macintosh | The Virtual Moose

Developer: Mike Piontek
Year: 2026
Genre: Adventure
System: Macintosh

a bus stop at night. Text says "You're at a bus stop. It looks nice form a distance. Beyond the bus stop is complete darkness. There are paths leading off to the south and east." — 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: John Calhoun
Publisher: Soft Dorothy Software
Year: 2023
Genre: Arcade

screenshot of two birds flying in a room with egyptian art

Glypha: Vintage is a remake of the 80’s Macintosh arcade game of the same name. It’s a variant of Joust, which happens to be my favorite arcade game, where you fly around on a giant bird and use your lance to destroy enemies by bumping into them while you are at a higher height than them. As far as Joust variants go, I think it’s one of the better ones, but to be fair there’s not really that many Joust clones I can think of. It’s mostly the same game, but with everything modified to have more of an Egyptian theme. The thing that stands out to me is how fast it moves compared to Joust. Everyone moves faster and less floatier, so you have to hit the flap button quite a bit more to stair in the air and enemies can turn around much faster. The egg items hatch a lot faster too. This all makes the game a lot more difficult than the original but to compensate, Glypha is much more generous with the extra lives you get from accumulating points. It took a few minutes to get used to but once I did, I thought it had felt very good.

The original Macintosh era was all a bit before my time. By the time I was in elementary school, our classrooms all had Macs that had color, so I don’t have any nostalgia for this era of computers. That doesn’t mean I don’t love the art in black and white Mac games though. It’s essentially the same art as the original Glypha game but obviously at a much higher resolution and a lot smoother. I’m guessing there’s some additional animations as well but I’m not familiar enough with the original game to know. I think it looks great.

I never played the earlier Glypha games but my understanding is that they eventually got color and probably other changes as well. I think they were all developed by John Calhoun, who is also know for his paper airplane arcade game Glider, also for the Macintosh. He eventually worked for Apple for a long time before retiring and I think this most recent version of Glypha was developed either right before retirement or right after. If you want to see what else he’s up to, I highly recommend adding his blog to your RSS feed reader.

Anyway, this is probably one of the best versions of Joust that you can actually buy for the PC. As far as I know, the original arcade version of Joust isn’t for sale anywhere and yes, obviously you can always just emulate the game, but it’s nice having this version as well with its ideas on how Joust should play and I’m not usually an achievements person but they’re fun in an arcade game like this.

Glypha: Vintage is available on Steam.