Developer: Not Jam Year: 2026 Genre: Arcade System: Browser
Sometimes you are just in the mood to play a short arcade puzzle game with very cute art where you make giraffe necks stretch so they can kiss another giraffe on the screen while avoiding obstacles and someone happens to share their game on social media that meets those needs. It’s really nice. The game itself is about 5 minutes long and while it’s an arcade game with upbeat music, I found it to be very relaxing since the levels are very short and messing up quickly restarts you to the beginning so messing up isn’t stressful. There’s also a surprising amount of variety in the levels given that the game itself is only a few minutes long too. You go from controlling just one giraffe, then levels where you avoid obstacles, to controlling multiple giraffes and levels with inverted controls. It’s great and I hope you love it too.
Necking is available to play in the Browser on Itch.io.
Developer: Mike Piontek Year: 2026 Genre: Adventure System: Macintosh
Screenshot taken from Itch.io page
After posting about the game in an indie game roundup early this year, I finally made the time to play through Transfer Point. Transfer Point is a new adventure game for the classic Macintosh, but playable in the browser as well. It was created in World Builder, a program released on the Mac in 1986 that allowed people to make their own games. You play as a woman who finds herself at a bus stop, but with no memory of how she got there and only remembering parts of her past. The game itself is first person, with you using a combination of clicking on things and typing into a text parser.
I was very excited to play this one and wasn’t let down. I had occasionally watched Mike design the game on his robotspacer Twitch channel and thought it looked great. Even though I didn’t grow up with this era of the Mac, I love how games on the platform look with their black and white art. It’s just very comforting to me. Luckily the rest of the game is solid as well. I enjoyed the story in this (you play as a woman married to another woman!!, not really a spoiler!) and while it’s not really a comedy, there’s some bits in here that I thought were very funny. There was a death scene in the game near the very beginning that I absolutely loved and made me really happy to see. It’s not a game with many deaths if you are an adventure game fan concerned about running into them. A nice thing about waiting a day or two to write a post about a game is that I can think about some plot elements for a bit before really settling on how I feel about them, which includes a twist later in the game, nothing too twisty really, that I wasn’t sure about at first but I like it. I think the puzzle design is solid for the most part too. There was one puzzle that even the Invisiclues apologizes for, but other than that one I think the game has good and fair puzzle design and if you do get stuck, the designer has provided the Invisiclues to look at, which give you small hints instead of spoiling a puzzle completely. I would love to see more adventure game devs provide this with their games.
Since I have only played a few World Builder games before this, I was fascinated by the things that seem like requirements for making something in the engine. The game has a Weapons column, but you never need to attack anything. The designer manages to make use of the section by placing “use rapier sharp wit” under there and makes it work, but I think it’s fun seeing people work with engines like this that force the designer to make choices like that. There’s also a Search command, I think it’s probably a leftover bit from text adventures, that you basically use in every room to see if there’s anything hidden. It’s a little odd if you don’t play text adventures since you can see what you’re looking at in the panel on the left, but it’s necessary for completing the game.
I’m trying to avoid talking too much about specific elements in this that I loved because it’s a fairly short game (took me about 1-2 hours) and spoilers in adventure games can sometimes hurt enjoyment for some players, so apologies about being so vague about the content, but I highly recommend this if you’re a fan of adventure games and the classic Macintosh look. While you can buy the game on Itch.io to get a version of the game that runs on Macintosh and also some nice bonus materials, you can also play it in your browser window if that sounds much easier for you. There’s a version in development for the Playdate to look forward to as well, which you can follow development of on Twitch.
Transfer Point is available for Macintosh and browsers on Itch.io.
Developer: Aerial_Knight Publisher: Aerial_Knight Year: 2026 Genre: Puzzle System: Windows
Screenshot taken from Steam
Having been a fan of Aerial_Knight’s games for a while, I was pleasantly surprised to see another game by him. He just released Dropshot earlier this year, which I really liked, and didn’t expect a second game this year. This one is a puzzle game where you play as a woman who is an axe-wielding serial killer. You have two rows of five heads and need to make rows of 3 or more heads by swapping their positions on the two rows, and then decapitating the row. Decapitating an entire row of five heads gives you a combo. You beat the levels by decapitating enough heads in the limited number of moves you’re given. This all sounds incredibly violent but the game is so stylized and all the bodies intentionally look like mannequins that it never felt like too much to me. There’s technically a story told through cutscenes but it’s mostly just there to set the mood and not the main draw of the game.
