| Game Engine: Unity 
You, the commanding officer for the Megacorps private army, have suffered severe brain damage in the line of duty and your previous experiences are lost to you. All you know is that you and your team have been assigned to complete missions and gather materials for the Megaship! As the title Future Breach 64 suggests, most of your work involves breaching a compound and rounding up 'enemy workers' and forcing them at gunpoint into indentured servitude to the Megacorps while stealing all their stuff. While not the only mission types or even the most profitable, most missions working towards your main victory point involve leading your team in apprehending workers from a base. Cuff 'em, mark them for pickup as they're then trapped in humilating floating cages, and then hunt down barrels of fuel and technology to steal! There's also evidence through multiple levels that you're stealing said workers from their Union. Yes, the Megacorps are being opposed by the Union Forces, clad in red, who will occasionally raid your base of operations and provide an important lesson in humility. Each mission costs a day and each death costs you more time in securing Megaship parts. Can you get all the parts and stave off the opposing Union Forces before the deadline?
January 23rd, 2025 - Thailand becomes the 38th country, and the first in Southeast Asia, to legalize same-sex marriage. One of the first couples to be newlywed that day were Pisit "Kew" and Chanatip "Jane" Sirihirunchai, pictured below.
| Game Engine: Unity
You play a gorehound who, on an ill-advised pilgrimage for the fabled Butcher's Creek - source of many a depraved snuff video - is apprehended and forced to fight for their life against a cult of murderers. The game sells itself on the main combat system being very similar to Arkane's Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, in which you use kicks and blocks to space out enemies and force them into traps. There are many other game mechanics referencing other titles that works beautifully with this system - the use of taking photos of crime scenes as a way of regaining health is a darkly comic way of tying the narrative and gameplay together, while also serving as a neat connection to how Dead Rising integrates photography into your skillset. The art direction is far less colorful than in David's better-known titles but there's a clear attention to textures and details that help the VHS aesthetic shine through in a way that doesn't require heavy blur effects that is very common in other games of this type. And yes, you have the option to pick up soap lying around as a projectile a la DUSK.
| Game Engine: Unreal 
Sex is a powerful motivator, as a retired ranger known only as Grandpa is summomed by an acquaintance from his DUI support group to rescue her from the feds, all for the promise of coitus. Coming to us from Ashnell Games, Grandpa High on Retro is a fairly straightforward FPS game in which you play as Grandpa, along with his grandson Charlie to shoot up plainclothes policemen and infiltrate a secret underground base. Grandpa has kept himself in great shape as he has an impressive vertical leap, a dodge roll, a running kick and a three-hit combo. Of course, it's not an FPS without the S and the guns at your disposal work decently - I never was able to make the shotgun work for me even at close range but the pistol/revolver works fine even though you can only pick one or the other. Grenades are a similar matter where they work great if they land where intended, but it has to be exact for the splash damage to hit anything. The respawn system is unique in that any enemies you already killed stay dead, making progressing easier overall. The enemy behavior is fascinating in that they will commonly stand and shoot at you, but other times will run away in a random direction that makes them very difficult to pin down with anything other than the automatic rifle. It's a decent game, I enjoyed my time with it!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
The game is a remarkable freeware collect-a-thon, with a great deal of lore that's a bit like if Bionicle centered around creatures from Spore. You play as a rescued Wildling baby who was nursed to maturity by the princess of a fallen nation. Your goal is to gather the resources necessary to build a village capable of supporting the beginnings of a new civilization. In opposition to this goal is the myriad number of Wildlings and the Dark Shaman who led them to new power in exchange for the sacrifice of wheels. Movement feels great, if a little clunky with regards to some surfaces, and combat is a reasonably intuitive pattern recognition game. Lore is presented in the form of these darling musicbox shadow play theaters found throughout the wasteland, that help contextualize what your enemies are and who they were before. You also get to meet with survivors of the calamity and engage in light conversation. It's really good, I had a great time with it!
