| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Although they would be better known for their Cowhead ZZT game just a month later, Raymbo provides a short and sweet action game! You play as Raymbo, sent to a military installation via parachute to destroy a supercomputer and rescue all hostages on the compound. After crawling through the underbrush, the real game begins as you are beset by respawning enemies, slime colonies, bombs, landmines, and Robot Masters! It's not all nonstop action as you have a few nice breaks to play a rudimentary shooting gallery minigame and an invisible wall hunt at the very end. Good stuff!
Rif's having a bad day. First he loses a chess match, then he gets profiled for stealing the Orb of Storms, and then gets his undefined situationship Rhene locked up on the span of like three minutes! It's up to Rif, and his two friends Eeah and Okk to uncover what happened to the Orb of Storms and potentially unravel political intrigue brewing within the tribes of Morphs within the Found Land. The game uses what AGS users would recognize as the Tumbleweed interface, albeit a very early version made in the SAGE engine by Talin. The movement in the isometric areas is zoomed in a bit close for a game like this and makes traversel a little challenging, but the game is very witty and has a lot of love put into it - the art and story direction is a veritable who's who of 90's furry fandom. Despite the circumstances surrounding the three main characters, Eeah and Okk work great together as they find ways to use subterfuge to get Rif into areas that are typically inaccessible. The further you go into the game the more clans you uncover, and the larger the world becomes as you gain access to the sorts of people that exist in this world and trying your best as an outsider to court the social expectations they have.
| Doom Mod (Single Level WAD) 
What we have here is not only (very very likely) the earliest Doom WAD in existance, but also a marvel of ingenuity. Coming to us from Jeffrey Bird, this file was one of several made before the release of a true map editor for Doom mapping, and as such, is able to accomplish pretty much everything you see on screen - two rooms, one shotgun guy, three imps, and two Barons of Hell. In the attached Readme, Jeffrey mentions that a lack of knowledge of the nodes and sector structure at this point means this is all that can be done, but the fact that it works at all is enormous. A true piece of gaming history!
Having garnered the attention of Apogee through the release of the shooter Galactix two years earlier, what was then called Cygnus Studios would go on to release Raptor: Call of the Shadows, an Amercian tate shump. If you had any interest in shareware during a certain time period, it was a fair probability you played the first two levels of Raptor in some capacity, but needless to say, the game is very much worth the money! You play a mercenary hired by the Mega-Corps to bump off its major competitors in your powerful Raptor! The game has three campaigns in Bravo Sector, Tango Sector, and Outer Regions, each with their own layouts and biomes. The enemies fire quickly in this game but precede themselves with a shadow so you have an idea of where to shoot next, which adds a nice incentive to keep scanning the top of the screen. Audicious use of ground elements as a way of shielding oncoming enemies from the player's bullets and becoming a way to punish players attempting to take advantage of a dead zone. Several enemies who use homing bullets leads to fairly regular bullet herding but it's not a cure-all, as enemy bullet variety is constant. My reliance on macro dodging leads to my getting punished regularly and so learning how to micro dodge is essential, especially with bosses. The average scoring system for a game of this type is removed in favor of cash rewards for killing enemies/ground units/various war crimes, which can then be spent on upgrades. These upgrades are the lifeblood for a successful run, and thus it becomes imperative to buy the best weapons available as quickly as possible, especially the weapons that use homing patterns like the Laser Turret because otherwise you miss out on opportunities to make cash by avoiding enemy fire and bullet herding. I personally recommend getting a Phaser Shield early, which acts as a second health bar, and doing your best to keep it for the rest of your run because those things cost 80k a pop. Overall a very good game!
Doomworld (Ver 1.2) | Doomworld (Ver 1.666) | Doomworld (Ver 2.5)
| Doom / Doom 2 Mod (Single Level WAD) | Part of the episode Inferno (M1 of 9)
Dr. Sleep, also known as John W. Anderson, would become so critically important to Doom as a whole that the work he did on both Dante's Gate and Crossing Acheron would land him a job at Epic Mega Games around 1996 and get the remaining cantos of his Inferno series included as part of the Master Levels for Doom II. Dante's Gate version 2.5 runs as a replacement for the level Underhalls (E1M2) in Doom II and is an impressive map with several arenas and massive battles, and a plentiful supply of bullets and supplies including the BFG 9000 for massive cleanup. It's really good!
| Part of the episode Invasion (M1 of 2)
The first in a 9 level series, Invasion...Level 1 - Contamination is a fine showing for Andy Chen and Claude Martins. This episode follows immediately after Episode 3 of Doom in which you are called back to UAC's Mars Base to fight against one final push by Hell's legions! For the age of this WAD, the work and love put in is clearly on display as you escape a bunker to find the base crawling with enemies and more teleporting in by the second - it's a mad dash to get all three keycards and fight your way to the HAL 9000 reference to shut off the electromagnetic barriers preventing you from getting further into the base. I liked this one a lot!
| Doom / Doom 2 Mod (Single Level WAD) | Part of the episode Inferno (M2 of 9)
Dr. Sleep comes back to us in short order with the second level of his Inferno series, and the #1 best WAD of 1994 as voted on by the writers of the Top 100 WADs of All Time. Following immediately after Dante's Gate, you find yourself at a keep overlooking the river Acheron. The presentation is top notch as you fight your way through a triumphal arch leading into a theatre for a ceremonial alter and a series of arcades filled with teleporters, and finally a cistern for the acrid river itself that serves as the final gauntlet before the end of the level. It's fantastic!
| Full Episode WAD (Doom E2M1 - E2M9)
The first release from the Germany-based The Innocent Crew, Slaughter Until Death is a commendable replacement for The Shores of Hell campaign. The levels are very well designed and coordinated with only enough sprinkling of evil traps to keep things interesting. The weapon placement is supurb as you're never given higher end weapons until absolutely necessary to get out of a tight spot or fight tougher enemies, so as long as you're sticking to the ol' reliable shotgun and chaingun, you'll have plenty of ammo for storming the Cyberdemon's keep in episode 8. It's a solid campaign!
| Single Level WAD (Doom E1M8)
A crew of five space marines have been sent via armored truck to secure and contain a demon invasion in the UAC's branch in Jakarta, Indonesia. As you might expect, things don't go to plan, and you're the only survivor left inside an upturned truck amid a compound full of demons. This WAD is a real treat as Leo Martin Lim made some real painstaking amount of effort to make the UAC facility you fight through really look lived in and realistic, from the exploded cars out front to the trough urinals in the men's room. Continuing further leads you to the hellmouth that released all these demons in the first place, and is a stylish bit of technical wizardry as this is the first recorded example of the self-referencing sensors trick used by a lot of modders. The ultimate fight is in a circular arena against a Cyberdemon so plenty of wiggle room for circle strafing, but your escape route is destroyed by seismic activity and you have to blast your way out of a cave-in and out to safety. You should definitely check this one out!
| Doom Mod (Replaces E1M1 and E1M9)
Billing itself as "The Ultimate Czech Level", it is at least the earliest, and definitely one of the more inspired WADs to come out of 1994! This WAD is based off of a Czech comic of the same name and central premise, you play as one of two astronauts who are sucked through a black hole and land on a planet with overgrown monstrous megafauna. The central episode of the WAD revolves around escaping the wrath of giant spiders - multiple Spider Mastermind enemies in this case (don't bother trying to kill them all) into a cave system and a dilapaded train platform which has a fun little segment of trying to coordinate where the switches to hit are with a handy map inside the level itself. This WAD is farily noteworthy because this might be one of the few, possibly the only piece of media around this comic to have reached Western audiences in earnest, and it's worth considering how that wouldn't have been possible without Doom modding.
Devan Shell has kidnapped Eva Earlong, the princess of the planet Carrotus, and it's up to Jazz Jackrabbit to save her! Travelling to each of the planets Devan has conquered and destroying his operations, Jazz Jackrabbit is a PC platformer with a memorable atmosphere that's evocative of the Sonic series at the time but is distinctly a product of early Epic MegaGames. There are six episodes in total (not counting the included Holiday Hare expansion released later that year), and each episode is six levels on three different planets leading up to a boss encounter. Like a lot of games following in Sonic's footsteps, there's a constant focus on how to keep a level of speed while maintaining a degree of enemies to worry about, and Jazz Jackrabbit's approach is to allow you use of a gun to eliminate enemies before they have time to spawn. It works most of the time, but a large part of the gameplay revolves around level memorization especially on harder difficulties/playing for a speedrun. In addition to that connection to Sonic, the levels each have a sparse 8 minute time limit that only affects your score, but you typically will never go below the 4 minute mark unless you're playing for completionism. The first four boss levels are easy to cheese because the arena have elevated entryways, with the exception of the third boss as you have to hide in trenches and take potshots at Devan's turtle-shaped tank. Each boss level wraps up with a delightful animation and illustration to take you on the the next episode. A very nice gem, this one!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
You've been locked up in a weird prison! Thankfully, a fellow prisoner helps you escape before being gunned down in cold blood. From there, it's a race against hoards of guards and obstacles to finally escape! Created by Mark McIntyre only a few weeks after his Mark Land series, the game is a fairly direct narrative as you have to collect four white keys from several purple sub-bosses before escaping from the facility proper. It's tough going, but not impossible by any stretch, though some puzzles might have you loading saves if you're not careful!
| ESRB Rating: Everyone 
After a brief and confusing dig at William Shatner's toupee while on Star Trek, Nikki casts a level 10 spell is unleashed that accidently summons a giant monster that must be defeated by seeking a boon from the Wishing Engine. Pandemonium! is an early rail platformer from Toys for Bob developed for Crystal Dynamics which shares a remarkable amount with Crash Bandicoot which debuted just two months earlier. You play one of two characters - Fargus (and Sid) or Nikki, and go through stages leading up to the Wishing Engine. The gameplay is farily straightforward and the decision to put all the action on-rails allows for some really fun setpieces and camera work. The setting and sound design alone are deliciously whimsical and if you have any affection for the PS1 era of graphics, this one is a must-have.
| ESRB Rating: Mature 
| Steam Net Revenue: $522,936.34 522k
One of, if not the most important and innovative of the games made on the Build engine. You play Caleb, member of a cult called The Cabal and faithful servant of Tchernobog...until now. Tchernobog has struck down all of the Chosen, including Caleb, but Caleb lives again and he's ready to wreck havoc on the Cabal. You use dynamite, napalm, Tesla cannons, and all manner of instruments made from human and eldritch hands alike to tear a bloody swath through Tchernobog's servants, witness the fate of the other Chosen, and confront your traitorous god.
You're an anthro rat in an ill-fitting shirt who owes a mob boss 5,000 USD for a 'shipment of cheese', but, uh oh! Some joker snatched the money from your apartment! Time to track down the one responsible! Rat is a point-and-click game in the Lucasarts tradition with a fun sort of late 90s irreverent atmosphere. Interact with strange people, get free stuff, and find the one who snatched your stash!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
One of the earliest, and stranger, of Daisuke Ayama's works! You play a blue cat sort of creature - you appear a bit like an enemy type in Vectorman - and you bounce around a screen trying to ram your head into a lemon slice while a green dot follows and tries to stomp on your tail. The gameplay has Pixel's trademark floatiness that would go on to codify his later platformer work, but here it provides an important push-and-pull as hitting the lemon slice earns you points but it also knocks you closer into trajectory of the dot and its spawning pawprints. How many points can you get?
Steam (Original) | GOG (Original) | Android App (Original) | ModDB (Original) | Steam (Postal Redux) | Playstation (Postal Redux) | Nintendo e-Shop (Postal Redux)
| ESRB Rating: Mature | Steam Net Revenue (Redux): $372,538.77 372k Game Engine: RSPiX (Original); Unreal(Redux)
| Part of the Postal series (1st of 4)
Now, Postal 2 is typically the one most people associate with the Postal series, and for very good reason. But, the original series entry absolutely deserves its roses. Made by a company of people so sick of having to do kids games and edutainment titles in the 90s that they set forward to making the most violent game they could. You're the Postal Dude, fighting back against a world gone mad and killing as many 'hostiles' as you can. Over 20 levels of carnage, and a plethora of weapons designed to make your enemies very, very miserable.
Direct Link (Bahamut RPG Community)
A vast majority of what made the early internet special comes from humble origins, and it doesn't much humbler than a 16 year old making a video game in 30 minutes out of spite. When someone says they love Arfenhouse, they are almost certainly referring to the series of Flash movies that would come to encapsulate a very specific form of 'ironic random' humor in the early 2000's, but this is where it began. You are the HOUSEMASTER!!! tasked with defeating the EVIL KITTY!!! at the other end of the ARFENHOUSE. The ARFENHOUSE in question is a giant nondescript room, you move north and run directly into the EVIL KITTY (they have mean eyebrows). Along the way you run into many enemies that all have the same sprite and attack pattern. Your options include using your LYTNING attack that one shots most enemies, using your normal attack if you want to lose, or scrolling through a menu screen with nothing inside, also to lose. Got three minutes to kill? Why not take a peek at what satirical games looked like at the turn of the millenium?
Steam | GOG
| ESRB Rating: Teen 
Having cut their teeth for years on the tabletop market, ALTAR Publishing would get enough experience with computer games to create their sister company ALTAR Interactive. Following up on their initial puzzle title Fish Fillets, the team at ALTAR would positively knock it out of the park with Original War! You play John Macmillan, a soldier who has signed up to enter a device discovered in Siberia called the EON, an honest-to-God time machine. His mission is simple, to enter 20,000 years into the past to extract the only resource that can suitably power the EON, known as 'siberate'. It becomes far less simple when the Russian forces make it to the past at the same time as the American forces, leading to a war for the siberite - the very first war ever held on Earth. The team based mechanic is a truly magnificant thing to see in action once you've gotten your bearings, and it really does feel amazing taking down a platoon of enemies giving you trouble, setting up facilities to protect yourself and your supply depots. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the hard work of the team at OWSupport for making this game as functional this far past 2001 as it is!
