| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Unity 
It's all a façade. As you gain consciousness, a mysterious woman asks you to help her disperse negative energies in HAPPY WORLD. But something is off, isn't it? What's really going on here? Why are some of these tasks nice and some make you feel repulsive? As you traverse the ZONEs and make people happy, these are the sorts of questions that will bubble to the surface. Made by Jimmy Malaski, HAPPY WORLD is an incredible work about how a jolly atmosphere can disguise and even smother the darker feelings that are a part of human life, and how we find meaning in meaninglessness.
Steam | Playstation | Xbox | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Everyone 
| Steam Net Revenue: $6,542.45 6k | Game Engine: Unity
Coming to us from Bony Yousef and originally for the iPhone, this is a platformer that will demand a lot of your logic solving and reflexes! You play a box with a bandana that must traverse a series of platforms and traps to reach a gem. The sparse visuals are an important design decision as the color grading lets you know straightaway which items are safe to touch or not. Wall jumping is a necessity for most puzzles and works in much the same way as Super Meat Boy, and you also have a sprint that activates after moving in a single direction for two seconds, that one's also important to surviving most challenges. There are 155 levels in total, and while most of the levels can be completed in less than 15 seconds, beating one always feels rewarding, especially if you get a 3-star rank. I recommend it!
Steam || Xbox || Nintendo E-shop
| Game Engine: GameMaker 
| ESRB Rating: Mature 
| Steam Net Revenue: $297,055.63 297k | Part of the Existential Dilogy (1st of 2)
We owe an immense debt to The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa's meteoric success for giving us the immense body of work from Yeo and their team. You play Ringo Ishikawa, a listless delinquent in their last semester of senior year. All of his friends appear to be moving on, but what is Ringo to do now that school will be a thing of the past? You spend two months worth of time trying to find that answer, the answer only you can find. A truly moving work!
Originally an entry for the 2018 A Game By Its Cover game jam, THE DEVIL HAUNTS ME marks an important point in lum's game dev work as this game would become the template for both PARANOIHELL and Search Party. You play a young person (possibly named Daniel) as they attempt to survive in the wilderness floating in what appears to be a type of purgatory. Many themes and game mechanics in lum's later titles appear here as you chop down trees, collect water, hunt for food, and evade the wrath of the devil while investigating the world around you. An excellent survival horror!
Steam | GOG | Playstation | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Mature | Steam Net Revenue: $4,879,301.73 4.8m | Game Engine: Unity
Sometimes the net revenue of a game speaks for itself, but DUSK is an incredible FPS game by your friend and mine David Szymanski, and published by New Blood Interactive as their first major get. You play the Dusk Dude, a treasure hunter who narrowly escapes from being mounted on a pair of sickles and ripped apart by cultists. Now is the time to turn the tables! An absolutely outrageous amount of firepower and physics-based platforming co-mingle with David's classic dark sensibilities and storytelling prowess and the incredible musical stylings of Andrew Hulshult and a surprise guest star! Every moment of this game felt like being trapped inside a horror movie in the best way! Absolutely give this one a shot!