| Game Engine: PICO-8 
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
An excellent little adventure game by the creator of Canabalt! The game is similar to games like Rogue and Nethack in the sense that it is an adventure game from a top-down perspective in which you have to find an exit to progress. The points system governing health and attack power are partially based on French-style playing cards: hearts are your health, diamonds are money, spades are shovels you need to break apart blocks, and clubs in this case are swords you use to attack. Breaking apart blocks will usually reveal one of these four card types as a collectable, but breaking apart blocks costs spades, and some blocks simply hide enemies. In this situation, avoiding most combat and non-essential digging is prudent - scraping at blocks without any spades takes a heart, and so does attacking without any swords. With the random nature of collectible drops in this situation, death and restarting is frequent. There are, of course, a few things in your favor to help your odds - the most obvious ones being a series of bombs that interacting with will explode any blocks and enemies within its radius. Additionally, there is a 'Shop Dimension' you can enter using the X key that you can use your accumulated Diamonds to collect necessary items for progression and whatever enemies you have to face. There is also the factor of HOW you collect certain items - each collectible works as a multiplier to a hand of three cards, and collecting like suits will improve your haul. There's also a risk-reward gamble in the ability to buy extra cards for improving your hand, but the problem is that getting a full hand is the only way to get any return on the items you've collected, so what would have been a boon at three cards can become a death sentence at five cards. Getting at least a Three of a Kind is highly recommended to keep you flush with resources, especially spades. These all add up to a strategy puzzle where taking your time is encouraged and patience is a virtue. Good stuff!
Welcome to the Number Factory! The gameplay loop works fundamentally like a game of Peggle in the sense that you fire a ball called Nubby down a randomly generated sequence of pegs with numbers on them. The numbers system works with Nubby gaining points by dividing the peg it pops and adding the initial number to your score - 8 becomes 4 becomes 2 becomes 1, adding up to 15 points total...naturally this number goes higher the bigger the initial number. There are 80 rounds in total, with 4 major Boss rounds concluding each 20 round section. The round goal is the number you want to reach to clear the round, starting at a reasonable 8 points and quickly multiplying by several factors. It's remarkably tough, and you have to have a certain eye for figuring out what initial arc Nubby takes that will maximize the point value with the items and perks you accrue throughout your run. There's no permanent stat increase mechanic like other games of this type, but you earn stars which will unlock new supervisors at your factory, all with their own gameplay modifiers. It's fun!
| Game Engine: Easy FPS Editor 
| Part of EFPSE Just Another Horror Jam
A game that borrows more than a few conceptual elements from the Troma film Street Trash, Dead Trash takes place in a city that has fallen to ruin in the wake of a pandemic that was totally mismanaged by the federal government. The streets are overrun with violent atomized people, and the secret to what really happened to this place lie somewhere within the sewers...Coming to us from Crowhill Studios is a delightfully nasty FPS game in which you play a former urban planner by the name of Sam, and possibly the only non-infected person left in the city, fighting to survive and tearing apart garbage bags for resources. You have a plethora of enemies to deal with, and for the most part, many of your enemies can be dealt with via the axe weapon - but make no mistake, it is not feasible to kill ALL of your enemies with melee strikes. Your most striking weapon is the dual-wielded nail guns you retrieve early on which functions as your hitstun weapon for most encounters. The traversal and signposting leaves something to be desired but that's somewhat par for the course when it comes to this particular game engine. Warts aside, it's excellent, I had a great time with it and I believe you will too!
Steam | itch.io (Demo Ver.) | itch.io (Jam Version)
| Game Engine: RPG Maker 
| Jam Version made for Hawktober Horrors 2024
There has been a catastrophe across the world - people that were exposed to the appearance of an extraterrestrial being that hushed whispers call the Visitor, even indirectly, have been subjected to all sorts of strange mutations in physical and mental health. Families are being torn apart and wild creatures are out on the hunt...with you smack dab in your one-bedroom apartment. Look Outside is a survival horror game by Francis Coulombe where your chances of survival depend not only on your ability to coordinate around enemy damage types and equipment, but also your ability to approach most encounters sensibly. It is easily one of the most humanist approaches to this type of horror that you don't get to see a lot of in gaming spaces. The enemies you fight are all dangerous but the game doesn't let you forget that they were people once, too - and that there's not much separating yourself from them other than sheer luck. Attacking everyone you see is not a good idea, because you'll find very quickly that most people are good-natured if off-putting and that maintaining your humanity is a necessity for survival. You'll also find, however, that for each passing day your apartment becomes more and more dangerous, with friends becoming foes without warning. You can also run from most encounters but the game has a system where running is only feasible after three turns, and by then you might as well be fighting. For people playing for the first time I would actually recommend Easy Mode - the main draw of Normal Mode is that you can only save when you're back safe in your room, AND when enough Danger has built up from visiting new areas or completing game objectives, while Easy Mode allows you to sidestep and autosaves in most predicaments. It's a pretty awesome time!