Note: This is an old Flash game that will require Ruffle or other Flash emulator to run.
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Flash 4 
When I was much, much younger and had a frankly irresponsible amount of time on the early Internet, I spent a lot of time playing Flash games. One fateful day, I come across Dream: The Game by Glen Rhodes, and it blew my tiny mind. This game has so much presentation in a period of time when everything coming out of Flash 4 looked sickly and it made a profound impression on me - the way the early 3D is implemented, the core concept of the game, the music (oh my God, the music!) - everything about this cemented a lot of stylistic choices and became a core memory for me, but more than that, it's also one of the absolute best games to have come out of that early period of Flash, and one of my personal favorites. I highly recommend it!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Flash
Presenting a nice little auto runner from developer preshing! You play Pol, a sturdy fellow in a state of undress, excaping from a testing facility! The game moves continuiously to the right while generating nuisances to dodge around, like balloons and mines and Smurfs! For the relative age of the game, the controls handle remarkably well and dodging through an entire level is very satisying! Can you make it to level 10?
Steam | GOG | Zoom Platform (Your Mom's Box Set) | Zoom Platform (Fudge Pack) | STOVE
| ESRB Rating: Adults Only 
| Steam Net Revenue: $13,277,341.42 13m | Part of the Postal series (2nd of 4)
So, let me clear the air on this one: Postal 2 is gross, puerile, insensitive, and racist in the way that can only be explained if you understand where the US was culturally in 2003. I also have 79 hours in the game on Steam as of this writing. The simplest way I can explain the appeal is that the Postal Dude in this game is very 'gender' to me and playing as him and his awful life is gratifying given where I am in life myself. Moreover, this is what I would consider the 'Ur example' of what an open world game ought to be: with other modern open world games, you're still expected to do things in a certain order and complete certain objectives before proceeding - adventure games with higher resolution, frankly. Postal 2 positively doesn't care when or how you do its objectives. Bought milk from the store honestly or stole it? Doesn't matter, off the list. Confessed your sins or killed the pastor? Off the list either way. In fact, it is entirely possible to go through the game without hurting or killing anybody, which poses as much of a unique challenge as playing the game as a typical shooter. The point is, though, the game is worthwhile because of what it does, not in spite of it, because it's a rare occasion that a game will earnestly let you get as buckwild as Postal 2.
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Developed by Kenta Cho under their self-publisher ABA Games, TUMIKI Fighters is a 2D horizontal shooter in which you control a toy plane and shoot other toy planes out of the sky. One crucial gameplay loop is the option to swoop in to retrieve downed planes and attach them to your own plane like Legos, providing not only cover from enemy fire but introducing a bullet generator for as long as you can keep the ship on your own ship. The presentation is incredible and it's a blast to play!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: RPG Maker 
Released in 2004 by solo dev Kikiyama, Yume Nikki is the story of a lonely young girl who won't leave her apartment and instead spends her time inside a world of dreams. The troubling world in this young lady's mind has proven to be deeply inspiring for many developers who would come after, mining from Aztec iconography and Japanese yokai, among many others. It's also noteworthy in the world of RPG Maker games by being a game so open-world that the very 'victory point' of the game seems difficult to fathom unless you have prior knowledge. An excellent piece of game history!
Fansite Download (Original Freeware Ver.) | Steam (Nicalis Ver.) | Epic Games (Nicalis Ver.) | GOG (Nicalis Ver.) | Nintendo Switch (Nicalis Ver.)
| ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ 
| Steam Net Revenue: $671,479.45 671k
I might be waxing poetic here, but it's a bit hard to understand just how BIG Cave Story was for the indie game scene. Basically everything that came after this title owes at least a little of its existance to Pixel's hard work. For those of you that may not realize the original game is freeware, I highly recommend it, but as much as people have legitimate reason to not give Nicalis money, I cannot deny that Cave Story + it is a highly polished version of the original with several new game modes. Either way, this work stands as a testament to the history of video games after the millenium, and is well worth your time!
| Steam Net Revenue: $23,317.27 23k
Half a decade after its formation, Popcap Games had all but cemented its place in what would go on to become the mobile game market with titles like Bejeweled and Zuma. 2005 was, comparitively speaking, a dry year for the company but Chuzzle Deluze would prove to be yet another highly addictive game from them! A basic match three game using fuzzy creatures that look a bit like shaggy squeeze balls. move a row or column to match three and watch them explode! Matching five or more creates a super ball that makes a giant explosion when matched, and the occasional big ball that takes up two rows and columns. Add to this a mechanic where a chuzzle will get 'locked' into place, forcing the player to use strategy to get rid of the lock, and you have an engaging game that can keep you preoccupied for hours! As of current, Chuzzle 2 and Chuzzle Snap are the only Chuzzle titles you can find outside of Steam.
Direct Link | Steam | itch.io | Kliktopia
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Multimedia Fusion 2 | Part of the Game With A Kitty Series (1st of 8)
Back when my time was regularly spent on Indiegames.com and scoping out new stuff to play, there were several that still occupy my memories to this day, and such is the case with A Game With A Kitty. Developed by a fellow who goes only by Bernie and originally published under Fallen Angel Industries, who brought us such freeware classic games as the first Noitu Love, this game is a real charmer. The Kirby influence is unmistakable as you play as Kittey, a jovial Chowder-looking kitty sent to investigate a tower that recently rose up along the edge of town. What could be inside? Only one way to find out! As of 2022, this game is also on Steam as freeware along with it's sequel Darkside Adventures and the first Treasure Hunter Man by the same developer. Give it a look!
Lyle is a guy just living in Cube Sector when suddenly some jerk up and steals his cat Keddums from his house! Lyle shouldn't have left his cat outside but that's besides the point. It's time to get Keddums back in a delightful Metroidvania in which you fight by picking up cubes and throwing them at adversaries, as well as using them for platforming and solving puzzles. Good stuff!
Direct Site | Archive.org Link
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Adventure Game Studio 
You awaken every day in a filthy cell with no idea who you are or why your face is bandaged, why your clothes are covered in bloodstains. Every day you're taken out of your cell and made to run an obstacle course. Today you are given a gun - a mockery, certainly, as how little control you really have over your situation...until suddenly your cell door opens. Made by Ben Croshaw in 2006 around the same time period he was making Trilby's Notes, 1213 is a technical marvel as the AGS codebase is pushed from a typical point-and-click adventure game to a Prince of Persia-style gameplay loop as you explore the dire remains of a facility literally crumbling around you. An excellent work!
Direct Link | Steam | itch.io
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Multimedia Fusion 2 | Part of the Game With A Kitty Series (2nd of 8)
The followup to A Game With A Kitty takes us to a more cosmic setting as the arch-chancellor of the Imp King gets ordered to recover Princess Daffodil's missing crown! It's a long trek to the castle, and the game features a lot of physics based puzzle solving as the latest addition to the series. The Kirby influence is stronger still then it was in 1, while the grabbing mechanics are a strong relation to the same mechanics in Super Mario World 2. Very cute, very funny, very fun!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
As the game of sudoku began to really take off in the UK around 2005, the US was bit slower to catch the Number Place bug, but it became a sensation here not long after 06. As it goes, there would eventually be studios looking to make their own sudoku games. Eight years before their hit game Subnautica, Unknown Worlds Entertainment would make Zen of Sudoku, their first official self-made title. While having an admittedly orientalist vibe, the puzzles work as advertised and the game features modest animations and pleasant soundscapes as you think through how to complete the sudoku puzzles. There are four difficulty levels, not counting the tutorial, and several in-game achievements for playing certain skill levels and forgoing options that make the game easier. It's nice!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Made by the studio Tocoroten and based off of the light novel series 'Maria-sama ga Mituru', this is one of those occasions where a game is so good that I'm shocked it's 1. freeware and 2. lost to time. You play as Yumi Fukuzawa with angel wings in a tate bullet hell shooting at bats and ghosts and possessed classmates. Normal mode lets you take four hits before death, with each defeated boss, while Child mode gives you 24 hits before death and endless continues at the expense of no score at the end level (and possibly the loss of a True End boss fight). It's really good!
| Steam Net Revenue: $870.31 $870 | Game Engine: GameMaker 
Created during a period of time when tower defense games saturated the market, this entry into the genre is a very special one. You are a volunteer from the besieged world of Dukis to forsake your mortal body and ascend your consciousness into 'pathspace' to fend off invaders from the Bavakh empire - sort of like Ender Wiggen by way of Dr. Manhattan. Along for the ride is an enigmatic, and somewhat bossy, pathspace defender by the name of Aa. As a tower defense, your defensive options take the form of parts of your personality that you literally put onto the path the ships will take to defend your homeworld from harm. As your victories mount, you find your powers growing and your humanity slipping away from you. What are the lives of the people of Dukis, of your own family, worth in the face of the defense of the whole universe? If you've ever wanted a tower defense game that felt like listening to a prog rock album, this is the one for you!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Coming to us from Ron "X-Out" Bunce and just seven months before the release of Gravitron 2, Blocks n' Bricks is a fairly common Breakout clone with a whopping 50 levels and having been made in 48 hours! If you've played Breakout before, you know how the game works, but hey, it's free and it's fun!
| Steam Net Revenue: $5,279.79 5k
Coming to us from Targem Games three years after becoming a subsidary of Nival Inc, Sledgehammer is a really...awfully silly game! You play Jack Hammer, who you are told through cutscene is a Punisher-type vengeance killer who is sentenced to death, but inexplicably gets rescued by a mysterious benefactor named Jorge and given a bad-ass truck that tears through any car with ease and has multiple mounted guns, AND jet propulsion! It's not a deep game but it really tickles an itch in the old basal ganglia because not only is it unabashedly a late-2000's video game and plays like it, but it is serious about being unserious and makes no bones about how silly it is. Like, I'm incapable of doing justice to just how many weird plot decisions this game makes, you should try it out for yourself!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: RPG Maker 2003
A truly mystifying work of art, OFF is the culmination of hard work between Mortis Ghost and Alias Conrad Cornwood. You take control of the Batter, an entity that has been tasked with purifying the world. Whether you both succeed is up to fate. This game in particular has a committed fanbase long after its release in 2008, and upon playing it, it won't be hard to understand why!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: RPG Maker
From developer Kan Gao comes the earliest release from Freebird Games, The Mirror Lied is a very pretty and enchanting game in which your motivations and very character elude the player. There are some truly compelling theories concerning the plot of the game, but the only thing you know for sure is that 'Birdie' has taken flight and your plant needs water - everything else is a mystery. The game is suggested to be played in one sitting, and that's not just for styles' sake, as the moment the game boots up, the clock is ticking. You need to satisfy certain conditions within 30 minutes game time, including time spent on the main menu, before the clock strikes midnight. Godspeed!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
"A puzzle game where the premise is a joke about the suicide rate in Japan? Really, Edmund?" I know, but this is Jesse Venbrux we're talking about, I promise it's good! In this particular iteration, you have 25 levels of switching between two salarymen and assisting each other with turning into gibs. Can you solve them all?
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
I'll be plain about it and say that Daniel Remar is an indie dev I have a mammoth amount of respect for, and Iji is the core reason for that appraisal. You play Iji, a young lady whose life is thrown into bedlam as she has to survive against an alien threat by any means necessary. Along the way she is aided by her brother, who seems to be keeping secrets from you, and a powerful gun that can be augumented into all sorts of powerful devices. I really can't undersell this particular game, and that's not just a joke about it being freeware - the story is captivating, the gun upgrades allow you to persue any sorts of avenues of dealing with your situation, enemies leave beind PDAs that comment on your decisions level by level, the levels themselves are labyrinths that can be traversed any number of ways...simply put, this game is a labor of love, to say nothing of being an important piece of internet gaming history. You should check it out!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Adventure Game Studio
Who gets stuck with all the bad luck? Life of D.Duck 2 is an incredible game brought to us by Bjørnar B. and Arden M., in which D.Duck attempts to win the hand of Daisy but encounters misfortune after misfortune in his attempts. Can you help D.Duck get his uncle Jubalon out of his house and get Grandmother Duck her heart medicine?
Steam (Enhanced Ver.) | Humble Store (Enhanced Ver.)
| Steam Net Revenue: $54,053.68 54k
An absolute classic! Originally freeware, developed by Guilherme S. Tows and published by his company Zaratustra Productions (not to be confused with Zarathustra), Eversion is a simple looking platformer that, unless you pay attention to the H.P Lovecraft quote at the opening of the game, will take you completely by surprise. Collect all the gems, and save the princess!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
As the name suggests, the team behind Shrapnel Games have released a game in which you travel along a 'brain pipe'. It is difficult to say if you are an electrical pulse fired from some neuron travelling along a pathway to its destination (I guess, technically as the player controlling the game, you are o.o), but the game is a wonderous psychotropic vision of color and sound. Winning the "Excellence In Audio" award at the 2009 Independent Games Festival, this game is an excellent example of using discordant noises in a level to create peculiar soundscapes that really make you feel like you're plunging into some kind of altered state. The score system also has a delightful setup where it animates by moving certain parts of the number into new positions like stars realigning. I LOVE this game!
A yummy arcade shooter, this one! You play as a squid (not an octopus) trying to survive being beseiged by jerks. Honestly, nothing beats the writeup Robert D. Ferson himself gave in the above link. Give it a shot!