I think it works really well. Each level is only a few minutes and I found the setting up of rows to be very satisfying. Eventually the game increases the difficulty by introducing new types of heads that introduce new obstacles, some heads can’t be moved, some don’t always move for you, etc. This introduces a lot of variety but also adds some frustrations that I had in the second half of the game. The game gives you power-ups you can select for each level, with some that will help your score and others that overcome the obstacles that the heads provide. I think it’s a fun idea that works for most of the game but near the end I felt like I just had to choose the power-ups that let me actually take out the heads or else it would start to feel like a chore to keep fighting with the heads in that level. The game also does not let you know what head types are in a level so if you want an optimal power-up for a level, you have to go in and clear a few rows, see if your power-up is relevant to that level and if not, restart the level with a power-up that will help you. Most of the time it’s not an issue but if you end up going into a level where you have a head that cannot be decapitated unless you have the power-up that lets you do it, then you often cannot get combos and the level moves slowly, which meant that 90% of the time I just went with that power-up.
That complaint aside, I think the game works well. It’s a fun puzzle game that takes a few hours total to complete and makes for a good game to play in short bursts. A weird thing I get excited about is when devs reuse assets from their previous games (See: Llamasoft) and there’s a little bit of that as well. I just think it’s a smart way to save time and helps establish a consistent style from the designer. That all said, I’d recommend it if you want a puzzle game to play this Halloween season.
Aerial_Knight’s MrFreezy is available for Windows on Steam.
Even though the general narrative online seems to be that text adventures died with Infocom (which I disagree with for many reasons of course), it’s nice to see that there’s two notable Interactive Fiction and Text Adventure events happening at the same time. The first is that the 32nd Annual IF Comp is now live! There are 71 new interactive fiction entries to play and vote on. Not all of them are pure text adventures but the entries let you know what type of Interactive Fiction it is. I love choice based games as well so this is not an issue for me. It’s also just wild to me that it’s been going on for so long. I always forget that the Post-Infocom Text Adventure era or whatever you called it really did start that early on while folks like Legend were still making text adventures.
The only heads up I’d like to give is that while they put much heavier restrictions on gen AI usage, I believe they do not have anything for code because it would be impossible for them to enforce. While I personally disagree and think it’s worth having anyway, even at least a disclosure requirement, I get it. I’m not going to fill up this post with complaints. Just know that you should dunk your head in a toilet if you use it.
The second Interactive Fiction related item I’d like to mention is that it’s the final week of voting for IntroComp. IntroComp is described as “an annual competition where participants develop excerpts of interactive fiction, gain feedback from audience reactions, and (hopefully!) use this feedback to release a fantastic final product.” Check some games in development out and help some games get made!
And if you’ve never played a text adventure, give it a shot. Many of the Interactive Fiction games on this Interactive Fiction Database list are text adventures and available for free. It’s a bit of a cliche to recommend Lost Pig but it’s a good one! You may also like Bronze, Shade, or Photopia. Just click around and start playing one that sounds interesting to you.
Last week on my birthday I issued a blog challenge for folks to write about an obscure game of their choice. As the challenge states, what is “obscure” is incredibly subjective and I just wanted folks to pick what they thought was obscure and have fun. I was shocked by how many people decided to participate and decided to do a roundup of all the ones I knew about. If I missed yours, please let me know in the comments. Technically the challenge isn’t over, there’s no end date, if you want to write about an obscure game then go ahead. I had so much fun reading all of these and I hope that you do too.
Let this be a lesson that if it’s your birthday, you can issue a Blog Challenge and people will actually do it. I hope you consider doing your own blog challenge and if you like any of the posts in this roundup, add the blog to your RSS feed reader.
The Blog Posts
This is a post that starts off being about Dragon Strike and an unreleased prototype but goes into how your ttrpg should have some sort of gimmick.