| Game Engine: GDevelop 
This is the story of a man that's been kidnapped and held inside a remote ramshackle building filled with cameras following his every move...and you are the one operating the cameras. Similar in vein to games like Night Trap and Not For Broadcast, the game is mainly an interactive FMV as your role is to switch between a series of nine live feeds to keep the eye on the action. Doing so increases your viewer count and bitcoin donations while the victim of your torment copes with the situation. While there is not a lot of interactivity beyond that, it's not often you get a solo dev with the committment to make an FMV game and make it work, so I'm very happy to recommend this!
| Game Engine: GameMaker 
Once upon a time, all of the world's technologies failed all at once, in an event that came to be known as Obsidian Wednesday. In the aftermath, life became ugly, brutish, and short for all but the richest and most powerful. The world is now run by the 'verts', mega-corps whose influence and control seem insurmountable. You are a wannabe-hacker dredge coming from the ruins of California, armed with a computer and ready to stir things up. Null State is a game about building community and trust in a world that has little of both, and your key to success lies in your hacking skills. Hacking, in this game, is a sort of dungeon crawler hybrid where you infiltrate networks and fight off ICs looking to impede your progress. You fight using a command deck with some starter weapons based on your chosen character background, and your weapons are a series of block shapes that can be arranged for optimal storage, similar to a inventory storage system in other games. There's no need to pick any specific background over the other, as the enemies you face will be made of blocks themselves and are defeated by bricking all available blocks on the enemy using your selected attack patterns. However, the battle phases work off of a turn/based system and bigger attacks means more time for ICs to directly assault your rig and potentially shoot your weapons into uselessness. You can evade combat altogether but this raises an alarm system that most missions require you to keep under a certain threshold for a victory condition. Over time, you start running into more varied enemies and some that even start off invisible and have to be either shot at or attacked with a specific weapon to remove the cloak. This all sounds very complex but the skill ceiling for winning battles is relatively low - as long as you're cautious and think about what you're doing, you'll generally have a strategy for most enemies you encounter and which have to take priority in 2v1 encounters. Four distinct writers at the helm - Peter Drummond, Pip Simms, Dean Hoff, and Maitreyi Viswanathan - art by Heloisa Panuci and Robin Field, and sound design by Billy Hobson make this a real treat!
| Game Engine: OHRRPGCE 
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Coming in three years after FRANKEN, Samanthuel Louise Gilson has released an animal-finding game called Formless Star. You play as Ameno, along with a crew of friends who all consume wind as a source of life, allowing them to make the fascinating excursion to the Formless Star. The concept is every time you leave your spaceship, the ground around you randomizes into a set of seperate biomes all with their own fascinating animals to examine. Sixty-one different creatures await your analysis, and it's a very relaxing game to just mosey around and check things out for a while. It's a touching and delightful adventure!
| ESRB Rating: Everyone 
| Game Engine: Unity
What we have here is a very pleasant series of nonogram-solving challenges cleverly disguised as home renovation! You are a mouse that just recently became a homeowner, but, oh dear! Your new house is totally empty! Luckily, you have the Home Squeak Home Catalog to make quick work of that issue. You solve puzzles inside of the Home Squeak Home Catalog to unlock new furniture/clothing/stickers/etc. The game is bouyed by a delightful assortment of new age piano and contemporary jazz songs with thematic names such as 'Tasty Peanuts' and 'Waiting for Playtime'. I'm not as familar with picross titles as I am with other patience games but the UI and feedback for getting an answer wrong is very intuitive. You have options for your rodent pal to help solve any squares or offer logic advice on how to place tiles with a mild cooldown on each option. 650 puzzles in total and multiple themed pieces of furniture to keep you engaged for a long time!