Archive.org Link | Flixel Port
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: GameMaker 7 ; Ported to Flash in 2010
Brought to us by Justin Stander and Askiisoft, Tower of Heaven made a huge splash in the indie game scene for being a remarkably hard and poignant title. You play Eid, an otherwise nondescript who's hell-bent on climbing the Tower of Heaven against the wishes of God. The game is rendered in a classic Game Boy color palette that's carried to dizzying heights by the musical work of flashygoodness.
Those of you that were around for when Let's Plays were bigger might remember this game as a memorable one played by Raocow. You are crazed - but like in a cartoon sense rather than a real life sense. This is a platformer game that has a lot of strange things to observe and explore as you dodge bullets, hop on multi-colored enemies and pop balloons to gain verticality. The darling character you play as has a "sanity meter" that's functionally just a health bar, but losing that meter just makes odd things happen before restarting you at the last cross you saved at. It's cute, it's fun, I believe you will like it!
| ESRB Rating: Mature
The position of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days on here is less about it being fun and more about what point in history this game occupies. This was towards the era in which Liveleak and 'torture porn' were common all over the American cultural diet, owing a lot to the impact of the Great Recession, and it was also around the turn of the decade that conversations about video game violence started to be addressed by video games themselves. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a miserable blood-splattered nightmare both in theme and execution, but it is an incredible achievement in the regards that few games had ever captured the nihilistic nature of this level of bloodshed before or since. You play Kane and Lynch - technically, you play an unnamed character who creeps around the two with a digital camera for reasons left up to the player - who bumble a gun running deal in an act of violence that rapidly escalated into a gang war in Shanghai. There is no honor, no sympathy, and no diplomatic recourse but to continue a monotonous stream of violence where civilians run screaming from the gunfire and any dopamine you could get from winning a shootout is absent. There is also a multiplayer mode that is a little less heavy but has a delightfully sinister take on the style of heist gameplay loop that would later be codified by Payday: The Heist a year later, in which friendly fire is fully on and it becomes a metagame of finding out who among you is a Fed, or maybe who decides you're just a hinderance.
Direct Site | Steam | Nintendo e-Shop (Paid Version)
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: GameMaker
I have a confession to make - despite having a lot of opinions about video games, I'm not terribly good at them. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to a tightly made arcade title. Super Crate Box is the first game from Vlambeer, who would go on to make Nuclear Throne and Luftrausers! SCB is a very simple concept, where you avoid aliens moving in a set path and slaughter your way through their ranks. The challenge comes from the scoring system, where the game doesn't care how many aliens you kill - it's all about the crates! Each crate opened is another point, and replaces your current weapon. The weapons run the gamut from the powerful minigun to the potentially run-ending disc gun, and everything in between! The arenas themselves are built and behave like the ones from Mario Bros, with the aliens moving in a set pattern (mostly) and going faster if they hit the bottom of the arena. This means your goal is to get to the next crate, and stave off any aliens in your way, with whatever weapon you have on your person. Sometimes you get three crates in a row with no resistance, and sometimes the crate is at the whole other end of the arena with floating skulls everywhere and nothing but mines to work with. Replayability is sky-high with this game, and it's one of my absolute favorites!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Flash
This particular title made a lot of people angry when it first released, because true to its name, you only get one chance to play through this game - there's no resetting and no option to view other endings, you get what you get. You play John Pilgrim, a scientist with a loving wife and daughter, who is on the verge of releasing a world-changing new product - you will have less than a week to live with the aftermath. Developed by Dean Moynihan and hearlding an electric career for himself, there's not necessarily a way to describe the gameplay of something you play once. So, forgoing that - I will simply detail what my story in the shoes of Dr. Pilgrim were like:
The release of the product is a smash hit. I don't even remember what it was we were making. All I remember is planning to get some work in because that's what you *do* in games when you know disaster is looming, you put in the work and get ahead of it. But I misclicked - I swear I misclicked - and ended up in the arms of a strange woman for the evening. The sun rises on a deadly pathogen destroying all living cells on Earth, complete wipe, tabula rasa. For the next three or four days, I work non-stop. The cure is closer and closer to being finished but the human race is dropping like flies. I forget when I came home again - did my daughter call me? - but I rushed home and found my wife dead in the bathtub. Slashed wrists. I had neglected everything I was capable of dealing with in a meaningful way. I thought I was saving the world but there I stood, a loser who put his job before his family, and the noble intentions didn't matter because I had nothing to show for them. I take my daughter - I know in my gut that she saw her mother's body but I choose to ignore that - and take her to a park. We sit there under a cherry blossom tree. It's a tender moment, and in my revolting sentimentality I convince myself that this is the best possible outcome. We meet our end.
No one's playthrough will be the same as anyone else's. I don't know that I'd want to have a second chance. The person I was when I first played is a distant figure now, but despite being five minutes in length, this game and the decisions I made have stuck with me after all these years. If that's not worthy of a recommendation, I don't know what is.
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
The flagship title of Big Fat Alien, BEEP is a standout physics platformer, not only giving you a gun but a gravity manipulator to work with - or work against, as the case may be. You control a ship dispensing a fleet of BEEP-bots to scour alien worlds for rare minerals, getting into firefights with rogue robots and spelunking into the occasional dark cavern. It's good stuff!
Coming to us from Cobra Mobile Limited is a darling physics platformer! You play Storm, a young person who dreams of flying here and there in a teacup. You collect sugar cubes and the occasional sticker on your way to the goal, avoiding stormclouds and other obstacles that stand in your way!
Steam | itch.io | GOG | Apple Store | Playstation | Xbox | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ | Game Engine: MonoGame 
The breakout hit by Supergiant Games and an early template for what would become the game layout for the Hades series, Bastion is a treat! You play as the Kid, one of the only survivors of the Calamity that tore the world to pieces. Now, all the Kid has left is a stranger and the hope of the Bastion, the safeguard against what caused the calamity and the last hope for humanity. The game is incredibly pretty even today, with the world lovingingly rendered in painterly strokes and warm hues to contrast the story. Armed with a growing arsenal and distillery, the Kid sets off into the sky to reclaim Cores essential for rebuilding the Bastion, and by extension, civilization.
| Game Engine: Clickteam Fusion 2.5
A fascinating and colorful roguelike approach to the twin-stick shooter genre, Really Big Sky is a delightful game by Boss Baddie. The concept is you earn points as you move through increasingly phantamogoric parts of space, narrated by a fellow providing color commentary all the while. Every loss gives you an opportunity to put points into respective parts of your ship's attacks and movement. There are many other game modes you unlock over time that add variety to the gameplay loop.
Steam | GOG | Nintendo e-Shop
| Game Engine: MonoGame
A magical goat is thrown into the Prison of Agnus by the Master of Chains! Time for a good old-fashioned jailbreak! First published as part of Xbox XNA Indie Games, Escape Goat boasts over 50 levels plus addons of puzzle solving action! Armed with a mouse friend and the occasional hat that allows you to teleport, jump and bash your way through an intricate maze of deadly traps and fire-spewing enemies. It's real fun!
Steam | Direct Site | Google Play
Created in 2012 by the husband and wife team of Kevin and Aneissa Wells, Hubert's Island Adventure: Mouse o' War is a delightful game borrowing from Commander Keen and many other platformers to make a real diamond in the rough. Can you rescue your wife from the dread pirate Dekker and get back your stolen cheese?
Steam (Director's Cut) | Steam (Super Lone Survivor) | Playstation (Director's Cut) | Nintendo e-Shop (Super Lone Survivor)
| ESRB Rating: Teen | Steam Net Revenue: $63,412.20 63k| Game Engine: Adobe AIR 
Created by Jasper Byrne and published through his solo initiative Superflat Games, Lone Survivor is one of the most important entries in the survival horror scene available today. You play 'You' (Your name is...no longer important.) and you are on a mission to find somebody, anybody that might have survived the apocalypse. All around you are instances of unreality and sanity-questioning situations as you try to balance your mental health needs with your survival needs. Sneak through the grim remains of your apartment, use your gun to clear enemies (or don't), bear grotesque witness to the horror and how it's changed you, all that good stuff!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: GameMaker 8.1
One of the earliest works by David Szymanski, Pit: The Bite-Sized Shooter is a very capable FPS game you can finish in roughly 30 minutes or so. You play Thomas Gage, a man who finds himself stuck in a series of labyrinthian tunnles under rural Pennsylvania and must fight tooth and nail to escape! The player assets are heavily borrowed. sometimes outright, from Wolfenstein 3D, enemies are mainly floating metallic heads and a ghostly figure that's clearly based off of the ghosts in the final level of Spear of Destiny. Gameplay-wise, the enemies can be easily circle strafed due in no small part to the enemies using physical bullets as opposed to being hitscan enemies. This has so many clear design decisions that would go on to influence DUSK, including a jumpscare of enemies masquerading as harmless items, a special weapon called the Perforator which shoots so hard it changes your FOV for a second when fired, and a really strong volumetric fog shader in the GameMaker engine (!!!).
Direct Site | Steam | GOG
| Part of the DROD series (5th of 6)
From the minds at Caravel Games comes a prequel to the epic tale of Beethro Budkin as he recounts a tale of his ancestor Gunthro Budkin to his nephews. One of the more approachable difficulty levels of the DROD franchise, this is a delightful puzzler as you explore through dungeons and attempt to bring the culprit of regicide to justice.
Steam | itch.io | itch.io (Browser Ver.)
A delightful CGA throwback title by J. Kyle Pittman, You Have To Win The Game is as direct a title as one could ask for. You play a Little Nemo-esque character as they dodge snakes, avoid spikes, run from crabs, fall down pits, and collect bags of cash to raise the percentage of the game's completion and find their way out of the sprawling maze. It's good stuff!
| ESRB Rating: Teen
A fine Metroidvania by the developer studio Platine Dispositif and ported by both Mediascape and Rockin' Android, Bunny Must Die! Chelsea and the 7 Devils is the ludicrous story of a bunny lady growing cat ears as the effect of a explosion using 'thermomewclear power' and having to fight seven devils to cure her malady. Commonly referred to as a 'rage game', Bunny Must Die has a stringent difficulty curve that rewards the skilled and careful on their hunt through the labyrinth! Regretably, this game was delisted from Steam in 2019 by the developer, but the Nintendo version is still available.
| Steam Net Revenue: $71,659.24 71k
A little over half a decade before Disco Elysium would come out of Estonia and blow everyone out of the water, a three-man team comprising of the brothers Johann and Mikeal Tael, and fellow programmer Edwin Adema, would make an intense top down roguelike. You're the last holdout on planet Medusa-1C as the corporation you work for has decided to not send a rescue party, and so it falls to yourself to make it to the major teleporter on the planet and make it back to Earth. Easier said than done, because the creators of this game aimed for an extreme level of difficulty in their game, and it comes out swinging. A generous use of negative space helps you maintain your sense of where you are in the world, which is crucial to surviving the number of zombies and mutants roaming the halls of your facility. Death is frequent and you'll find yourself having to really focus to get past the 10 levels to make it to the end. Will you truly escape from Medusa-1C?
| Game Engine: Clickteam Studio
First premiring on Desura and later on Steam after Desura folded, samurai_jazz is the first game by developer Blaze Epic, and has the stylistic patters that would go on to color the rest of their work. You play as Yo, a ronin who is on a quest to stop a person known as In, but has to take his own life to do it. What follows is a strange cityscape full of swordsman and youkai looking to murder you. Your goal is simply to traverse the back alleys through acquistion of 'special cigarettes' to reach the abode of In and fight your way into its inner sanctum. The gameplay is very similar to an NES title - including the reularly spawning enemies - and is not as polished as its followup Shin Samurai Jazz, but the game oozes style and I personally enjoyed my time with it!
| Steam Net Revenue: $58,646.30 58k
You play as Kerotan, the 'custodial sciences officer' for the firm Cat & Frog Inc. Along with your teammates, you progress through multiple levels while cleaning up strange pests that are blocking off teleporters, eventually working your way to the heart of where they're coming from. The game's physics are floaty as is typical for Ayama's work. There are three modes that unlock one after the other: Normal mode is the base game, Zangyou mode is a new scenario in which Kerotan keeps getting their vacation interrupted by a looming threat, and Omake is a remixed Normal mode with a boss rush. It is an immaculately charming game and perfect for people looking for a (slightly) more down-to-earth setting compared to Cave Story.
Steam | Direct Site | Nintendo e-Shop (Paid Edition)
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Multimedia Fusion 2 | Part of the Unstrong Series (1st of 2)
After being defeated by Kittey and their friends once again, Glasses once again has to rebuild their base from scratch in this charming platformer! Bernie's diligent work with 2D platformers really shines through here as you use all manner of devices and whatsits to both keep Glasses out of harms way and to help level up their health bar. Find some friends, some enemies, and maybe even self-actualization?
| Steam Net Revenue: $9,662.84 9k | Game Engine: Unity 4 Free Version 
The third game released by David Szymanski under the online handle jefequeso, The Moon Sliver is a 'walking simulator' in the common style at the time, but the use of assets and text in the game reveal an aptitude for storytelling and composition in David's work long before Dusk would cement his place among the biggest victories in this rough business. You are a lone denizen on an island that's been rendered desolate by visible calamity, and as you come to learn, the only thing keeping the community safe from harm is a religious icon known as The Moon Sliver...the story takes about an hour to complete and there are no save options, so the game is designed to be played in one shot. It's a delightfully morose game about religion and loneliess, despair and what it means to move on.