Fledgling Manor screenshot from Steam
Silas praises the indie horror visual novel Fledgling Manor.
wildweasel writes about the simulator Gazillionaire, which I never played but somehow have a boxed copy of it sitting on my shelf. So maybe it’s time for me to finally open that one up and give it a go.
I love the Heretic and Hexen games so it made me happy that someone else enjoys Heretic 2, which has not been rereleased.
Grayson has launched a blog to write about game and the first post is about Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Grayson admits that this stretches the definition of obscure but I think it gets a few points for talking about the N64 version of the game, which I believe was exclusive to Blockbuster.
Journeyman Project 2 screenshot taken from my Cheese Girl video
Folks, we got a post about The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time. This game rules and you should all play it. Look at this in-game ad for Cheese Girl! I know the blog post here isn’t as big of a fan of JP3, but I also recommend that one. Love the series!
Pete Davison writes about the racing game Jupiter’s Masterdrive for the Amiga and Atari ST. I’m a big Amiga fan and always love learning about games for it I never heard of before.
SpindleyQ talks about the experience of type-in games, and specifically the game Micropuzzle, for the Commodore Vic-20.
Mono by Binary Zoo is an indie shmup from the 00s, before Steam took off, an era I love to read about. Looks like you can download it from the Internet Archive too.
I knew of the Monster Rancher series but never even knew it had spinoff games like Monster Rancher Hop-A-Bout.
Odama is a Gamecube game that I remember wanting to really play but never have, but I’m happy to hear that it’s weird and rules.
Operation: Inner Space screenshot from MobyGames
Operation: Inner Space is a game for Windows 3.1 I never heard of, which is always exciting to learn about, and I also get very excited when a shareware developer from the 90s is still selling that game on their own website.
Road Trip Adventure screenshot from MobyGames
I saw a few folks posting screenshots from Road Trip Adventure and now I know what the deal with that game is.
I also like when people write about games that are completely average or don’t quite work but still have interesting or good bits in them, so I appreciate this post about Shepherd’s Crossing.
I was so happy to see a post about Shockwave web games, more specifically ones using the Lego license. Shockwave games are a whole thing that I never see anyone talk about these days but I played so many of them.
It’s great when folks write about their memories of playing a dead MMO because even when the files are preserved and the game is still playable, the one thing that can’t be recreated is the experience of playing it at launch, so at least folks can write about what it’s like, such as this post about Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. I’m not the biggest Richard Garriott fan but I think he’s really interesting.
Weird games that shipped with versions of Windows are another thing I love to read about, so thanks to The Works of Egan for this post on Tinker, a puzzle game I never heard of.
LEMONPOPPYSEEDGAMES has launched a new blog and the first post is about the ttrpg Quest.
I challenged folks to write about very obscure stuff, unfinished prototypes, lost games, etc and this post delivered with Zombie, a game that the author doesn’t even know where the game came from.
Screenshot of Croustibat
And then finally, if I’m going to tell people to write about an obscure game then I suppose I should too. So I wrote about Croustibat, an advert adventure game for fish sticks by the folks that made the Gobliiins adventure games.
And obviously not everyone can drop everything to write about an obscure game so some folks were kind enough to recommend older blog posts they wrote about obscure games.
Brown Benign Beast writes about two board games, Situation 4 and Situation 7, as well as a board game design they had in a dream.
Gretchen covers so many obscure games on her Backloggd including Shadowgate 64, which I have played but it was decades ago and now I want to revisit it.
Eli wrote TEN pages for a journal about the Sega CD game SWITCH / PANIC!
Computer Chronicles Revisited covers The Tower of Myraglen, which appeared on on an episode of the show from 1987.
Developer: thecatamites Year: 2026 Genre: Platformer System: Windows
There was some very silly discourse yesterday about how there are no original ideas in games anymore and that all games these days are just made by game devs who only play video games and do not read books or watch films and while this is wrong on so many levels, boy have I got great news. They finally have a game they can write about on their website! I’m sure they’re all rushing to write about the new thecatamites game right now because it’s fantastic.