| Game Engine: Godot 
A series of minigames themed mainly around telling an abridged version of the story of Martín Fierro, the subject of an epic poem by José Hernández. The subject matter is of immense importance as the Martín Fierro poem is a major landmark of Argentinian national identity, and for those of us who only knew this poem as a Great Work in Civilization V, it's a wonderful introduction to the material. Gameplay-wise, the minigames center around pattern recognition and being able to maintain rhythm. For those buying this for a younger audience, parental discretion is advised for the subject matter does dip into the racism prevalent in a majority of guachesque literature, but is mainly kept to a single verse.
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
The opening cutscene bends the opening title in a strange way as only four red Mickeys crash out of a stained glass window. You play as the 5th Mickey, some time before the first cutscene - not red but green. What originally presents as some kind of avant-garde shitpost rapidly becomes a look inside the tortured mind of the fictional developer Bastian G. Neumann. Like many versions of this style of psychological horror, the game starts out seeming like a basic RPG Maker title with stronger art direction, but then you start to notice certain things Bastian does in the game that lead to 5 Red Mickeys being a tactic admission of guilt and cry for help. The itch.io page lists the core theme being 'heroism': Eric Engström and Emily Hall seem to have quite a bit to say on the topic of heroism, specifically what kind of monster calls themselves a hero, and whether a person like that really can change. The unusual control schemes in some sections are relieved somewhat by the use of keymapping UI that lets you know what keys are in use for which section.
This is a delightful game made by a crew of five young ladies - Caroline, Anne, Juilet, Rose, Lydia - and their father Mark. Your tuxedo cat Ivy has escaped the house, and you must get him back while facing strange obstacles and contesting with the antagonist Queen Anne. It's not possible to die in the game and every level presents an overarching puzzle to solve in order to progress, usually involving finding materials or a weapon to utilize. There's decent platforming to be had, and the lack of a death state means the combat in the game mostly just involves avoiding potential stunlock. You can also play with up to 4 friends from your Steam profile, which is a design decision you really don't see enough of with work in this genre. It's a very sweet story and it's always heartening to see young talent doing their best. Highly recommended!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Spherical street bollards aren't especially common in America - in certain parts of the country, the only play you can expect to see them is outside of a Target - but they've got a lot of representation outside of the US. Being themselves a means of preventing vehicles from injuring pedestrians, it's a nifty sort of visual pun to have a bollard speed down a runway filled with other bollards at speeds anywhere from 10 to 50 miles per hour. Shidunzi Parkour is a competently made endless runner game from developer MixBadGun (坏枪) including single-player, local server hosting, and internal beatmap functionality that turns it into a rhythm game. It's good!
September 9th, 2025 - The IDF attacks Doha, Qatar targeting the Hamas negotiating team, as Qatar had been a key player in mediating ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel. Unsurprisingly, the United States was the only world leader that would not outright denounce the attack despite being allied with Qatar.
| Game Engine: Unity
You and your father had a difficult relationship before all this happened. When he died, he left you the house. You eke out a life within in, and it can be inferred you are reasonably happy - as much as someone like you can stand to be. And then, a knock at the door. No, I'm Not A Human is a story about the apocalypse, wherein the sun is exhibiting intense heat signatures and strange 'non-humans' known as Visitors begin to enter into the picture. Svetlana Chibichik and Olga Shkirando's art direction of the game is very Expressionist, with a heavy emphasis on skewed perspectives and people whose bodies look so strange that eyeballing any obvious differences in people is impossible. The gameplay loop is simple - you get a day and night cycle wherein you can perform a set of actions during the daytime to increase your chances of survival, and a night cycle wherein you are visited by strange people desperate for shelter from the heat and chaos. The TV and radio give you a reasonable amount of information to catch a Visitor within your home, but the tell-tale signs are entirely circumstantial evidence...you'll generally never know if someone's a Visitor until you've already pulled the trigger. You CAN let people in without question and try to be a good neighbor that way, but the Visitors you let in can - and will - murder your other residents with impunity. And so the loop turns into a psychological exercise: what makes these people human? What justification makes what you're doing okay? Better yet, what is there to say that you, yourself, aren't a Visitor? These questions will percolate in the back of your mind for 15 days in-game, during which time the world around you will fall apart with such alarming rapidity that you may come to wonder if the world was ever redeemable in the first place. It's a rock-solid game that will leave you shaken up for a long time afterward!