Steam | itch.io | Humble Store
| Steam Net Revenue: $153,305.54 153k | Game Engine: Unity | Part of the Lakeview Cabin series (2nd of 4)
Roope Tamminen follows up with his well-recieved Lakeview Cabin Flash game with this collection, a densely packed and intricate series of movies in which a group of people attempt to survive everything from murderous mutants, cannibals, aliens and rakes. Each level and environmental detail serves some kind of purpose in Tamminen's work and every environment is a delight to run, fall, and die in. Even failure has a brutal beauty as you attempt to piece together how to stop the onslaught of violence being set against you.
| Steam Net Revenue: $905.35 $905 | Game Engine: Unreal
The first thing about this game right off the bat is it's not shy about how much it is truly of the Unreal engine. That being said, I find myself absolutely absorbed by this game. You play an unnamed fellow with a very unlucky streak when it comes to transportation, and finding yourself regularly face to face with tons of aliens! The gameplay has a lot of fetch quest minutae that might turn off some, but the idea is straightforward enough - in the Wasteland map, your goal is to load up a recovered car with gas, food, and water to escape the area. With every item delivered to the car, another wave of aliens comes to beat your head in. With the Island map, the goal is to load up a plane with supplies after finding the key - you get the idea. With the Wasteland map in particular, the long stretch of highway that makes up the map helps make it very clear what's coming and from what direction, making it an ideal starter map, while the Island map is more intermediate based on the foilage hiding aliens regularly and moving slowly through water being a factor. The aliens all have specific ways they affect the tide of battle, as the quick small aliens run up and nip at your heels, the purple aliens shoot acid and act while you're distracted by the quick aliens, and the giant aliens are there to take up your focus fire from the other two. The game has a weird way it handles audio, because you'll hear the pitter-patter of aliens that are homing in on you, but not in relation to where they are on the map. Every single footstep sounds like it's directly behind you, which is great for the atmosphere but not so much the shooting. There's plenty of opportunities to get above ground to avoid the aliens, but don't get too attached, because practically everything is destructable and the aliens WILL rip apart any shelter to get at you. All of these add up to a hoard shooter where it's imperative to use your shots wisely - at least at first, as each session in the game gives you points to spend on better movements and weapons to make each successive run easier, similar to what you'd find in a roguelike. Improved weapons hit harder, and golden weapons will explode on impact like a Borderlands gun. This one really charmed me, and I believe it will charm you too!
I know the screenshots here may not tell the whole story, but here's the situation - this is a by-the-book incremental game, just a series of UI buttons and progress bars with descriptive text, but I've been glued to it for a day since picking it up! The story so far is you've crash-landed on an alien planet, alone and forced to forage to survive! Before long, you uncover a species known as Trimps that appear to be under your command! It starts off innocently enough, setting your first trap and training your newly-discovered Trimps in the finer points of agriculture and engineering...next thing you know, it's time to put ever Trimp not currently employed into conscription and tearing down the planet's fauna to retrieve books to upgrade your burgeoning civilization. Satirical autocracy aside, this game is a blast to play. The main source of the gameplay loop is in bolstering your army's resources to better handle the enemies coming in later zones. Your reserve of Trimps is functionally infinite, but you have to spend the necessary time to keep the Trimps' stats up to help them survive attacks, or even better, levelling up their Block ability so they don't get hurt in the first place. It's sounds funny for a game where the menu stays the same 89 percent of the time, but there's always new things going on, new maps to charge through, new tweaks and optimizations waiting just around the next cell of the next zone!
| Steam Net Revenue: $3,498.82 3k | Game Engine: Unity 5 Free Version
In the classic style for David Szymanski's "hour-long" games made during this time period, A Wolf in Autumn is a depressing story about child abuse at the hands of a parent, but unlike in the earlier game Fingerbones, A Wolf in Autumn has quite a bit more to say about the nature of womanhood, the mother-daughter relationship and how abuse affects it, and what we do as victims when we victimize others. The gameplay loop is straightforward adventure game stuff, find tools to break locks and solve puzzles, but with the added wrinkle of your mother (played by Julie Hoverson) growing increasingly cruel and hostile with you. Some of the more interesting lighting solutions that would go on to persist in his later FPS work are beginning to blossom here.
Steam | itch.io | Nintendo e-Shop
| Game Engine: Unity
The date: April 15th, 1917. As the citizens of Verdun-sur-Meuse had believed the fighting along their city had finally waned, the bones of all the fallen soldiers could only look on as a lone Fokker Dr-1 takes flight against a threat too outrageous for words. 1917: The Alien Invasion DX takes place in an alternate WWI where the world is violently beseiged by aliens. You play Dr. Brunhild Stahlmüller, performing an solo act of vernichtungsstrategie against the aliens and flying her 'Red Beezlebub' to the heart of the interplanetery menace. The game has a nod to the developer's earlier title Sturmfront: The Mutant War as the assistant to Dr. Stahlmuller, a Dr. Hartmuth Griesgram, is a key character in Sturmfront. The game functions well as a tate shump with plenty of risks and rewards for good flying. One specific factor in the gameplay loop is the use of a score locking pickup, in which the combo you build from downing enemies increases as long as the combo is unlocked, but can quickly drop if you're not careful. Once the combo is locked by a pickup at the end of the level, the combo can be continued into the next stage, and so on. The Red Beezlebub also come equipped with two different firing modes, a green weapon that does modest damage, and a heavy hitting weapon that pushes back your ship with each shot. Sebastian de Andrade shows their trademark capabilities with pixel art as every portion of the game is lovingly rendered and easy to read. Can you get through all eight levels and defeat the Chessmaster?
| Game Engine: RPG Maker
As Karbonic was working through high school, they were working on this game to the detriment of their grades, but released this treasure in 2016. You play Nicholas, an unhappy fellow thrust into a dimension rapidly closing in on itself, known as the Garden of Vurrus. From there, he gets roped into a wild story of disparate and anachronistic characters as they attempt to halt the full collapse of the universe. Bracing stuff!
| ESRB Rating: Mature | Steam Net Revenue: $44,795.16 44k | Game Engine: Unity
You are the walking apocalypse, an unstoppable killing machine come to destroy the remants of humanity...but humanity's putting up a fight to remember. BUTCHER is a 2d platformer/arena shooter where you face off against fearsome enemies and machinations of death, literally tearing apart your enemies with lead, fire, and shrapnal. It has a lot of similarities in tone and difficulty to Teleglitch but from an android's perspective. A vicious delight.
| Steam Net Revenue: $10,314.68 10k | Game Engine: GameMaker
Deep within the confines of a foreboding castle lie a cavalcade of enemies, dutifully working on a terrifying device that could alter the path of history as we know it! You play as Moth, a jovial and good-natured sort on an excursion to see just what's happening in Creepy Castle! With an aesthetic sensibility of early side-scrolling games, dopterra was able to secure funding for this game through a Kickstarter back in 2014 with an excess of $2000 USD and would later publish through Nicalis. It's very cute and a lot of fun!
| Net Revenue: $4,073.83 4k
From the mind of Anton Riot comes a world made entirely of plasticine to explore! You play as the newest recruit to get hazed out of a massive Megabomb to blow up the door leading to strange new worlds. The world you come from is strange enough, right? But there's plenty to explore and lots to do. Brew and drink compote, level up weapons, locate books on the other side of the dreaded doors...this is a real diamond in the rough, highly recommended!
Knock knock, the Health Inspector Cats are here and you are in SOOO much trouble! A short and sweet platformer by Sink, you play as Crow, a crow with a jaunty red kerchief as she putters through her hotel attemping to fix things for the inspectors, battling cockroaches, ghosts, and her own plumbing skills. There's some really creative game mechanics in here as well as an emphasis on using inertia to your advantage. The save points are sign-in sheets which is just a cute detail that other devs might have left on the cutting room floor. Music is provided by captbeardd and kayfaraday giving the whole game a really funky character! There's also a prequel game called Croaktel that you unlock for beating the base game, where you play as Lilly the frog on their morning commute getting bullied by flowers and dealing with the challenges of office life. It's a tiny bit shorter than Crowtel but provides a healthy challenge to people already familiar with Crowtel. Absolutely give this one a shot!
Steam | itch.io | Xbox Store
| Game Engine: Unity
As AI becomes more and more of a permanent fixture of everyday life, it will become critical to have material from before its meteoric effect on the world around us as a means of grounding us in what our fears and hopes were for the future. From Sylvius Fischer, Fumiko is a love story, turned horror story, about an artifical intelligence developed for uncertain reasons and the denizens of the I.M. - human consciousness uploaded to a digital realm and the forces that are gradually driving it to tragedy. Mechanically, Fumiko offers the greatest freedom of movement I've ever seen in a game like this - running and jumping gives way to double jumping, gives way to quadruple jumping, giving way to endless running and jumping which is necessary to navigate the worlds you find yourself in. Visually, the game is remarkably gorgeous especially considering the audicious use of default cubes as architecture, because everything is designed to fit in seemlessly with the extreme digital environment. The story is a truly prescient one and it unravels beautifully. Check this one out!
| 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!
Coming in three years after their last game Rym 9000, Sonoshee is back and with one of the most enticing stories of kinship, betrayal, and rebirth that I've seen in a while. While it would be crude to compare this game to something like World of Horror, the comparisions are unmistakable as you wrestle hopelessly against a tidalwave of eldritch horrors and seemingly inescapable fates. But beyond those obvious comparisions is how Sonoshee merges the stylings of Satoshi Kon with a magical realism similar to works like Achewood. You participate in five stories, represented by the 'critters for sale', as various people who all seem to be connected through a web of fate in which everyone and everything hang in the balance. This is a game you'll need to brace yourself for - the endings in these stories are not happy and frequently uncompromising, with one very happy exception that I won't reveal out of respect for the artist. Needless to say, this is one you'll be very happy to have picked up, and here's hoping that Sonoshee can deliver on more stories in this game's universe in the future.
Steam | itch.io | Nintendo Switch | Xbox | Playstation
| Game Engine: Construct 2 
| ESRB Rating: Teen
Look, let's just be straightforward here - if you managed to end up on a Neocities cite run by a furry, you probably have already played Hypnospace Outlaw and don't need me to tell you how great it is. Just in case you haven't, though, here's the rundown: You play the role of an Enforcer, a glorified hall monitor important member of the Merchantsoft™ family whose job it is to narc on innocent people maintain the integrity of Hypnospace. As your role on Hypnospace increases, you become embroiled in a cyber-noir that seemlessly blends the atmosphere of pre-Web 2.0 internet with corporate malefactions and the sorts of behaviors that only come from the truly desperate. The final act of the game's story is one of the most pleasing denounments I've had the pleasure of playing. Please do yourself a favor and check this one out if you haven't already!
Steam || Epic Games Store || Nintendo e-Shop || Playstation || Xbox
| ESRB Rating: Teen | Steam Net Revenue: $529,160.19 529k
In the post-apocalypse, someone has to be the one to tend the fields. In this game, that someone is you! Grow your plants and keep them big and happy while staving off the threat of gun-toting rabbits and other hungry pests. You can spend your days tending the farm while occasionally exploring to get better supplies and increase your crop yield. But beware, as you're far from immortal and being careful is the the only way to survive. Can you make it through the years to keep the homestead fed?
Erica Yu is a bartender at The Only Bar in town. It's early morning, and she's ready to go home to her girlfriend. But her relief is short lived as she finds herself beseiged on all sides by murderous cops, impossible geometry, and strange red mannequins. Death and danger await around every corner, but is death truly the worst you have to worry about in this town? Coming off of the success of THE DEVIL HAUNTS ME 13 months prior, lum creates a delightful atmosphere of torment as you work your way through this survival horror!
| Game Engine: MonoGame
A demoralized Bimbob's clerk stands over the contents of a busted trash bag, wet with rain and pig blood, and now her tears. Suddenly, a stranger with round glasses and a toothy grin approaches. Thus starts the story of the up-ad-coming street gang known as the Thornz. Star Fetchers is a game currently in production from LKsvavelstickan with a Kickstarter and the pilot available for free off of Steam and releasing in 'episodes'. True to this format, the game is heavily informed by anime with its choice of graphics and gameplay style. Similar in execution to Katana Zero, you use the mouse to swing a sword and defeat enemies, either fighting off sword-wielding gang members or cutting down bullets before they reach you. There's also a heavy undercurrent of the future of the world under AI and consumer culture informing the setting around you. An excellent work!
Steam || Xbox || Nintendo E-shop
| ESRB Rating: Teen | Steam Net Revenue: $21,402.72 21k | Part of the Existential Dilogy (2nd of 2)
While very different from the other work by Yeo, this is an important milestone not only for the amount of influence it would have on games like Fading Afternoon but for helping establish what kind of work he's capable of outside of The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa's mold. You play an unknown mercernary in France getting contracts to kill people. You don't know their names, or locations. All you know of your player character is they're an expert marksman and they have insomnia. Beyond that, their life is depressingly sparse and bleak in sharp contrast to the dull, brutal beauty around them.
Steam | itch.io | Google Play Store
This is another fine solitaire game, albeit one with a lot more bells and whistles than most others. The game looks and sounds like it's running on early equipment, with a bitcrushed announcer saying the name of every card that's produced. This particular game is a random version of 'draw 3' Klondike but with a specific twist on the formula; instead of having to start over when you get deadlocked out of available moves, the game has the option of taking the currently selected card in the deck and 'getting Radical' with it, changing the game into a horizontal breakout clone where the ball hits against the card at the end of the stage and changes it to an available card on the playing field at random. It's a fascinating twist on an old classic, and is worth checking out just for the aesthetics.
Steam | itch.io | Playstation | Xbox Store | Nintendo e-Shop
From Joshua Hollendonner comes a brief but highly replayable rougelike! You play an elderly fellow using their trusty single-shot pistol to escape the grim confines of the Gutwhale. With a myriad of enemies, a bullet replacement system that feels similar to Heavy Bullets, and several hats to change game conditions, this game really has me coming back for more every time!
