I’ve now put all the indie games covered in the indie game roundups that are on Itch in a single Itch list and will add things to this going forward. This isn’t a perfect list, sometimes my posts covered an entire jam or collection of games. For cases like this, I kinda just included one or two games from the list. Not an ideal solution but oh well. Of course it’s missing anything that didn’t have an Itch.io release. It’s also missing all context for why I thought the games were interesting that I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I just think it’s a fun way to check out small, experimental indie games from a year or two ago since the memory on games feels like it’s extremely short lived and people move on extremely quickly unless it’s a massive hit. Search on Itch.io has also always been flawed. So I guess consider checking out the list, scrolling down a ton, and opening a random game?
There’s probably better ways of highlighting indie games that are older than a year but aren’t old enough to be considered “retro” and I think it would be fun to poke at that more. I think point-and-click adventures and interactive fiction seem to have a pretty long tail to them for maintaining interest after they come out, despite having smaller audiences, but who knows.
SNAKE Lucky Laugh, one of the games that’s already been delisted from Itch
The biggest bummer about going through the list was that there’s been a few games that have already been delisted even though I’ve only been doing this for a few years. It’s good stuff so it kinda stinks I wasn’t able to save them. I thought I should start submitting this stuff to MobyGames as I do these roundups but I tried to submit one just not and got hit with a message about how I hit the limit on pending new game submissions because it takes mods there months to look at anything. You’d think with Atari owning the site it would have a bigger budget to deal with this but I guess not. I have no interest in submitting anything to IGDB since it’s owned by Amazon and Backloggd, which uses the database, just feels like another harassment vector at times. So the only documentation of some of these games is just my half assed weekly posts, and nobody deserves that.
Every day I wake up and say “What a week.” But it’s Friday, which means it’s actually near the end of the week so that’s something I suppose. Being back in school while having a full time job means that lately it’s just been free and pay-what-you-want indies I’ve been playing. Nothing wrong with that of course, but if you’re wondering why a lot of the bigger commercial indies aren’t on here, that’s why. Six One Indie did a nice indie game showcase yesterday and that’s probably a better way to become more familiar with those. You could also always look at my list of indie game websites and plug them all into your RSS feed reader of choice.
The Play for Peace – Games for Palestine 2025 Charity Bundle (Itch.io) bundle sale ends in a few days. Foor $8 or more you can get tons of great games
There’s another anthlogy from the game dev collective I’m in! I didn’t work on this one but Locally Sourced Anthology II: The Timeline (Steam) is a collection of 5 games set in different points in time in different genres.
_ΩMEGA_POINT (Itch.io) is a Pay-What-You-Want walking simulator where you explore the last moments of a dying world in a mech.
Indiepocalypse #68 (Itch.io) is out. Check it out for a great collection of experimental indie games. Only one more month until we get to the nice number.
I’m just really fascinated by Mars Attracts (Steam) using the dormant Mars Attacks license to make a sim game. It’s nice to see that the user review for it have been positive too. What a weird thing to exist (complimentary).
Eclipsium (Steam) may not be for me because I’m not a big horror games person but I really like it looks. I just like a game that always has a hand sticking out in front.
Toward From (Itch.io) is a short experimental browser game that I think does some neat stuff connected to movement and was created for the Game Poems Community Showcase.
Matt Stark keeps creating really fun browser toys focused on building things and they’ve made another one. Mazegarden (Itch.io) is, as you would expect, a game focused on building maze gardens.
A new PUNKCAKE Délicieux game has arrived! Frontline: War of Echoes (Itch.io) is a capture the flag game where you play against recordings of yourself from previous runs.
Snarl (Itch.io) is a short point-and-click horror adventure set in a diner and available for Pay-What-You-Want. Be sure to check out the developer’s other adventures on their Itch page too if you’re a point-and-click adventure fan.
A Chirp in Space (Itch.io) is just a cute 3D puzzle platformer available for free!
Developer: Oh, a Rock! Studios Publisher: Oh, a Rock! Studios Year: 2022 Genre: Adventure System: Windows
Photo from Itch.io page
The Lost Oregon City Gold is an adventure game where a dad and his two daughters stumble across an old letter from an ancestor with clues pointing them to $25,000 in lost gold. It’s up to you to explore Oregon and find it. Most of the game is played in a first person view where you click on arrows to navigate various spaces in Oregon, made up of photos, and talking to people or solving puzzles that will point you to the next clue in your treasure hunt. Occasionally you make choices in dialog but they’re pretty low stakes decisions and there are parts where you can answer questions about Oregon’s history that you learn by playing the game. I suppose that technically this makes the game an edutainment title, but that might be a stretch.
