don’t have the time for or ever figure out a way to make it, so it’s always really nice when someone make a game about something you’re thinking about, and probably much better than whatever I would have designed. Record Shop is a solo ttrpg about one of my favorite things, digging through the stacks of records at a record shop.
Gobliins 6 has been announced and I’m very excited.
A demo for Roman Sands RE:Build has been released and it looks incredible. I haven’t played it yet but I was a big Paratopic fan so I’ll have to make time for it soon.
Thirsty Suitors is out! This is one of the games I was most excited for this year and I will be buying it as soon as I can afford to. The reviews have been positive and I hope it does very well.
Here’s a bunch of recent games I’ve enjoyed lately and other neat stuff
We got a new batch of Domino Club games! Domino Club is an anonymous collective of game developers creating games for jams for the last couple of years. Every jam provides a bunch of interesting experimental games and I recommend checking out the other jams too.
The Games for Gaza bundle is still going! Get a ton of great games and help some people out.
A new Click Or Treat bundle is out. I was lucky enough to be in the one last year with a bunch of great games and this one has a new batch of great games for the season.
Schloss der Wölfe is a short, free horror-themed World War II FPS by David Lindsey Pittman, who has made some great games like Neon Struct and Eldritch.
A new Choicebeat is out! Choicebeat is a free zine covering interactive fiction, adventure games, and other narrative focused games.
The new Indie Tsushin for October covers a bunch of indie games from Japan and features a lot of interviews as well.
karyogenesys is a short atmospheric walking sim with light puzzle elements with a style inspired by the first System Shock. It is now available for pre-order with a launch planned for early next year.
A Kickstarter has launched for the adventure game Brain Hotel: Remodeled. The game is designed by Mark Darin, who worked at Telltale and made indie adventure games like the Nick Bounty series
I was digging through my google drive and stumbled across a ttrpg I wrote for the 200 Word RPG Challenge contest back in 2018. It didn’t win nor should it have, but it seems alright and maybe I’ll come back to it someday.
It Came from Studio 9 is a GM-less RPG where 3-5 players are part of a crew making a B-Movie. The crew collaborates on the framework of a science fiction, horror, or adventure movie before producing a film in three acts. Players then choose one of the following roles in the movie’s production:
Director (Required) Lead Actor (Required) Supporting Actor Location Scout Stunt Person
Players then film the scenes in each act (usually two or three) by taking turns to say what they’re doing in each scene. If the action seems difficult, they must roll 2d6 to determine the result.
10+: Action is a success (Ex: Lead actor delivers a great performance)
7-9: Action is successful but there’s a complication (Ex: Location Scout gets the beach they wanted but there’s turtles everywhere)
6-: The movie has a disaster (Ex: Director couldn’t get prop guns and actors now must fight killer birds with coat hangers)
After all three acts are completed, the movie is released and the group discusses if it was a huge success, box office bomb, or film that is so bad it’s a cult classic.
Developer: Anima PPD Publisher: Got Game Entertainment Year: 2003 Genre: Adventure Game
I just noticed from browsing MobyGames out of boredom that it has been 20 years this month since the game Conspiracies was released in the US. Conspiracies is a FMV game developed by Anima Ppd Interactive that I’ve had a long fascination with. I picked the game up near release when I saw it was pretty cheap at a Best Buy, during a time when we were desperate for new adventure games but also because back then I already had a morbid curiosity in FMV games. You play as the detective Nick Delios as you investigate a murder and along the way you discover a bunch of weird subplots and bigger mysteries. This case takes the player all around the world, to outer space, traveling through time, and also a concert for a Greek blues band that the developers seem to be a fan of since you must watch a music video featuring them. It plays exactly like a Tex Murphy game, but not quite at the level of quality that we would expect from that series. It’s hard to know where to start with why this game is so fascinating to me. Richard Cobbett wrote a great article about the game for PC Gamer a while ago about it.
Our hero, Nick Delios
I guess a lot of the weirdness in Conspiracies comes from the main character, Nick Delios. He’s not particularly interesting but he’s just such an odd protagonist for an adventure game. Like all characters in FMV games, he wears the same outfit throughout the entire game but it’s just a grey hoodie and grey sweatpants. Since it was a game developed in Greece, he is also dubbed and it doesn’t quite fit but it’s also endearing at the same time?
The PC Gamer article mentions the starting puzzle where you cannot leave the apartment until you make coffee using water from your fish tank, but that’s just the beginning of the odd puzzles. Another puzzle requires you to get by a robotic dog, that is not intimidating at all, by filling an inner tube with water and feeding it to the dog. The most famous puzzle in the game requires you to get a signed cd from a real band called Blues Wire and give it to someone in another location to proceed.
Nothing about it really makes sense. Why is a band from today playing in the future? Why this Greek blues band? Why do you have to pretend you’re dying for them to give you the cd? Like most of the game, it’s not a particularly difficult puzzle, just a really weird one.