} Game Engine: Unity
A very pleasant point-and-click adventure game by Rusimitu, you play the treasure hunter Noracam on their quest for the treasure of the ruined city of Macaron. The style is charmingly lo-fi as you guide a clay figurine away from videos of Rusimitu's household pets and solving cryptic puzzles on the hunt for the treasure. It's fun!
Steam | GOG | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Mature | Steam Net Revenue: $74,202.00 74k | Game Engine: Unity
Having just got a recent sequel, SLUDGE LIFE is the story of a grafitti artist named Ghost living in sludge. It could technically be considered a town but it's really more of a set of pillars and wreckage in a midst of oil like that one level of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Meet weird people, spray some tags, scare off pidgeons, smoke cigarettes, it's all possible in SLUDGE LIFE!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Godot 
A duck taking their seat on the porcelian throne / goes and gets themselves flushed into the Toilet Zone! Made by Wolfenrahd for the first Miz Jam hosted by miziziz on itch.io, Toilet Zone is a tough little game where you have to make audicious use of the stream of water escaping from your toilet as a way of accelerating and decelerating within the walls of your confinment, locating the keys that will get you back home!
| Game Engine: Unity
Borislav just lost a flexing competition to decide the mayor of Swoleville for the next year, and only has 24 hours to contest the results! As fate would have it, an explosion far off in the distance and an unconscious man in a nearby clearing herald far more important matters. Heart is Muscle is not only a scientific fact but the game's central thesis as you have to balance your time wisely on the things that actually matter in the grand scheme, or risk misleading Borislav down a darker path. The story is extra sweet and has a delightful aesthetic, though the UI is spotty in places, but is still commendable for the dev's first time working in Unity. I enjoyed it, and I believe you will too!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: PICO-8 
A delightful example of the kind of work the Pico-8 engine is capable of, High Stakes is a fairly straightforward premise: you've had all but 20 mL of your blood stolen by vampires and must play card games to get the blood back. The gameplay loop is similar in card placement to Golf Card, but with the premise that each 9 card layout has eight numbered cards and one face card - the Vampire. Your goal is to turn over as many cards as possible without getting the Vampire per round, and the gameplay is about attempting to use the various tools at your disposal to figure out just where the Vampire is so that you can either avoid or stake them. Play your cards right and you'll be laughing all the way to the blood bank!
| Game Engine: Godot | Steam Net Revenue: $4,989,393.76 4.9m
"It's a sadistic game born almost entirely out of spite."- Ville Kallio
A man on the phone promises you a financial future as an activer shooter lays waste to the streets below your window. So it goes in the grotesque world of Cruelty Squad, an FPS game/finance sim in which you are assigned wetwork tasks by your handler that become increasingly unpredictable. At the risk of sounding pretentious, this is the purest example of a cyberpunk game I think might be possible in the modern sense. Every part of your very being is stripped and torn apart in the quest for money and continued employment, everything is a jumbled nightmare of textures bereft of meaning, and the social satire is biting. This game is very much an acquired taste but it's a taste worth acquiring. Check it out!
Zenith Into Maronarium is the fifth title in the Samozbor series, and is one of the most fascinating entries in the series. The Samozbor Empire, former Russian rebels who evacuated to another dimension, have begun a devestating assault on Earth and the only hope left is the survival of a pilot in her Kotel One. Episode 1, you take to the skies and shoot down an alien menace, while intermittedly exploring cave systems armed only with a rake. You successfully shoot down the alien queen and her envoy, only to crash your own plane and scramble into a featureless landscape for help. In Episode 2, you must traverse a series of platforming obstacles on foot in order to obtain a working ship and kill another member of the Samozbor forces, the one known as Winged Doom. Winged Doom appears to be a satanic creature, but in Episode 3, you are shot down once again while attempting to bring the entity known as Winged Doom under your command and hopefully swing the tide of the war in your favor. In addition to all of this is the option to play the Orika Protocol from the Options menu, which appears to be a training module/brainwashing system. In it, you play as the dev's mascot character Kotel in a clone of a Mario game but with more difficult movement, a more distressing aesthetic and what sounds like the Pilot sing-talking in Russian. The difficulty in each chapter ranges from trivial to patently unfair, but the efforts to move the Pilot are hampered both by an exceedingly glitchy interface and persistant chatter from an HQ that appear to be having several unrelated conversations. Every chapter you play has you only take one hit point of damage before dying, including the ship sections, and they all open with a scene of the Pilot in some sort of physical or mental distress. These elements all add up to a specific commentary on the senselessness of the conflict being presented, but in a way vastly different from how other war games illustrate their point. Any delusion of a power fantasy vanishes instantly once you realize a single enemy bullet rips through your ship like paper. This particular game is one that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since playing it!
| Game Engine: Stencyl 
The simplest way to explain Sparkles & Gems is to take the games Breakout, Columns, and Puyo Pop - and then throw them all together into a cotton candy machine. An enchantingly weird offering from resnijars, the core gameplay loop involves hitting cascading gems with a ball and paddle, aiming to hit as many gems that have three or more of the same type grouped together to destroy them. Gems with sparkles cause multiple gems to explode. You play against an opponent trying to make your paddle hit against a gem or block to win, and just like in Puyo Pop, you can get multipliers on your score to cause the blocks on your opponent side to multiply. The gems respawn as though by magic and will take a quick wit to handle them all! There's a Story Mode in which you get to know the characters of the game, from OAT the ferret plushie to Sandway the business horse, and presents a fun tale similar to a fighting game storyline. Treasure Mode is a game mode where you play rounds of Sparkles & Gems against the PC to rack up stocks, battery power, and jam to help improve your future runs, and to gain treasure in the form of special items you can use to decorate your room in Treasure Mode. Naturally there's a two player mode as well. This game is CUTE, and really really fun! Try it out!
| Game Engine: Unreal
You enter into the Fuzz Dungeon through a vault that appeared in your workplace and made the Sasquatch Sex Amulet disappear, along with your path back home. You have to go through several mini-games to recreate society within the Dungeon and get the amulet back. The game has a specific viewpoint on the cruelties of modern life and how the dreams of a new society are difficult to reconcile with the material realities we live with, but acknowledging in the player a desire for things to change for the better. A project by Jeremy Couillard, an accomplished artist who has been working since 2008, Fuzz Dungeon is a beautiful and fascinating work!
| Steam Net Revenue: $274,450.11 274k | Game Engine: LÖVE 
| Part of the Intravenous series (1st of 2)
As the sequel to this incredible game has been announced as of this writing (and it looks beautiful) I figured it was high time to put it on the list here. I still get chills playing this game, trying to figure out where precisely the enemy is coming from and how best to approach them. For all the allusions to the Hotline Miami games this style of gameplay may conjur up, Intravenous is a completely different animal. Stealth is the name of the game here, and the AI for your enemies are extrememly sophisticated. They'll perform safety sweeps, fall back, position themselves, work in groups...all things that make your decisions on how to progress carry more weight. The use of light in this game is wonderful, too - you can feel the sense of creeping dread as you hear footsteps of a patrol moving in and out - are they coming from the left or the right? - and all the while trying to find the best way to avoid detection. You want an intense action title? This is the one for you!
Call it a consequence of getting older if you like, but after a certain point this month after seeing several game announcements come and go, i realized that what I really want out of gaming is the baseline stuff that's been there the whole time - solitaire. While there is a fancy Microsoft solitaire that comes pre-installed on Windows 10, Big Klondike has a signifigant advantage of not making you have to look at ads for predatory gambling apps unless you pay for a subscription to a solitaire game. No thanks. This game has a choice between 'draw 1' and 'draw 3' styles, as well as regular and Vegas style Klondike. The cards make a very satisfying 'plap' as you turn them over, which is a small thing to note but it really does make a lot of difference on how good a card game feels to play. Actually, this game comes with a lot of small touches that feel really cozy, from a clock at the top right that lets you know how long you've spent on solitaire and help you keep time management in mind, to thoughtful little axioms that are included when you win a hand or exit the game. There was a point where I thought it wasn't actually possible to lose a game of solitaire, but Vegas style made a humble enby out of me. And, there's also paid DLC for spider solitare, freecell, pyramid, and tri-peaks. Overall, a delightful addition to anyone's game collection!
| Game Engine: Unity
Coming to us from our friends at Brainwash Gang and publisher Digirati comes a marvelous stage play in which you are the brightest star, for better or for worse. You are the Soothsayer, a hermit living in a dank corner of a great mountain. You are visited by many who seek the counsel from the stars, and you find yourself in an unflattering position. You become entwined with the fates of the members of the tribe seeking you out, and the voices you hear in the dark with no one present. The advice puts you at the mercy of those that would shoot the messenger. Are you truly helping anyone? At first, your advisors are your own conscious, but as the plot continues apace, you find yourself seeking guidance on decisions from the long-dead and the soon-to-be. It's a truly beautiful piece of artistry!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Lily is a nine-year-old girl on a mission to save someone trapped in a well! It's up to you to guide her around her homestead and find suitable materials to make a rope long enough to descend to the bottom. Made by Sam 'Ice' Woodrick, Lily's Well is a horror game with lovely easy-to-read CGA style graphics. It is also in the vein of titles like Space Quest in the sense that death is frequent and gruesome. This game merits a content warning as some truly awful things happen to Lily throughout the course of getting the True Ending. However, the game rewards sharp thinking and strategic use of your items to improve your odds of making it down the well intact. The story wraps you up like so many vines as what initially starts out as a call to action gradually reveals itself to be a mission to help a victim of nauseating abuse stop the cycle of trauma plaguing her. Are you up to the challenge?
| Game Engine: Unity | Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
There's no shortage of people that rebuke the 'walking simulator' for being a simple genre, but it takes true artistry to make a simple thing like choosing between one door or the other feel like a decision of immense gravity. How Fish Is Made finds in the role of a sardine flopping around without water out of a chute, and your day does not improve from there. You are given two choices, to go UP or DOWN, and the other denizens of the creature you find yourself in have some opinion or another on the choice. From here, the game becomes an absurdist play in which you flop haplessly from one scene to the next, hoping for something to make the 'decision' something concrete and finding yourself wanting. Wrong Organ have done something really special here, and is definitely a triumph of their skills as a developer team!
| Game Engine: MonoGame | Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Part of the Stanford Game Designers' Winter Game Jam 2022
Coming to us from Eli Vazquez, a junior developer with Yacht Club Games, Pong Invaders is a fun take on the Space Invaders formula! Your goal is to prevent errant meteors from crashing through your defenses and smashing into earth. You play as a paddle sitting above twelve separate blocks that the meteors destroy Breakout-style upon hitting them. You prevent this by two means - bouncing them off of your own paddle, and shooting them until they glow red and burst, which earns you a point. The game gets progressively more difficult as different sized meteors come into play, but you get a bonus triple shot if you successfully hit a bonus star on the game board. Can you get to fifty points?
| Steam Net Revenue: $41,671.29 41k
An absolutely delightful tale of absurdist dark humor from the dev behind Lethal Company, The Upturned is a physics based platformer in which you are the newest resident of The Upturned Inn. You're on a long and trecherous journey to make it to your room, with the companionship of the owner Ik your only constant. You'll be beset by all manner of pests and misfortune that you have to fight against using your wits and whatever self defense you can fling at your enemies. You'll have a blast with this!
Steam | itch.io | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ | Steam Net Revenue: $1,905,991.78 1.9m | Game Engine: Unity
Probably one of the coziest survival games I've ever played, Stacklands is a game in which you get a selection of cards to attempt to survive with. The primary goal is to keep your Villager cards alive (keeping them fed, improving their weapons, fighting off enemies) and gradually amassing a card base of buildings capable of fending off the attacks of an otherworldly enemy!...or you could always play in Peaceful Mode and forego all that silliness! The gameplay loop is as follows: each phase of player action is called a Moon, which is generally 2 minutes in length on Normal (the time constraints can be adjusted according to taste) and you have that length of time to craft card recipes/spend Coin cards to buy Booster Packs/fight enemies/etc. It's fun!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Part of the Clotilde Soffritti series (2 of 2)
Poor Clotilde! After getting a shabby deal on a used spaceship that almost sent her into a sun, she's been stranded on an asteroid with a zealous hermit! She'll have to use all of her wits to scramble together a solution to her problems (and the problems of others) to get herself back to civilization...and to be plagued with even more worries! Made by Lorenzo Boni as a sequel to Clotilde Soffritti in: Never Buy a Used Spaceship, Lorenzo brings their trademark cartooning chops in full force with beautifully rendered backgrounds, varied character design and clever puzzle solutions! It's a delight!
| Game Engine: OHRRPGCE 
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
A brief but fun game by Samanthuel Louise Gilson, FRANKEN is the story of a hero who's...honestly kind of getting the 'save the world' bit pushed onto them, but it's alright! What starts out as a farce gradually becomes a remarkably touching story at the end. Funny, satirical, and a really nice pick of music await you as FRANKEN draws near!
A delightful platformer by Robin Fox, dark kitty monsters have invaded the world, and it's time to don your witch hat and stop the invasion! Boasting a platforming style and upgrade system borrowing heavily from Kero Blaster, Downpurr includes the introduction of kitties you can rescue that in turn can be used to upgrade your powers! Can you find all the kitties and save the world?
| Steam Net Revenue: $99,424.26 99k
I had put off getting this one for a long time because the concept of a desktop simulator that wasn't Hypnospace Outlaw wasn't grabbing me the way it is now that I've become more interested in Solitaire, but that was largely my own loss because this is a magnificant addition to anyone's game library. Not only does the desktop itself have a lot of character by itself, but you begin to learn more and more about the person/people involved with getting it into your hands, which is remarkably in line with what Melos Han-Tani has spoken about with regards to the concept of ludoancestry. As for the games themselves, well:
20th Century Food Court - A highly technical automated food simulator where you use node editing and pipe puzzle logic to construct a conveyer belt to fulfill the people's need for nachos and pretzels. I'm going to be really straightforward and say that while I'm not particularly good at any of these games, this is the one i literally do not understand on a basic level. I can tell it's a blast to play, especially for those looking for something close to the aesthetic of old Nitrome flash games, but it's not for me.