As you can see, it’s not a very serious game. Photos of people, played by the devs and family and friends, are used for all of the characters and the plot itself is very silly. It all works for me though. Something I really like about the games by Oh, a Rock! Studios is that they all feel like a group of folks having lots of fun making games for each other but without all the inside jokes so they’re still very approachable for folks outside the group. They’re all just like a nice, relaxing, and goofy hangout session and would also recommend Internet Court and The Awkward Steve Duology for the same vibe. They don’t take themselves seriously but the games aren’t doing any sort of ironically bad FMV either.
The Lost Oregon City Gold is available on Steam and Itch.io for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
After taking a break from these for a while, I’m finally doing another one. I don’t know if I’ll go back to the weekly format I was doing because that was a lot, but I missed doing them. I think Blaugust kinda burned me out a little and I had a lot going on anyway. I couldn’t think of a clever bit where I go on about it being a quiet week and ignoring Silksong, but pretend I did I guess. It’s probably not a game I’ll play for a long time since I haven’t really played the first one much but I’m glad it’s doing so well. Don’t really have a spicy take on the reception of that.
This post is going to be weird since I was missing so many weeks and there’s been a ton of bundles I’ve missed and just generally out of the loop on things, so there will probably be some really weird obscure things listed in here and also missing some bigger games, but I think that happens quite a bit with these anyway since I mostly just play adventure games. Speaking of, there’s a ton of those in this post.
IF Comp just started for its 31st year, and you can play and vote on this year’s entries. It’s wild to think about how this started 31 years ago, when Interactive Fiction was “dead” after Infocom was shut down. I think Legend Entertainment was just pulling away from text adventures at this point but there was still some commercial IF coming out. It’s always weird thinking about the time spans of adventure game companies and how companies like Wadjet Eye have been making commercial adventure games for a longer period than Infocom and Lucasarts. Time is weird!
Speaking of adventure games, it was fun seeing two of them coming out on the same day as the new Hollow Knight. The GTA 6 of Indie Games thing was always silly because not everyone is going to play the same genre! Like I generally play more casual stuff and Silksong is probably too hard for me. Casebook 1899 – The Leipzig Murders (Steam/Fireflower Games) is a point-and-click adventure set in late 19th-century Leipzig, Germany where you are a detective solving murders.
The other adventure game I was excited about on Silksong day was Maura & Ash (Itch.io), a free point-and-click adventure that runs in DOS! It’s just a really solid sci-fi adventure game and it’s fun to see that there’s a new engine for making adventure games and can build for DOS!
Another one I’ve been excited for is Neyyah (Steam), which came out earlier this week. It’s a Myst-like with prerendered graphics and the amount of FMV in the trailer made me happy too. This one has been in development for quite a while.
I get excited about seeing old games being rereleased on Itch.io too. One of those is Dr. Blob’s Organism (Itch.io), an arcade game from 2003. I remember enjoying this one and it’s available as Pay-What-You-Want.
Checkout Blitz: The Shopping Dead (Steam) is an arcade game where you complete shopping lists while fighting off zombies. I remember playing a demo for this one a year ago and having a good time. It’s also got a co-op mode.
I’m a huge fan of Octavi Navarro’s games and I’m always happy to see another one. The Supper: New Blood (Steam/Itch.io/GOG) is a horror point-and-click adventure featuring great pixel art. I don’t believe it’s a direct sequel to The Supper (Steam/Itch.io), but that one is very good, free, and short so I recommend playing that anyway.
Yet another point-and-click adventure game to come out last month was Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken (Steam), a horror game by the developer of Don’t Escape: 4 Days to Survive. This one leans more in a survival horror direction and has some very nice isometric pixel art.
There’s a new batch of LITHOBREAKERS games on Itch.io! Sorta like DOMINO CLUB, it’s a collective of anonymous game devs and no one knows who worked on each one, except me because I know everything.
I haven’t played it but Blast Rush LS (Steam/Switch) looks like a fun shmup with lots of explosions.
Death to a Merry Car (Itch.io) is a short visual novel you can play in the browser by the creator of Rodeo Clown.
