i get most of my freeware from terry cavanagh and weird fucking games
short narrative game about reconstructing your dead lover in a digital space - i think - it was very abstract. somehow, a 3d dungeon crawler made in rpgmaker. it was so... mournful and lonely it nearly made me cry and im not really sure why.
16/04 edit i keep thinking about this i dont think this little blurb is enough to say how much this touched me and i don't know how to write any more about it
had to nope out of this one. too scary for me. watched a video playthrough and it was really good though, really nailed the kind of combination glitch/comedy indie horror (you know, how there's loads of edutainment horror games etc now, loads of program glitch horror with a pleasant tone overlaying fucked up things)/post-pt house horror it was going for
small visual/narrative experiment by a game design student. it, uh, felt... like a student game...
there was little interesting about it - basically Only the incomprehensibly fast player character and the mis-sized houses - and what was interesting felt like an accident? the rest was blunt Environmental Storytelling with Audio Logs. real bethesda skeleton in the toilet hours.
the visuals were the main experiment here, trying to recreate 'old console style pixelated graphics', but they weren't faithful to any console in a way that didn't then feel like it was trying to invoke the idea of a console, but more that it was just unresearched and undirected - and the draw distance for the visuals was dogshit in a way that actively worked against the the (lack of) 'level design'.
it still had a jump and run button without any thought as to why, and then the map was made too large for the concept to support, just to fit this hideously fast run speed. i'd have liked to have seen it slow down and carefully remove extraneous interaction mechanics.
i love to collect 3 [audiologs], like in every short, uninspired, first person narrative game post-slender. yet again, a Unity game with an interesting coat of paint. sorry to mx peanutscratch i didnt enjoy your game but i do appreciate the audiovisual experiment
little randomly generated exploratory twine thing. some pleasantly evocative writing. i really enjoyed the randomly generated cardinal directions too - very disorienting, and occasionally funny/strange to see a cave room with exits north/south/north/south, etc. found some suspiciously straight yodas which i think means i won
small twine poetry about going into a cave. the cave is a metaphor, probably. i'm no poetry expert. but i liked the meter, and i think the presentation was nice - presenting the lines in evenly spaced center alignment avoided some of my inbuilt feelings about the pretension of heavy use of staggered whitespace (this one's a me problem - it's a 'i don't engage with poetry often' problem), + worked with the feeling of the protagonist pushing through and onward through the cave blindly, their pace not dropping. the brightness of the plain blackground matching the events was also a cute touch.
bitsy exquisite corpse about a flesh farmer. really funny, great little plot paced like a good joke, solid 2-colour graphics, overall v. charming. nice to see such a Horror graphics set be used for something nice and family-friendly, like queer and demonic farming feuds
other half of the bitsy exquisite corpse. it's not Funny like the flesh farmer, but it's a pretty story, still evocative through it's very minimal text, and i really liked the visual effect you got when climbing up the tower. a lovely use of the sprites provided by Beck.
what if your fucking bonzibuddy died if you pressed quit. and he didnt want to die. daniel mullins (inscryption guy) is an evil man. rest in peace jopbeth im glad i did digital necromancy to bring you back after i pressed the quit button too many times without realising itd work
monster manipulation (like, they have 2 moves you have 1? there's gotta be a name for this i'm missing) tile-based puzzle game made in gbstudio + themed after a minotaur's maze where you collect letters about self-improvement. lovely presentation - the abstract splash screens are lovely, the palette's gorgeous - but i got stuck on 8/9. sad
sarcastic hypertext breakdown and critique of the questionable values espoused in varying canonical game design texts.
i don't have a lot to say about the specific writing here, having not read the books the text was sourced from, other than "wow, yeah, the author's right, some of these passages really ARE dire and offensive".
visuals were fairly unappealing to me, as were the author's previous work (Museum of Mediocre Appropriations) - pen and ink-styled body horror of abstract figures being fused into graphics cards and the like. it felt a bit banksy-y, politoon-y, but i suppose it comes from a place of deeper understanding than the normal 'wot if Apps were Pills' -tier Make U Think cartooning.
i've thought a bit on why i feel this way, and i think my issue with this style of blunt visual metaphor is when it's used in absence of a thesis made in a different medium, rather than in conjunction with - banksy, for instance, has no nuance because you cannot achieve much nuance in the space provided by a single image, even if you take into account other factors like the cultural and literal environments, etc. you cannot engage with counterarguments in a single image. the same is true of twitter! i don't think this work manages to use visual metaphor adjacent to its point... but more on that below.
the author claims it's an anti-manifesto of sorts, but do think it's kind of... odd? to create a manifesto entirely out of negatives; especially when your game doesn't say this explicitly, and instead only notes it in the description (...someone in the comments fully didn't realise the text wasn't the author's...)
i don't know, the text rallies against the hypermasculine, aggressive, This Is The Only True Way writing style of a lot of academic text, and i respect and support the right of essayists and creators to reject that style and not be so... conclusive, perhaps? to be more humble in a developing field? to be able to share their opinions without needing to win? but the sum of it all still comes off as a bit wishy-washy.
making your 'manifesto' out of things you didn't write and don't believe in... even if i believe the intent of the manifesto - that the rules prescribed by canonical game design texts and then taught in game design classes are stifling - to be true, i'm not very certain about the approach.