Chipwizard™ Professional - This particular game is an edutainment title about how to properly construct components, disguised as a puzzle game, disguised as business software. The concept is to follow the specified parameters to make a piece of machinery that carries a charge in a specific way from an input to an output setting. I feel a sense of pride from doing something right in this game because it's a logic puzzle with real-world logic questions. I also just really love the aesthetic.
Dungeons & Diagrams - A D&D themed map-building puzzle game, the goal is to place walls inside a grid filled with monsters leading to a treasure chest. I'm not very good at it. You have a set amount of blocks you can put on each row and column of the dungeon, making the game a bit like a really nerdy Sudoku. It is a great slice of dungeon design that lets you really dig into the concept of making a dungeon out of scarce pieces.
HACK*MATCH - A matching game in the style of Puyo Pop, but with the wrinkle of shuffling a preset block layout as opposed to creating the layout with random blocks. You play as Hackmaster, a shounen hero commanding a small robot who can pick up one block at a time from the rapidly descending hoard of colorful blocks. This one has the added style of coming with it's own emulator, the JUiCEbox Arcade.
Kabufuda Solitaire - This version of solitaire really threw me for a loop at first, because I have zero familiarity with kabufuda, but is also a lot of fun. The concept is to arrange a deck of cards into sets of four in an empty space on the game board, with the caveat that you can only set like cards on top of one another and the top four shelves only take one card. The difficulity varies by how many slots are available at the top, but much like Sawayama Solitaire, it's entirely beatable if you just focus and stay strategic in your movements.
Sawayama Solitaire - As the name implies, this is the desktop's default solitaire program - at first sniff, it seems to be the basic straightforward Klondike solitaire, but with a highly inventive twist, where it's a 'draw 3' format, but with the wrinkle of having every card you draw stay on top of each other, with an extra space to lay a single card where the deck originally sat, similar to Freecell. Much like Freecell, I am also really, really bad at Sawayama solitaire, to the point where I thought the game was unwinnable in certain cases - the truth is that this is a solitaire clone that mainly just requires you to be strategic in a way that standard solitaire isn't. Because there is no 'undo' button, it makes the game a tough but fair challenge in comparision to the seemingly toothless 'draw 1' version I'm used to. It's a delightful version that really makes you feel accomplished when you finally win.
Steed Force Hobby Studio - This is the game that I associated Last Call BBS with the most before getting my hands on it. It's a fairly straightforward gunpla simulator that lets you build models from the fictional Steed Force anime, five in total. It is remarkably relaxing, and I quite frankly can't believe this isn't already a more common game type.
X'BPGH: The Forbidden Path - This is the game I vibed with the most, taking the commonplace puzzles up to this point and turning them into a grotesque gene splicing puzzle game. The goal is to fill a specified grid layout with a specific cellular growth of skin, bone, flesh, or metal. You have twelve slots to change the way the cells form inside the grid, but it will require logic to figure out which cell data is going to get the result you need.
Overall, this is a really in-depth, lovingly built game, where you can be playing this for hours and still not scratch the surface of what it's capable of. It even has a means of making your own websites in game by adding .js files! It's a lot to take in that this is to be the last game Zachtronics ever develops, I really feel like I missed out on something special by waiting so long to see this beautiful swan song.
Steam | Xbox | Playstation | Nintendo e-Shop
| Game Engine: Construct 3
In 2022, Alfie Wilkinson submitted their game Egglien to the BAFTA Young Game Designers competition, and won the Game Making Award for ages 10 to 14 beating out 9 other finalists. It's not often that we're able to see devs be celebrated this early in their life, and Egglien is certainly worthy of the praise. You play an alien who hears a voice telling her to save the world, many centuries after Earth's downfall, and gains the power to pump out a lot of eggs. This sets her and her friend off on an adventure to retrieve the Earth's core and fight whatever gets in their way! Your character mainly jumps and attacks by spewing eggs until she runs out, and landing anywhere allows her to restore her Egg Meter. Your goal in each level is to destroy all enemies without getting hit, which is easier said than done in some places. 40 levels and 5 bosses make this a delightful experience!
| Game Engine: GameMaker
Coming to us from Caiys and a spiritual successor to their earlier game Skelly Selest, Boneraiser Minions is a auto-battler squad builder in which you control the wretched Boneraiser, incapable of attacking by themselves but taking bones from fallen enemies to bolster their ranks into fearsome bedlam! There are a multitude of ways to bolster your ranks, from surrounding yourself with demons to giants to melded gibbous horrors! Fight through 10 waves of enemies to defeat the King, run through a gauntlet of settings to reach the Queen Gigalicious, or play a rousing card game based on your various troops of the undead!
| Game Engine: Unity
A seemingly direct gas station visit goes terribly awry in Convenient as you find yourself in the clutches of a very dangerous individual! While being a fairly straightforward horror game, the main selling point is feigning captivity to avoid being murdered, but it's got quite a bit more hiding under the hood if you know where to look! If you know what to do, you can resolve a good ending very quickly, but since it's release Jonm has been adding more and more optional segments to the game, such as new areas to explore, new puzzles and new endings!
Amid a spree of homicides and abductions in the 60s in the city of New Grandewel, an officer goes into a desperate search for answers for what is causing the mayhem, and gets much more than they bargained for. A solo dev effort by Jason Smith and published by 3D Realms, CULTIC: Chapter One is a worthy title in the vein of Blood, but without the limitations of the Build engine. You'll be faced against cultists and various eldritch monstrosities in your hunt for the truth, but thankfully you have a growing arsenal of weapons and an impressive jump height! Most enemies will go down with enough bullets but if you want to conserve resources, headshots are the name of the game. Fire is also a useful ally to get rid of clusters of enemies at once, but is of course very situational. Can you get to the heart of what's happening in New Grandewel before it's too late?
One might call it unseemly to recommend a game where you get to break blocks by getting incredibly fat, but I'm a grown adult and I know what I'm about. The first game by Plubber/Plubsoft to be featured on Steam, Doughball Descent is yummy arcade rougelike fun where the goal is to eat a bunch of food in a descending dungeon grid full of sentient food and traps galore. You play a nondescript 'dough-cat' who changes shape the more pounds they rack up. You move through the level by either breaking the blocks underneath you by jumping, or by doing a 'belly bump' to your left or right. There are 5 dungeons with 3 levels apiece, with a random breather level where you can spend your weight to gain either new items, alter the dungeons' rules, or get a new power to make the game easier. I really have to give kudos to the sound design in this game, it makes the overall experience really delightful. I'm very excited to see what Plubsoft does next!
Steam | itch.io | Nintendo e-Shop
| ESRB Rating: Everyone | Steam Net Revenue: $15,612.29 15k
This is a game that I am admittedly REALLY late to the party for, but this is a really staggering piece of post-Rareware art. Made by Marcus Horn and ported by Sebestian Kuepper, Super Kiwi 64 is a game where you play as a kiwi bird with a set of goggles and a backpack that can turn into several items. Gameplay-wise, you have a lot of options for mobility like a Ninja Gaiden-esque wall jump and a glide - the camera is really responsive to your movements as well, which is always well-appreciated in a platformer like this. You have little in the way of offensive manuevers but as you learn fairly quickly, you don't really need them. In a similar vein to 'creepypasta' games of this sort, the bright and cheery atmosphere is disguising a dark story of religious zealotry as the very first level presents you with a skeleton posed as though meditating inside the remains of an oak tree without any explanation. As you continue through the levels, you witness other pieces of the seemingly dead civilization that you're exploring, crawling out from the sewers that act like your hub world like some kind of Ninja Turtle, or possibly The Punisher. The graphics are a real stand-out feature of the game as it carefully nails the specific aesthetic of games like Banjo Kazooie and Jet Force Gemini (the ending scene even includes a nod to the ending of Star Fox 64) while also working in badass visuals that evoke imagery like Dark Souls, Evangelion and even Zardoz. I really can't recommend this game enough!
| Steam Net Revenue: $82,246.38 82k
Chop Goblins is a short but sweet FPS title by David Szymanski in which you accidently release a plague of Chop Goblins upon the world (think the gremlins from the titular Gremlins movies but with periodontitis) and are stuck having to deal with them as they get up to unsanctioned demolition and time travel shenanigans! This one's real goofy fun, five levels in total but there's plenty to do and several remix levels to chop into!
| Game Engine: RPG Maker VX Ace | Steam Net Revenue: $56,160.04 56k
Melody is a young lady on Sapphire Island, hopelessly in love with Allison and finding herself embroiled in the life of an adventurer she's not at all sure she's ready for. To make matters worse, the guild she's working with jusssst might have messed things up REALLY bad. Can Melody and her friends pull through? SLARPG comes to us courtesy of Bobby Schroder and is an absolute delight to play. The manner in which the game mechanics are given much-needed versatility in the form of spellbooks that unlock specific skills based on the holder helps make or break certain encounters. What more can I say? They're lesbians, they're animals, and you better believe they're super!
This WAD is a beautiful set of levels made by veteran Doom mapper Fernito! Lateral thinking and perseverance is rewarded here, more than in some other maps - one main example is when you have two sets of levers to activate to get keys, but one of them is broken, and so you have to work out how to get to the key without it. Forgotten Foundry is one of the most impressive maps both in scope and thematic structure. UAC Resort is a fun Doomcute map leading into the final two maps where the gloves really come off! You're in for a wild ride with this one!
| ESRB Rating: Teen | Game Engine: GameMaker
Uh oh, Peppino is up to his ears in debt and now an evil pizza is threatening to destroy his pizzeria! So begins Pizza Tower, a game that caused such a splash at the beginning of 2023 that its ripple effects can be felt in every cartoony stylized platformer that's come after. The sheer amount of mobility and handling in this game cannot be understated, every movement feels fluid and every punishment feels earned. A vast majority of the game's mechanics can be traced wholesale back to the Wario platformers, but the influence of cartoons on the game design is undeniable. Every level features a ton of sight gags and off-kilter jams to make every moment in this game a treasure. It also boasts a strong modding community to swap out Peppino with a growing roster of fanmade character sprites, like Eevee from Pokemon or Olivia from I Wani Hug That Gator!
| Game Engine: Unreal
Aw jeez, you crash landed your boat on an island infested with demonic forces and the undead...luckily, your arm is a shotgun! Presented by Merlino Games as a very different tone from their other projects, the gameplay is simple but intuitive. You're a delightful pill-shaped creature with a shotgun in place of a right arm trying to find parts to repair your boat, among other things. The game is isometric perspective and the aiming on the gun is a little tricky to get down pat, but I'd have issues firing a shotgun from my bicep too. Shoot zombies into gibs, explore a failed Helltech installation, rescue a spherical dog - it's fun!
Steam | itch.io | Apple Store | Google Play
| ESRB Rating: Everyone | Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Unity
As we enter into a period of history where climate catastrophe becomes an unavoidable fact of life, it becomes moral necessity for those making entertainment to have some kind of position with which to remark on the path our world is taking. Enter Beecarbonize, a free-to-play climate simulator by Charles Games in conjucture with People In Need. You're faced with four Sectors, and a bar constituting your emission level. With every card you add to any given sector, you either speed up the creation of Tokens that can be spent on other cards, or add/remove emissions from the steadily climbing bar hearding ever-growing increases in temperature. A somber piece of edutainment but managing a working model of a world with zero emissions will always feel satisfying!
Note: This game is designed to run in GZDoom.
A truly incredible work of art, this one! Coming out in March of 2023, it very rapidly made a splash as it toyed with the conceptual 'first level modelled after a modder's house' and turned the concept into a discussion on grief, loss, and what we do when the only thing we have left is what our loved ones leave behind. The full game needs both the WAD and PK3 files to function as intended, but running the WAD by itself is an immensely disquieting experience as moving through MyHouse gunning down enemies produces a grotesque feeling of vouyerism in the player. The link to the game also includes a 'dev log' of the modder's life during the game's production which adds some truly delightful insight into the material. I won't spoil anything here, this is one that has to be experienced completely blind, but there's a reason this game won a 2023 Cacoward. Highly recommended!
A powerful love letter to the Love-de-Lic games and the result of years of diligent work on smaller titles on itch.io, Happy Shabby Games has a real winner of a flagship title on their hands! You play as a cursed super-intelligence put into the body of a dead soldier by a godlike alien in the middle of the Indian Ocean. As dark a premise as that is, the game couldn't be further from dark, as this has the aesthetic touches more in line with moon: Remix and Pikmin as you rescue 'mons' from an underground structure via elevator and do fun little errands for them, develop new powers, take photographs, eat beans - it's all incredibly charming, and very worthy of your time!