Carnival (Steam) is a horror point-and-click adventure released last month. I don’t know a whole lot about it but Buried Treasure seemed to really like it.
And finally, I’m a fan of Howdy Riceball’s Game Boy games and they just made another one, it’s a cute puzzle game called Polar Peril and you can play it for free on Itch.io.
That’s it for this week. Again, apologies if I missed something you made. I was out of the loop for a while as I was on vacation and also busy with school stuff.
Aran’s Bike Trip is an interactive travelogue where you follow along on a bike trip through the Dutch countryside through a series of 360º photos. The game says it’s a short bike trip but it’s about someone riding their bike for two days, which doesn’t feel short to me. This is a game by Sokpop Collective, a small group that has been making a variety of short games for years, but this one is a pretty big stylistic departure from their other games. I think it would be a stretch to say the game has FMV since all you do is look at the panoramic photos of the Dutch countryside while looking at notes from the designer and listening to calming music, but it’s very nice. Sometimes a game can just be an excuse to look at photos of beautiful places in the world. It even inspired me to make a really tiny game about walking on a trail near my home.
Aran’s Bike Trip is available on Steam and Itch.io.
Developer: Taylor McCue Publisher: Taylor McCue Year: 2022 Genre: Visual Novel System: Game Boy
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is a short Game Boy visual novel created in GB Studio about the developer’s experiences being a transgender sex worker and the trauma that came from doing that work. The player advances the story by walking around different scenes and talking to various characters and is about 40 minutes long.
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me was one of my favorite games of 2022 for many reasons. It’s incredible to see someone put out a semi-autobiographical story like this where where they are so vulnerable. The game uses the limitations of the Game Boy so well and I think the artwork in this game is fantastic. Another thing I loved about it was that it was for a platform created by Nintendo. Even today, Nintendo is known as a company that does not approve of adult queer content on their platforms and I loved seeing someone use one of their consoles to tell a personal story. It’s inspiring seeing retro consoles and computers being used to create experimental games and tell stories that we didn’t see very often in games thirty years ago, when queer games like Caper in the Castro and GayBlade were a rarity.
Unfortunately this is one of the games that has been hit by the Itch.io deindexings, making it harder to find. I know the developer has put it on the Internet Archive and encouraged other people to host downloads of it, but it’s still heartbreaking that queer stories like this are under attack because of pressure by Mastercard and Visa. I hope that one day people will be able to create their art without capitalism trying to stamp it out.
Five Years Old Memories is a short interactive experience where you listen to people in Japan talk about memories they have from when they were about five years old and interacting with animations that play while they talk. It’s very short and only takes about 20 minutes to play through. I’ve played it a few times now, with my most recent playthrough happening because I thought it would be fun to revisit and also get all the achivements, which rewarded me by stumbling upon an element or two that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. The art is fantastic and it’s really cute seeing this storybook-like pictures animating as you listen to their stories. There’s not a whole lot to say about this one other than I really like it and think it’s worth checking out if this sounds appealing to you since it’s only $3.
Five Years Old Memories is available on Steam, Itch.io, and iOS.
Developer: Calligram Studio Publisher: Calligram Studio Year: 2024 Genre: Adventure
Phoenix Springs is a neo-noir point-and-click adventure game where you play as a woman in search of your missing estranged brother. I knew very little about this game going into it, other than it being developed over a long period of time, but picked it up based on really liking the art and it ended up being one of my favorite adventure games from 2024. It’s hard to explain more about the story, partially to avoid spoilers but also because it’s a very surreal story told in a non-traditional way, but I actually liked that a lot. I was talking about the game on Mastodon and Andrew Plotkin (who liked the game) described the game as “Philip K. Dick took the good acid,” which I think is a good description of the game’s story. Some people on Steam were critical of not full understanding the story but I liked that.
Since the game is a detective story, the game has a really interesting mechanic where you are basically using ideas and memories as inventory items. I loved that you’re using these “items” in a way that you would like an inventory item. There’s a lot of interesting side investigations as well that don’t advance the main plot but do reveal more about the world. There’s also a lot of red herring thoughts that aren’t used and get crossed out once you’re out of an area that is no longer relevant.
If I do have any criticisms, I do thing the last section of the game is too big and aimless. I had felt like I was doing the adventure game thing where I just try every item on everything and repeating that a bit. It was a little frustrating since the rest of the game moves as a pretty fast pace. The game even includes a builtiin walkthrough which I think is nice.