i guess i continue to not like a lot of media that take an undefined, 'draw your own conclusions' approach, no matter if it's vague art or vague interactive essays. what's wrong with taking the time to argue and communicate your point instead of simply airing your opponent's thoughts, unchallenged? even in such a niche subject, the comments on this game have already proven that people are too stupid to draw the intended conclusion, even when it comes to very binary arguments like this. (and yes, i know, that's not the responsibility of the author to cover all comprehension levels, but i am a person who appreciates directness and clarity, because of my own struggles with communication) (also, i know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards, etc, etc) all in all, i got a greater appreciation for my own opinions from this work (?)
yeah!!!!!!!! Yeah!!!!!!! smooth, solid, quick little pico-8 run n gun platformer. great clean visuals, smooth gameplay, a cool death gimmick and a fun narrative with multiple endings. baller. i might buy the full version with the maps and code talkthrough
fuck yeah, this is great. short pico-8 art/altgame about baking. not particularly on speaking terms with tarot as a practice but i AM on board with food and bread and routine as introspection and very extended metaphor. hunger as more than just an absence of food, as a want, as a need, as a catalyst for changing, surviving.
recipes as storytelling gets a bad rap because of online recipe websites being like, old white women using their recipe websites as blogs instead of resources, but food as history and culture and stories is a real thing that i think this work Gets.
actual writing was lovely - short, poetic stories, the kind of punchy, alliterative writing that'd feel great to speak out loud. visuals minimal but stellar - there's a really fun visual Twist near the end that i adore.
i suppose tarot is a practice i associate with a lack of... grounding in reality, the kind of spiritual bullshit my irreverent, wholly irreligious, post-capital-a-Atheism ass avoids - but this is very grounded, very thoughtful, a reminder that the practice can be used as a conduit for true self-examination.
mfw i could feel my concept of bread was slowly changing (note: i still don't like tarot). author's made some other tarot pico8 things but i'm less interested in those because they're not about food
(extremely R18 [although it does have extensive content filters])
short demo of a one-man upcoming action platformer eroge billed to me as 'being by a blazblue player' fuck dude it sure is! much like blazblue, i really clashed with the gameplay - i found the jump cancels too hard, the level design difficult to parse, the forward+heavy crossover mechanically unintuitive. but what's there is sick, and the intent behind the gameplay being like, a 2d fighting game stuck in a speedrun platformer thing is cool. just made me want to play katana zero again though.
abandoned virtual chatroom where an auto location bot worries about how it's been 7000 days since anybody logged on and is scared about what's going to happen when you leave. the shoddy graphics and audio is v charming, the atmosphere's lovely, the background worldbuilding of the culture that was lost is sweet and tragic.
i feel a bit... disconnected? with the location bot's dialogue style being just like, Normal Human, though... i appreciate the intent wrt sudden and clear communication, but you are still hobby code from 1997. why are you saying 'Uh'. i don't think this strictly is an Immersion thing re technology of the time but i just have a preference for robots that are robotic - i suppose it's more of a sentience thing than a humanity thing, i like when things that aren't human but are sentient are treated with respect, i like 'learning to communicate' stories, i like exploring that middle ground more than i like 'what if a robot was sad at you in the same way that like, a teenage girl was'
evocative text + pictures thing about tunnels beneath the earth. stunning presentation (huge, dithered b/w photographs of Tunnels), lovely writing. really fond of it being completely linear and the hypertext links being like... inconsequential small, minute adjustments to the story-as-it's-being-told, like you're pressing someone for more half-remembered information, stuff they've already received 3rd hand, embellishments
abstract horror point and click and microgamesy thing about cooking feels like something i'd be into, and the environment and its atmosphere was great, but i didn't like it. in part because it ran terribly and made my laptop get so hot i got genuinely a bit concerned; in part because i just didn't gel with its sense of humor - i managed to click on something that triggered like, a 5 minute deepfried (and slightly edited to be Satan-y) infomercial of a kid learning about healthy eating, and it was just...idk, hyperamerican creepypasta shit that went on way too long? the textboxes being misspelled (often in a cutesy uwu way) didn't feel like it was serving anything, it was just Online for no reason. i didn't get it
anthology of 10 small text-heavy bitsy games about life on a generation ship, in free or paid format. just...really sweet, really lovely. highly recommended. i'll be thinking about a few of them for a while.
super-hard tic-80 sokoban with some truly messed up teleport/clone puzzling. it's FAR too hard for my rodent brain but it's also really good? i keep finding myself wanting to beat it... i got stuck on level 3 and came back a few days later to do it in one try then beat another 6 levels
guy behind the realtor game made, uh, serial killer qwop. a really funny 5 minutes, twist made me laugh out loud
funny and bizarre pico-8 physicsy-puzzle-platformer from the above sokoban creator. it really is like nothing else i've played, but it's also a bit qwoppy - you move...uh, in directions around your character's head? when you try to move right from standing you rotate so that your legs point left. hard to explain, but you spend a lot of it sliding facefirst and pushing yourself off of vertical walls to try and get upright again. you can hold x to hold your breath and die from lack of oxygen