After having bought this game on the promise of more solitaire than I could dream of, the fine people at TreeCardGames have more than delivered. There's an absolutely mind-boggling amount of solitaire and patience games to choose from here, not to mention a multitude of card types and playing mats, but all of the games involved use the basic French card deck setup, with exceptions for Forty Thieves style games or really any game involving 104 cards or more. Solitaire from all over the world is in this pack, and they all range from 'so easy it nearly plays itself' to 'so hard it makes you question the very nature of solitaire rules'. Among the bells and whistles in this collection is a random solitaire selection; a Solitaire of the Day that allows you to explore the sheer density of solitaire available layer by layer; a handy-dandy internal guide to the rules and origins of the solitaires you're playing; an autoplay feature that goes so fast that you can blink and the game's over if you're not paying attention; and, achievements that track both your win/loss ratio and little awards for beating solitares a certain number of times. I can think of no better endorsement than the fact that I've been playing this program's daily solitaire every day since I got it. You gotta try this one out!
| Game Engine: Unreal | Steam Net Revenue: $7,852.25 7k
You are Molly, a ghost in the machine that's been "given" new "purpose" as a character in an FPS game filled with other dead amnesiacs, the titular Arena of the Dead, hosted by a man known only as the Wizard. Aside from the expected arsenal of weapons, you also get a double jump, a wall jump, and a slide as your basekit, with other powers downloadable off of the in-game web browser. The browser and the information it gives you is very reminiscent of Hypnospace Outlaw, as you trawl through worrisome news reports and forum posts full of machismo and unrestrained id. While being obviously influenced by the Unreal series in terms of aesthetics, the game is pulling from a lot of influences ranging from 1984, Series 7: The Corrections, and No Players Online as you're immersed in a gripping story about interstellar corporate power, the intentional diminishment of the value of human life, and the evil that nostalgia is capable of. The environment around you can turn in an instant from the welcoming and familiar to cold and alien as you're far from the only person interested in the acts of the Wizard. You'll be doing yourself a favor picking this title up!
| Game Engine: Unity | Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Part of the Retro Game Jam 2023
Now this one's a real treat for the eyes! Made by borbware for Retro Game Jam 2023, at the indie game dev center the HIVE in Turku, Finland, Oscilloids is effectively an Asteroids clone but with the added effect of using Unity plugins to simulate the look of an oscilliscope. It really feels like playing on a proper vector CRT! The ship's movement is not as touchy as some versions of Asteroids and both of your guns have a decent enough range where you can shoot every asteroid off the map without even using the thruster. There is a minor problem where the ship will occasionally spawn directly inside an asteroid at higher levels, but it's from a two day game jam, you know? I had a lovely time with it, and I think you'll like it too!
Got some classic Doom mapping this go-around! Currently a single episode called The Phobos Faux Pas, it is a wonderful standalone episode on its own merits! Plenty of consistant challenges, especially after you hit Map 04: Canyon Station. This is where ARottenKomquat and LadyNims demonstrate how to make every enemy dangerous even in a wide arena setting, and the danger only escalates from there! One of my favorite maps is the secret level Imps and Blimps, where it's an Icon of Sin fight with the added touch of having only imps and cacodemons to fight - a simple combo turned deadly once the map is choked with projectiles going in every direction! It's good stuff!
| Game Engine: RPG Maker | Steam Net Revenue: $20,379.07 20k
An RPG centering around the characters from Japanese artist BAYACHAO and their kemono character franchise Makemon. You play as Kohaku, a mischievous kumiho who is trapped in Iizaka shrine and accidentely releases evil spirits that they end up having to recapture before the Shinhwa Festival while also dealing with their bad reputation around town. Combat is functionally non-existant but you use transformations to deal with obstacles and puzzle bosses. You also are able to grant emas as a way of completing side-quests and getting extra items. It's cute as hell!
Itself a mockup of an improved variation on MAP33: Betray available only on Xbox, the work to make something palatable out of the concept is on full display as the level is just a really well put together map full of fun tricks and traps. One of my faves is the use of rising and falling walls allowing for cover from the Spider Mastermind's hitscan attacks. It's jam-packed with enemies that can otherwise be blasted apart with several well-placed rockets - the ability to deal with the challenges presented is awfully generous. Check it out!
THE S-BLADE HAS A HACKBLOOD CHARGE
| ESRB Rating: Mature | Steam Net Revenue: $69,968.22 69k
Zane Lofton, the 14 year old in charge of the best website on Hypnospace, is all grown up and made an incredible video game! Based off of a mod of Doom Kataklysm, this is a FPS in the classic 'boomer shooter' mold. You play as Zane, the X-Slayer setting off on a quest for vengeance against the Psyko Syndicate with the help of his friend and mentor Mikey Sykey, and the friendly rats that occupy the Steel Sewer. You fight sentient feces, weed smokers, werewolves, evil brains, and other unsavory purple threats in your hometown of Boise, Idaho. 10 levels of mayhem await you, X-Slayer!
| Full Episode WAD (E1M1 - E1M9)
Making a WAD primarily with Doom I's enemies is tricky business, it's generally accepted that Doom II's expanded enemy roster was crucial in rounding out the difficulty of any WADs that came after. Chris Kendell takes up the challenge of making the limited enemy palette work to great effect here! This WAD makes a slight change in scenery as the demon-infested UAC base isn't on Earth or on Phobos, but a real-life TNO oribiting Neptune within the Kuiper belt, known as 486958 Arrokoth. The first thing you may notice that's different from a fully vanilla Doom WAD is how the replacement sounds for the guns are delightfully meaty. The map design is very modern in the sense that every misstep is a major setback in your chances of survival. There's ammo aplenty, but only small medpacks here and there, with the big stimpacks not showing up until the second map and even then only rarely making an appearance. The maps have very clear and readable signposting to help the player navigate to what they need to progress. Seargents waiting behind corners and boxes littering the environment to fill you with buckshot is a favorite trick of this WAD, so remember to check those corners! The secret level is mercifully easy to find as long as you're paying attention. Each level has what I like to call a setpiece battle, where a weapon drop in the middle of an arena opens up a slew of enemies to kill with said weapon drop. This particular WAD is really good with rising amounts of spectacle based on your arsenal, heating up the size of encounters upon getting the chaingun and turning into all out Doom upon getting the Rocket Launcher. The penultimate level is a map mimicking the layout of the first level as a bookend. The latter half of the WAD suffers a bit from the door problem but the whole WAD is good about giving you multiple options to strafe and pin down your enemies with supressing fire. Highly recommended!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: GameMaker
This one's a real treat! Performing a twist on the story formula not dissimilar to Moon RPG, you play as a horde of skeletons trying desperately to prevent a knight from becoming overlevelled by destroying treasure before they can reach it, and keeping your fellow undead out of harm's way. Stepford and AndyL4nd prove a formidable combo along with Dougle/Oklahome, JPabuga, and music by Milkypossum as their style of art and programming makes your skeleton pals at both points adorable and nerve wracking as you point your mouse to their destination and hope they don't trip or bump into walls. The knight tracking you down is also relatively easy to distract, but you're in a race against the clock and saving everyone is truly impossible. After several levels, you come to see if your efforts were enough to prevent the knight from killing your boss. All in all, a really terrific game to come out of Game Maker's Toolkit 2023 Jam!
'Ichi nichi' being romaji for 'one day', the central premise of this megaWAD is that it's comprised of levels that were all made in one day, and it's a triumph! The limited time of production means that the levels never outstay their welcome, and you can breeze through each level as quickly as the original Doom II if you're staying on top of things. The weapon distribution is such that half a level in you're thinking 'I could really use something stronger than this'? Boom, a Super Shotgun/Rocket Launcher/etc. The maps are a delight to stomp through and everything feels great to play!
The 14th release from Joe Cassavaugh of his Clutter series, Clutter RefleXIVe is an absolutely titanic number of puzzle games, ranging from sedate to nerve-wracking, but always a lot of fun. Joe's spent a lot of time on this title, but the biggest piece of note is his 100-level long Story Mode in which he goes in depth about his life and how he came to make the Clutter series, along with where he plans to take it. Thoughtful, engaging, and challenging, I love this game!
Steam (Standalone) | Steam (Dread X Collection 2) | itch.io (Dread X Collection 2)
| ESRB Rating: Teen |
Hunting games as a whole don't get a lot of opportunity to shine in a horror context, but David Szymanski is here with a piece of art originally made for the Dread X Collection 2. The premise is...well, 'simple' is the wrong word for it, but your beloved has been mutilated by an unexplained act of violence. Your goal as their...widow??...is to hunt squirrels in the grove in which you live, and staple them to their skinless body in a direct affront to God and good taste. The gameplay itself is very much in line with an ordinary hunting game, albeit with the limitations that comes from a solo dev effort, but it is very rewarding to line up a shot and pick off a squirrel from yards away. But beware, because there are many hazards out there for an enterprising hunter like yourself, and don't forget...GOD IS COMING.
| Game Engine: GameMaker
I'm absolutely enamored with the worlds that Yeo creates, and Fading Afternoon is no exception. The best way I can describe it is as a thematic bookend to their previous work, The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa. You play as Seiji Maruyama, a yakuza fresh out of jail. From the outset, the player prompts themselves to think of this as a mythic Kiryu Kazama character as they speak with their aniki, Azuma-san. But you learn very quickly that the story of what family controls what part of the city is not, in fact, what the game is about. Without getting into spoilers, Fading Afternoon is about how a person acts when the end is upon them. It's not something anyone talks about, but the way Yeo carefully used game mechanics to make you feel the immense weight on Seiji's shoulders - the way you walk through all these familiar areas of town without any run button, watching strangers living their lives, seeing couples at the disco embracing in a slow trance, the slow comprehension that the most human relationships Seiji has are all transactional...this is a truly beautiful work, and I can't recommend it enough.
| Game Engine: Unreal
This game is heavily compared to the likes of Postal 2 and for not unfair reasons - it even shares a publisher with the makers of Postal: Brain Damaged, but 77p egg: Eggwife can best be described as being trapped inside a 2005 era Newgrounds flash cartoon. It is immensely puerile in subject matter, but make no mistake, the crew behind 77p Studios spared no expense to make this game a wonderful experience. Over 10 weapons, immense interactivity from being able to electrocute yourself urinating on a wall plug-in to burning down your house by leaving the oven on, a sense of humor that plays peek-a-boo with your expectations...I had a great time with this game, and I believe you will too!
Developed by Sigyaad Team, a one-man doujin circle and producer of many Touhou themed visual novels since 2020, Twilight Town: A Cyberpunk FPS is a fine total conversion mod for Doom in which you play as one of two characters, a character known only as Girl and a lonely man named Ikuro. After Ikuro is fired upon by unknown assailants, a police officer comes to them with a deal to get revenge and clean up the streets of Twilight Town in the process. The movement and humor in the game takes some getting used to, but the game has clearly had a lot of love put into it. Good stuff!
| ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+
As of February 26th, 2024, Die Gute Fabrik has halted production on all upcoming projects, so this entry is in memoriam as the last game from their studio.
From Die Gute Fabrik, the developers behind Where Is My Heart? and Mutiozone, Saltsea Chronicles is an incredible story of love and the things that complicate it. The post-apocylapse has come and gone, leaving the planet as a cluster of islands with the remainder of humanity living upon these islands in reverence of the sea, not unlike the setting of the Earthsea books. In this world, the motley crew of the De Kelpie have come together to locate their missing captian who seemed to have disappeared into thin air. You can really tell just how much work and polish went into the writing of this game, it feels like a cozy book you tuck into right before bedtime. I recommend everything on this page but this particular one is fantastic.
Steam | GOG | Playstation | Xbox Store | Epic Games Store
| ESRB Rating: Mature
The game opens with the grim report: your youngest has just witnessed an act of brutal violence against a friend of the family, at the hands of the imperialist Birds. So begins the story of Laika and her struggle for survival in a world where all she can do is escort the fallen to the afterlife. The gameplay is a fasincating take on the Metroidvania formula in the introduction of an unstoppable motorcycle, which gives the game a captivating twist to the movement and environments reminisent of both physics-based platforming and games like Sonic Spinball. Absolutely give this one a shot!
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Unity
The abrupt suicide of Wálter Martins has sent the program Teleforum and their parent network ComuniTV into a tailspin. A reporter named Julianne and her cameraman Silva have decided to visit the home of his widow Adriana to get further information about what happened...and the tape that drove Wálter to take his own life. TELEFORUM is a truly intense story about what we become in the relentless pursuit for knowledge and prestige, and how even caution can be worthless in the face of a reality that changes the rules on you at any given second, how even enlightenment cannot save us. The MONUMENTAL team put their experience on multiple types of horror games in other studios on full display, as you can see influence from everything like The Ring, REC, the Backrooms videos by Kane Pixels, and so forth.
| Steam Net Revenue: $51,776.10 51k
WOW, is this one a wild ride! You're the newest resident in Bright City, and through a series of mishaps amd debasement, you end up in an employment situation right out of Tales From The Crypt. I would be remiss to spoil the plot of the game further, so I'll just say this game's story and humor has the twists and turns of a mountain road. The gameplay borrows heavily from Warioware with audicious use of minigame mechanics both in and out of combat, but the combat really is the game's crown jewel - Brodhy really has a mastery of how to make the fighting in an RPG engaging and receptive, using the sort of tricks that Undertale used and pushing them in fun new directions. Please check this one out if you haven't already!
You play as Cyl, the last line of defense for humanity against an undefinable threat posed by an enemy known as Picayune that will destroy human life as we know it. Created by the same people who made Underlevel (coded by Stepford, art by AndyL4nd and music by Milkypossum), Picayune Dreams is a remarkable blend of bullet hell and bullet heaven genres as Cyl is beset by strange and mystical enemies armed with an ever-growing arsenal of weapons and add-ons to their person, all displayed as additions to her code base. Each level is selected by the player in a movement-based segment where you pick both your level of agression to go against and the type of enemy you want to deal with for the rest of the run, and as opposed to a timer-based system you have a 'mortality rate' that produces a boss encounter every 5 percent. There's also the nice touch of the progress bar for your XP level being on all four corners of the screen instead of just one, with is such an ergonomic solution to the problem of losing track of the bar that i'm shocked it isn't standard practice. The story is a sad but impressive one, as we are forced to reckon with just who all these characters are and what they're doing in the void of space. It's good!