God it’s fucking hard for someone of my writing skill level to summarize a game like this but I’ll try. International Obsession is a narrative platformer where you are a spy, I guess, and in a world where mankind has gained the ability to double jump, you are trying to stop a terrorist group who is trying to stop the world from entering our current millenium in the first place and go back to how it was. It’s by thecatamites, who has created other games I highly recommend like Anthology of the Killer. You explore this world by double jumping through environments and seeing what various characters are talking about. As you can see in the screenshot above, it’s got a very trippy low poly look that I loved to walk around in and you get transitional scenes with comic panels of characters talking and I loved those too. I don’t think I’m the best at video games and platforming but aside from some jumping puzzle parts, it wasn’t anything I’d really consider difficult. There’s enemies in here that can knock you around but there’s no health meter and they just knock you back a bit so if you’re more of an adventure gamer, I think you would still really enjoy exploring the environments and experiencing the story that I think is an interesting exploration of nostalgia poisoning. But it’s also just funny and fun to look at so if you just want that from a game, you’ve got that too.
Just a note before playing because I was a dipshit and maybe other folks will make the same mistake that I did. Please carefully read the readme before playing and please pay attention to the controls. There are two buttons for jumping and they do different things. It is not the same jump button in two different spots. This is not the fault of the game, it’s mine, but if you are a weirdo that chooses to play this exclusively on the keyboard because they couldn’t be bothered to get a controller out, maybe you will run into this as well.
But yeah, it’s a lovely game. I think some folks will see that it’s Part 1 of a series but I would still highly recommend it to folks who might be hesitant to check it out when this is the only part that’s available. I’m usually the same way but I felt like it was a very satisfying and self-contained game that took me about 40 minutes to play and did not feel frustrated by the ending.
International Obsession is available for free on Itch.io for Windows/Mac/Linux.
A while back, Panic made a big announcement that they were banning games that used generative ai art, music, text or story elements. This was nice to hear since so many other stores for digital games allowed it. However, they were fine with it for code as long as you disclosed it, which is bizarre situation since it doesn’t magically use less energy for code and isn’t built more ethically. I had once asked them why they had a different policy and their response was essentially “Well, you can still filter those games out,” which didn’t answer my question.
I considered this a huge disappointment since the Playdate store positioned itself so strongly on caring about craft. Fast forward to today and now the Playdate Catalog announcement threads on Mastodon and Bluesky consist of games that use genAI. In the most recent thread, 3 out of 4 new games used genAI. In the thread before that, all 3 games used genAI. Frankly it has killed my interest in the Playdate platform and I assume this is the case for others because I very rarely hear about others talking about the Playdate. It’s a huge shame because folks were so excited about the Playdate when it was first released, but now it’s just another platform with endless amounts of slop.
Developer: lowpolis Year: 2021 Genre: Adventure System: Mac
Screenshot taken from Itch.io
One thing I love doing is showing games I played years ago to my kids that I think they will enjoy. Recently one of these was the first-person adventure game/walking sim co-open. co-open is a game about a kid’s first time buying groceries on their own. While it wasn’t designed for kids in mind, my 6 and 9 year olds absolutely loved it. My oldest would be the one controlling the game and walking around while the 6 year old offered suggestions on what they should look at or explore next. I think in general they are just huge fans of games where you can explore a space without fear of losing, which is why they like Proteus as well, and co-open offers so much to look at but it’s all optional. If you want to do a simple trip to the grocery store, pick out a few items and leave, you certainly can and the game won’t look down on you for it. However, you can also talk to folks and help them with their shopping trip, find things like phone numbers to call, and explore and stumble across so much interesting stuff. The game just gives you so much to look at even with it being smaller in size, so I was really happy that my kids were into that and also enjoyed its chill vibes.
I think something else that kids are very good at embracing and I’ve lost is roleplaying in video games. They are happy to just explore a space and make up stories about the characters as they play. Another example is that my 6 year old loves playing Unpacking, with the puzzle elements turned off such as everything needing to be in the proper place, and just making up her own stories about all the objects. While I love roleplaying in tabletop rpgs, somehow I’ve lost this in video games and there’s a lot my kids are showing me in how someone can play a video game. Maybe I should have made up an elaborate backstory for the moose in Moose Life. It made me happy that co-open was a game they enjoyed and that my 6 year old still asks occasionally about playing “the grocery shopping game.”