| Game Engine: idTech 
The game gives you all the information you really need with the title: the fictional Brazilian celebrity Mit Aia (based off of real life musician Tim Maia) has expired, and in your grief you open a portal to Hell to bring him back to life. Catastrophe follows soon after, as you might well imagine. Coming to us from Youtuber Joeveno and the third in a series of Brazilian Drug Dealer games, this game is a delight! The whole game is filled to bursting with Brazilian meme culture, particularly the weapons: your melee is a chancla (naturally), and your other more powerful weapons include a 100 real banknote folded into a paper airplane that functions like the Doom BFG. Your enemies are largely fans of the Flamenco soccer team, under the possession of the Vasq Demon, named as such because they are a fan of the Vasco da Gama football team. There are also strange creatures fair and foul at the Vasq Demon's beck and call, including a delightful creature known as the Angry Capybara, who barks out cutesy yelps when launching itself at you. The map has you going through several back alleys in Rio de Janerio where you first opened a portal to Hell. From there, your missions get more absurd as your adventure takes you through a TV studio, an alien spacecraft, a mall in which Ronald McDonald has altered the local gravity, and much more! The music and SFX are crunchy as hell, and may take some getting used to for some players, but fans of breakcore will be in hog heaven. Absolutely one that's worth your time!
September 21st, 2025 - The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia all announce their formal recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state, with France following suit the day after. This trims the number of non-recognizing countries down to 36, most of whom are in approval of a two-state solution.
I have to be a little cautious about how I approach this recommendation, because it's coming hot off the heels of my initial playthrough and I'm not too proud to admit a lot of the more salient points of this artwork went clean over my head. That said, the work is absolutely gorgeous and haunting to traverse. You play Ayba, who is on a mission to purge the now-blighted Belot Almshouse of Hysterians devout to the many-armed god Pel. The almshouse is the centerpiece of the level, full of twisting pathways and clear evidence of Hysterian desceration. The Hysterians and your weapons are close proximities to the Doom II templates, most of which are imagery of pale nude women in relative degrees of uncanny disarray. Your weapons are strange in similar ways, where your guns are tastefully ornate death dealers that use fingernails and peppercorns as ammunition. As you traverse the almshouse, you'll notice certain statues that make a dull roar when you're nearby...what you choose to do with this information is yours alone. This is an excellent piece of transgender art and I can't recommend it enough!
| Game Engine: Godot
Figglewatts has been busy making a very immersive walking sim with ARG elements set in a story that I can't seem to put down. Dirus Software is an ailing game studio on its last legs, right before the turn of the millenium, and Apparatus: Exanimus will prove to be their final entry to the art form. The connected website to Dirus Software is the core of the ARG elements, mainly giving important lore information as to what was happening in the studio during the game's development. I really like how the walking simulator 90s throwback here uses specific tank controls and strained movement options, because it helps crystallize a point where Dirus Software was developing this only for Half-Life to come out in November of 1998 and the amount of course correction it took to avoid being an also-ran in comparision. Your biggest threat in AE are these strange fungi strewn throughout the facility. You take radiation damage while within their AOE, which is represented by TV static overlaying your vision similar to how other games will use VHS static to alert the player of danger. Staying too long in this state takes one pip off of your health (represented as these red pustules in the top right corner) and you respawn at first aid stations when you die. Because of the aformentioned fungi and the fact that their damage is in a confined space, the slow movement in AE becomes a vital tool in your arsenal to stay alive - take your time, be careful, don't overstep into a fungi's radius or it'll cost you. The necessity of exploration to get anything done in this game provides the push and pull that makes this game so interesting - keep moving forward, but pace yourself. Most importantly, be on your guard...you're all alone in the facility - until you're not.