From the dev behind Soma Spirits comes a delightful adventure as the plucky-yet-insecure Zosma gets himself into a heap of trouble and has to scale a gigantic tower with the help of a mysterious witch and an even more mysterious cat-slime. This RPG has a remarkable amount of thought put into its game mechanics to make knowledge of how to synergize your attacks pivotal to success in later battles. Very good stuff!
This is easily one of the highest end 2D live steel combat games on the market. You will feel like a badass samurai cutting people down, and more importantly, the game mechanics have been honed to such great effect that every play session introduces a new concept you'd never even considered. You can use the blood from your blade to blind your enemies, you can kick up fire in some situations, blocking and dodging gives new opportunities for strikes - there's never a dull moment with this game.
Steam | Nintendo e-Shop | Playstation | Xbox
| ESRB Rating: Everyone | Game Engine: LÖVE
There's been a lot of talk about this game encouraging a lot of young people to gamble, which is amusing not only because of how many game devs had to get their start working for casinos and other gambling companies and how that informs their work, but also because of the nature of this game itself. This is not poker, this is the Calvinball version of poker. The concept is you have a selection of blinds to play through, with a set number of hands and discards to beat the blind with, and a standard 52 card deck to do it with. You earn chips based on the type of cards played, all basic stuff, right? Then you get the Joker cards which affect every hand you play in unique ways, and you have Tarot cards that alter your deck, Planet cards that alter the levels and multipliers of hands played, you have vouchers, foil cards, holographic, polychrome, celestial cards and they all alter the game to the point where Balatro becomes not a gambling simulator but an exercise in strategy and lateral thinking. You can absolutely play the game like standard poker and it works to a degree, but once you reach a point where a two pair is getting you more chips than a straight flush, you really do start to feel like a joker. I really cannot recommend this one enough, it's one of the first games to really scratch that itch that Zachtronics solitaire did.
| Game Engine: Unity
Self-described as a cozy Souls-like, those that grew up with Beyond Oasis will feel right at home with Tails of Glimmervale! What started as an early demo called Project Rootbound, the team at Corebreak have found critical success as Tails of Glimmervale won Best Visual Design at the 2024 Norwegian Game Awards, and it's not hard to see why! You play Willow, an adventuring lynx who has come to Glimmervale seeking fame and fortune. But what will he truly find in this search that's leading him ever closer to a castle long forgotton to time?
Developed by Knitting Games and having the poor luck of releasing just a month after Balatro, Bingle Bingle is very much a similar approach to a gambling game in which you turn the rules of roulette on their ear and add in new components to the situation - balls with strange powers, switching out pockets, levelling up chips and bets, all in the name of outmatching a score to beat in every round.
| Doom Mod: Single Level WAD
This WAD kicks ASS. It may be a single level but it's so merticulously textured and designed, so thoughtfully paced and plotted that it feels like a full standalone episode! ORiginally created as part of Endoom's 2024 Mapping Contest, Slavius turns the common trappings of the Doom level into a deranged abandoned city block housing a dark and terrible secret. On top of this is the addition of the Auto Rifle. in place of the stock Chaingun, which handles beautifully. Can you find out what happened to this town and cult overrunning it?
| Game Engine: RPG Maker
Translating literally to 'Upland' and generally referring to Upper Hungary, Felvidek is a fascinating entry in the world of RPG Maker games not only in it's art direction but writing as well. Created by Vlado Ganaj and Jozef Pavelka, with the English translation by Stanislav Kužila, Felvidek is the story of an alcoholic knight named Pavol who, at odds with the lord of his manor and his wife, finds himself embroiled in strange and eldritch doings in 15th century Slovakia. The dialogue is deliciously in line with the tone of the story and it's hard to not get invested in the plight of this manor and the calamity beset upon them.
; Argentina (cobcris) 
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A | Game Engine: Flash
Don't you just hate a bland breakfast? It's the most important meal of the day, y'know? You wanna start it off right! Luckily there's Los Toatadores to save the day! You play a piece of toast riding in their trusty toaster steed, jumping by popping out of the mechanism and shooting outlaw beans with your six-gun. Clear out the cereal boxes and shoot the targets in your way so you can get the sugar rush you're looking for!
After its unexplained closure nearly a decade ago, an urban explorer we only know by the screen handle 'eEnsign' goes to investigate and learn the shocking truth of what could cause a Disney-level theme park to shutter its doors. The love and attention to detail in this game is evident as even cursory glances around the park reveal a level of internal disconcent and anti-ergonomic design processes that causes the park to fail long before the horror began. Your constant companion is Rambley Raccoon as he leads you around meeting his 'friends' and trying desperately to dress up the nightmare the two of you are currently in.
Over/Under is a simple numbers game - you're either over or you're under. But there's an interesting undercurrent of powerlessness in the player of a game like this, the realization that the rules of probability are not on your side. Tim Oxton mines this undercurrent for massive horror potential in FLATHEAD, as you have to continually guess correctly over or under at a deranged slot machine to get 'cells' to escape from your confinement. On either side of you are what appear to be people (what used to be people?) that are your sole companions in this dark journey as you are gradually stalked by an unknown enemy looking to make you bet your life...
A delightful casual arcade game by Noah and Nat King in which you shoot pool on a square playing board, but with the end goal of matching similar colored balls together to make larger balls and increase your score! The game ends when you have >= 75 balls on the board, and the idea is to get as many balls matched together to increase your score before you get to that point. It starts off reasonably easy but as the balls get larger and take up more of the square, the more you'll need some real strategic pool shots to get two like-balls to connect. The balls increase in size and change both facial expression and color from across the color spectrum, leading to the coveted Pink Ball, the biggest the ball can get. It's a very relaxing title and a lot of fun!
itch.io | Gamejolt | Mario Fan Games Galaxy
| Game Engine: Unity | Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
This is a very fun game in which you surf along the ocean on the magic carpet from Super Mario World 2, attempting to stay on the carpet for as long as possible before wiping out! The levels in Journey Mode are 1000 meters long and are made up of a series of obstacles to overcome without hitting the end of the screen or losing all health. Unlike other infinite runners like Flappy Bird, this one is very generous with second chance mechanics like the use of shields from Sonic 3 to help in tight situations. About 500 meters into a level there is an enemy who stays on the screen and acts as a extra push-and-pull factor to punish sloppy play. Every couple of levels there's an additional boss battle to really put you through your paces! There's lots of extra costumes to collect as well as an online leaderboard! It's excellent!
| Game Engine: Unity
Here we have a Metroidvania coming to us from Gami Studio! You are a Deviator, a creature with a face like a loading screen and one of many who were created by the Originator to dispel 'twisted spirits' from the living world. In all honesty, the comparisions to Hollow Knight aren't made in jest, this is very much a version of Hollow Knight, though not an outright copy as you might think. Tonally, Deviator is more hopeful and playful with the material it's working from. Mechanically, however, the game is nearly identical - that said, the game heavily emphasizes a parry mechanic in which attacks are deflected and immediately parried. Bottom line? If you liked Hollow Knight, you'll like Deviator!
| Game Engine: LÖVE | Part of the Intravenous series (2nd of 2)
It would be gauche of me to introduce this game without letting you know that this game's story was written by Roman after the tragic loss of his father Vladimir to Covid, and as such, should be considered as an act of reverence first and foremost. You are a hitman named Sean, a young buck who plays by a fairly strict moral code, which ensnares him in a massive political conspiracy after one fateful hit. This sequel is a remarkable step up from the first game, as Roman has instituted a lot of crucial QOL changes like gun modification and levelling systems. There are ENORMOUS ways to modify any guy you acquire to suit your playstyle, from attachments specifically complimenting night vision to magazines built for quick reaction time. He has alsointroduced levels that factor in civilian targets and certain levels in which non-combatants can actually make your life harder, thereby working into the main premise of the game's plot in a beautiful way as you have to rationalize whether to choke out a bystander or suck it up and work around their patrol paths. This sequel also introduces the implementation of rescue missions, where the decision to pacify or kill affects your opportunities to effectively exfiltrate, as the person you're escorting can't go the same routes that you can. This sequel is a true masterwork, I can't recommend it enough!
Picture this: you awake from a medically induced coma to your new life on a new planet! Less than twenty-four hours later, you're shoving a used hypodermic needle the length of your forearm into the face of a gang member, and he's STILL coming after you. Welcome to CORPUS EDAX, an imsim in the vein of Deus Ex by solo dev Luis G. Bento, which is such a massive accomplishment that the game would belong on the recommended page even if it wasn't a blast to play, though it very much is! The game is listed as a Melee RPG and it lives up to that title as being the first cyberpunk game I've ever played without a single gun involved - everyone's slugging it out with their fists, bricks, mops, and whatever they can get their hands on. The game also uses a homebrew variant of GURPS called AGNIS - Allure, Grit, Nerd, Intuition, and Strength - and a set of seven skills that all modify gameplay. Upgrading Stealth lets you creep up on people more effectively, Combat improves your fighting ability, et cetera. There's also modifiers that allow you to hack and pick locks more easily, both of which have unique mini-game sections for doing both! Once you get acclimated to the setting and how the gameplay works, the story becomes a bit of a linear gauntlet as you push a violent campaign through a laundry list of corrupt leaders all the way to the top like Joan d'Arc. But who are you really working for? Who's this man in your dreams giving you instructions? What will be the ultimate fate for the planet known as Corpus Edax?
| Game Engine: Unity
From the moment the game starts, Wrong Organ lets you know they're not pulling any punches with Mouthwashing. The story of the doomed Tulpar vessel is going to be a hard one to swallow, but the game is so lovingly crafted and attentive to the finer details that would normally be lost in the shuffle of a concept like this. The sheer absurdity of the situation couples with the mounting dread and antipathy bubbling under the surface of the crew that the nightmare that ensues makes for a delightfully unpleasant experience!
| Game Engine: Godot | Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
akabos is the game about a dog who hates squares and rectangles, and needs you to pet him to rid the world of them! Toss away any reservations you might have about clicker games - this one has a lot of personality and surprises waiting for you! If you give it the time it needs, it goes from an absurdist nightmare to a heartfelt message at the end that personally blew me away! It's a real delight!
We've got a delightful gardening sim this time! You play the new gardener meant to look after the estate. What happened to the old gardener? Don't worry about it! Use your trusty shears to trim the grass and the hedges, and see if you can't get your watering can and trowel back to spruce up the place. You'll come across polaroids across town to help you solve certain puzzles relating to your living situation, and if you want to sleep soundly with a job well done, it's imperative to be on the lookout for them! A lovely game with just enough menace and mystery to keep things lively!
The Sniper Killer is on the loose! The tale of Sniper Killer plays out a week after the events of Henry Hoare's previous game Bloodwash and plays out from the perspective of muiltple protagionists. The two main player characters are the Sniper Killer himself, and Officer Comardy. You get an in-depth portrait of both men as they struggle under the weight of their responsiblities, and a dark force looming over them both. Splattering people's heads creates a satisfying spray of eyes and teeth in a comedic fashion, and as your skills mount, so do your target requirements, and some problems require real out of the box solutions. You should give this one a shot!
| Game Engine: SHMUP Creator 
The air is thick with insect life, and this bear's going to get their honey by any means necessary! A tate shump by Yoshida Hiroaki (吉田博昭) of Studio Codori and the studio's first game on Steam, Bear Shooter provides a modest challenge to players with five levels of shooting through waves of giant bugs! The patterns themselves are a bit scattershot and most enemies go down in one hit, with some notable exceptions. One specific enemy type that's likely to give you trouble is the bat, who moves slow and takes a lot of hits but also gives smaller and more dangerous enemies to punish uncautious playing. The bosses themselves are straightforward to beat, usually requiring micro-dodging to deal with effectively. I had a good time with this, and I believe you will too!
| Game Engine: Unity | Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
Brought to us by xena-spectrale and Spawn Kill Studios, DEMON COMPASS is a wonderful game about fighting through trauma and the ways in which success in that fight comes with a heavy price. You play as three separate individuals within the ongoing PROVOKER story universe, whose connecting thread is that they all come into possession the DEMON COMPASS. The compass itself is an ornate figure with the vague appearance of a dream catcher within its center, working as both a flashlight and a means of self-defense. The narrative/design comparisons to Silent Hill are unavoidable, but the game is also heavily influenced thematically by works like Devil May Cry. Play through the story campaigns, and maybe play around in Exploration mode to sight-see the world map! I really liked this one!
| Game Engine: GameMaker
The devil is jealous of Dynamite Anton's pigmentation, and sends an army of malevolent moles to steal his Spirits and coax him into a fight! As you may well have guessed, ANTONBLAST looks and plays like a cartoon - but what a cartoon! Playing as either Dynamite Anton or Dynamite Annie, you'll get to tear through countless enemies and turn Satan's abode into your own personal rage room! The moveset takes some getting used to, but your mobility is excellent once you figure out how to string together speed boosts. You also have a variety of power-up versions comparible to the ones in the Wario Land series, but far more destructive. Twelve levels and seven bosses await you before fighting old Scratch himself!
| Game Engine: GameMaker Studio
Developed by Wishes Unlimited and published by Klei Publishers, the demo for Beastieball is really cute and sweet and funny - really, I don't have a lot of notes about the core concept of this game, or it's execution. You're out to save your hometown's natural habitat from getting bulldozed for a coliseum that the Beastieball league almost certainly doesn't need, and to get the league's attention, you need to get to the top 50, which means coaching like you've never coached before. In short, I had a really great time with this one, both as a concept of being a coach to your not-Pokemon and the concept of winning a game by virtue of playing well and out-maneuver instead of worrying about hit points. I can also relate to it as an old fella whose gotten burned out on so many things like Pokemon and similar because it all feels like a mad rush to develop the most devestating meta to crush your opponents - "Beastieball used to be fun." I have to say, I'm really looking forward to this coming out next year.