Developer: Nifflas and Bit Kid Publisher: Bit Kid Year: 2026 Genre: Platformer System: Windows
This game has so many little guys
I have fond memories of playing Knytt so I was very happy to see that it got an official rerelease recently to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary. If you haven’t played it before, it’s a freeware game where you have crashed on a planet and need to explore the planet by platforming around and finding parts to repair your ship. There’s no combat and only a handful of enemies that can hurt you. If you touch one of them or a hazardous element of the planet like lava or water, you teleport to your most recent save point. The save points are scattered frequently around the world so it is not an issue if you touch something you shouldn’t. The world itself is fairly big and maze-like, but you can also hold down a button to have the game point you in the direction of the nearest ship part, so it never feels overwhelming. It’s an incredibly chill game and exactly what I needed to replay at this moment.
It was just really nice to revisit the game since it had a big impact on me in college, when it originally came out (lol I’m old). That, and Seiklus (EDIT: I originally got it mixed up with Within a Deep Forest, another freeware game I recommend), a similar game with a relaxing vibe, both seemed like they came out sorta around the same era when there was maybe an explosion in freeware games. I wasn’t a part of any scene so I was just stumbling across this stuff on sites like Game Hippo and Retro Remakes. Laura Michet’s blog has far more interesting thoughts about this game than I do. It’s just a game that means a lot to me because I didn’t really have the money to spend on games and really appreciate that there were folks making some really interesting stuff for free. I suppose you could argue that stuff like Steam wasn’t really taking over yet, but you still had folks selling games digitally so they maybe could have figured out a way to make money off it. I don’t know. It bummed me out that some of the discourse from the Manifesto Jam was about how folks releasing games for free devalues them and hurts people making paid games. Not only is it not true, just look at the last 50 years of computer games, but teenagers like video games too. Ah well.
I still haven’t played the new extra difficult modes that were added for this rerelease. I might poke at them a little bit, they’re probably not for me, but I think it’s fun that they’re there.
Anyway, give it a look if you never played it before. It only took me about an hour to beat on my first run and I think it’s a nice, free game.
Knytt Classic is free on Steam and GOG for Windows/Mac/Linux.
Developer: hoolis Year: 2026 Genre: Arcade System: DOS
Just a few days ago the full version of a DOS game called Europa Panic came out. A demo version was previously released for a jam last year and I enjoyed that so I was happy to see this full version come out. It’s a top down arcade game where you enter rooms of a planetary station to recover parts of a generator. After you collect all the parts in a level, you go to the generator and turn it back on. While you navigate the station you need to avoid or shoot enemies with your very slow laser gun thing that causes the enemy to slowly disintegrate. To make things even more difficult, if you take too long to complete a level you will see a purple tentacle monster appear and quickly hunt you down if you don’t exit the room very soon. The game is immensely challenging but also very forgiving in that touching an enemy will instantly kill you, but you do not need to restart the entire level, just the section you are doing, and none of the sections are too long. You also have infinite lives, unless you turn on the option to have a specific amount.
(EDIT: This bit is actually no longer relevant because it’s since been patched and the game has some extras added now too. I’m leaving it here just to document my feelings but at the moment but it’s been fixed.) The only real frustration I had was that the hit box is larger than it appears to be, meaning there were a few times where an enemy was not actually touching me but I died anyway. This only became an issue with a section in the 2nd level (there’s 3 levels total) that requires navigating some tight spaces with lots of enemies bouncing around, and once I completed that part everything went back to feeling very tough but fair.
I loved the game. While it’s incredibly tough and not the type of thing I typically play these days, I loved the huge amount of level and enemy variety in a relatively short (took me about an hour) game, and I have a soft spot for 16 color EGA DOS games. Plus it’s pay-what-you-want, so you can play it for free first (including in the browser if you have no interest in DOSBox) and pay some money after. Give it a look if you like challenging arcade games.