I think the voice acting also deserves a shoutout. It’s all narrated by the same woman and it has kind of a more deadpan or monotone delivery, but it works really well. Even the dialog from other characters is voice acted from the viewpoint of the main character.
I just think it’s a really solid mystery and think it’s worth a look if you want an adventure game that is willing to experiment a bit more.
Morph Girl is an FMV game inspired by 90/00’s Japanese horror movies such as Ringu. You play as Elana, a widow who is unable to move on following the loss of her wife to cancer one year ago. A supernatural being resembling her wife begins to force itself into her daily life and the decisions you make during the game determine if she embraces or rejects the creature. It’s the first game by Autumn Knight, who later worked on D’Avekki’s game Dark Nights with Poe and Monroe as an editor and game tester.
It maybe lacks the production values that a FMV game by a larger studio would have but it’s an interesting game and I enjoyed the writing. Sadly it’s rare for queer relationships to be depicted in FMV games so it was nice to see a game entirely about one. I was confused by how some of the choices led to various endings. I did get a little frustrated by the inability to skip previously seen scenes too, especially in a game that needs multiple playthroughs to see all the endings, but I appreciated that the playthroughs were only 30 minutes long so it was easy to see it all and repeat scenes weren’t a big deal. Despite my criticisms, I had a good time with the game and appreciate that it explores themes that are unfortunately rarely seen in adventure games.
I don’t know what happened but it feels like there were a million games this weekend, so apologies for the massive and kinda messy list. I hope you all are doing well. Blaugust has been pretty fun so far and it’s been nice seeing so many posts from other people I follow. If you’ve got a blog, consider joining in and posting a bunch!
Video Games
A new Indiepocalypse (Itch.io) has been released this month, featuring a nice set of video games and ttrpgs.
Wildwood Down (Steam) is an adventure game where you must solve a murder mystery at a boardwalk in New Jersey. The game features a protagonist with Down Syndrome modeled after and voiced by the designer’s childhood friend and has been receiving positive reviews from what I can see, which I think is really neat. There’s a demo available too.
I haven’t played anything submitted to the GMTK jam but it has almost 10,000 games so I’m sure there’s a few good ones in there.
Strange Jigsaws (Steam) is what you expect it to be, a collection of strange jigsaw puzzles. But I was a big fan of their previous game, the very good and free 20 Small Mazes.
This Downpour game touring the games exhibit at a local library is great! More games folks should do events at their library.
FALLSTRUKTUR (Steam/Itch.io) is a free game where you must descend down a giant structure in a first person view without falling too far. Sometimes you’re just awful at a game but can appreciate that it’s well made.
Valerie Paris has a very nice asset pack and tutorial on Itch for doing your own Myst-style adventure game.
Zentera (Itch.io) was already out but the assets and engine were just released for people to use on their own games.
Wholesome Games is doing a whole thing on Steam, don’t @ me about discourse, and it seems like some games releases have happened during it too? Is This Seat Taken? is a puzzle game about seating people at tables and booths. And Tall Trails is a chill exploration game.
I don’t think? Tiny Bookshop (Steam) is connected to that one, but I am a book nerd so this has been one I’ve been watching for a while. It has a demo!
I don’t think Sands of Home (Steam) is either but it’s heavily marketed to the chill, cozy games crowd as well. It is an isometric puzzle game and features a demo.
1000 Deaths (Steam) looks like a very trippy 3D platformer and there’s a demo available to try. Something about it reminds me of early 00s console games.
I don’t know anything about PAGER (Steam) but it’s an adventure game with a nice 1-bit aesthetic so it’s going in the post. Someone let me know how it is!
I haven’t heard anything about Prometheum (Itch.io) either but it’s published by Thalamus so it’s probably a good arcade game where you blow things up. I was also excited to see that Ste Pickford did some art for the game.
Desktop Forest (Steam) is just a really chill time on your desktop and it’s $1. There’s a bunch of options so you can adjust it to the scenery you like and then you just let it run and listen to the nature sounds.
Azaran: The Demon Bottle (Steam) is a short game inspired by the first Zelda game.
TTRPGs
Dragon Reactor (Backerkit) is described as a “mythopoetic mech tragedy game about conflict on a grand scale.” It’s for 2+ players, with one as a GM, has a demo, and I think it’s worth a look. I’m a huge fan of Dinoberry Press and it’s always nice to see them working on another game.