However, there is one puzzle that beats them all and caused my friend and I a lot of pain when we played through it. Conspiracies is a game that gives you a ton of inventory items, many of them being completely useless, and a very limited inventory space. Some of these items are small sticks of gum that are scattered throughout the game. My friend and I were playing through the game on our own computers while chatting about it over voice chat and while we each had to dump inventory items to make space, he chose to drop some of those sticks of gum. After all, surely you don’t need six sticks of gum? Well, it turns out you do. Apparently you can figure out what items are needed and which ones aren’t by going to your apartment, and using items on your trash can. If an item isn’t needed, the game will dispose of the item in the trash, otherwise nothing will happen. You’re meant to use the gum much later in the game, where you reach a cutscene of a flying car taking off and Nick combines gum and a tiny gps and throws it at the moving car to get it to stick. If you do not have all six pieces of gum, the game reaches a fail state. We did not know this and my friend spent an hour looking for the stick of gum that he dropped somewhere in this massive 3D space to get past this point. Eventually he gave up and I just sent him my save file so he could proceed. Even the cutscene itself is ridiculous and shows Nick unwrapping and chewing on all six pieces of gum before throwing the gps unit at the flying car.
The reception to this game was a bizarre thing to watch as well. This came out during a time when the adventure game community was desperate for adventure games and would rally behind every single game in the hopes that it would “revive” the genre that many perceived as dead. I think you could make a solid argument that the genre was fine if you were including freeware games and the adventure games coming from Japan, but if you were looking for commercial adventure games for the PC then it was a rough time. Adventure game sites often gave the few commercial games we had glowing reviews, only for bigger outlets to trash the games. This led to accusations that the mainstream gaming press was biased against adventure games and sounds oddly like a conservative talking point we’d hear today but no, the games were frequently just terrible. I have a vivid memory of PC Gamer giving The Moment of Silence, a completely forgettable adventure game, a poor review and the Adventure Gamers forums having a massive thread about it. Even games that I thought were decent, like Broken Sword 3, had unrealistic expectations placed on them and people in the community expected them to single-handedly make the genre popular again. This basically went on until companies like Telltale started making games and I’m glad I don’t see it anymore other than the occasional person at a games outlet saying the genre is dead and then the resulting discourse from that.
Anyway, this all meant that when PC Gamer gave the game a poor review, as it should have, people were not pleased. The developers wrote an angry letter to PC Gamer and the magazine actually published it.
“We at Anima PPD-Interactive are new developers. Conspiracies is our first game, and it took us five years of development and our own funding. Do you believe that judging the game that hard is leaving us anything? The most likely thing that may occur is that we sell nothing in the U.S. and stop our efforts here. Is that what your magazine wants? Fewer independent developers?
Also, did you play the game till the end? You think there’s nothing worthwhile? Not even the story or the Puzzles? I think that you’re on the slope that Hollywood is on – lots of effects and explosions, but boring stories or no stories at all. Just kill, kill, kill. Of course I don’t say that our game is at the edge of technology , but all of the gamers that played our game up to now had a lot of fun. FMV games are very expensive to develop, and there aren’t many of this kind on the market anymore.
We’re very frustrated that you don’t count the story factor or human factor but only graphics and effects. As adventure gamers we feel that a game with a boring story and great graphics is worse than a game with a good story and poorer graphics.
We feel sorry that you’re not supporting us independent developers at all.”
To which PC Gamer writer Chuck Osborne responded with:
“I’m not sure which is more surprising: That we’re supposed to award brownie points to independent developers, or that Conspiracies took five years to make. As I said in my review, I’d gladly play an all-text adventure game (and have!) if it had a great story and compelling puzzles. Sadly, Conspiracies received a 23% because of its confounding plot and pathetic gameplay. To answer your question: Yes, we enthusiastically support small developers – we just don’t support bad games.“
Again, this was a thing that frequently happened with negative reviews of adventure games in the early 00’s. I remember Chuck Osborne going onto the Just Adventure forums to explain how he’s not biased against adventure games just because he gave a negative review to the latest Dreamcatcher game and what not, and other journalists would pop onto the Adventure Gamers forums to explain the same thing.
The game must have been a success because in 2011, 8 years after the first game, there was a Conspiracies 2. Even with the long gap between games, it manages to bring back everyone from the first game, including the people who did the dubbing for the English version. It’s an improvement over the first game, although I felt like it removed the weirdness from the game so I never finished it. One day I’ll have to, so I can see how the cliffhanger from the first game is resolved.
While they only developed the two games, Anima PPD seems to still be around today doing video production. You can even buy physical copies of Conspiracies 1 and 2 from their website. I believe this is the only place where you can legally buy them, as they never got a release on Steam or GOG. I hope they do get a digital release someday. While it’s clear I don’t think they’re “Good” games, they are fascinating and must have done something right if I’m still thinking about Conspiracies 20 years later.
On a final note, after our playthrough of the first game together, my friend wrote the studio an email thanking them for making the game. I don’t think the email was entirely sincere but there wasn’t any sarcasm in it either. To his surprise, the studio responded and sent him a bunch of Conspiracies swag like a poster and a copy of the game with a bonus dvd of extra material, which I believe was signed? Just an incredibly kind gesture from a small studio that didn’t need to do so, and this enthusiasm is probably why I’m still recommending it to streamers and enjoyers of obscure games today. It’s not a good game and I strongly recommend having a walkthrough open while playing it, but good lord is it a fascinating fever dream.
