i get most of my freeware from terry cavanagh and weird fucking games
rpgmaker mv dungeon crawler about moving into a decaying apartment block full of tunnels and fighting off
enemies with your virtual assistant, a little cat-like thing that can change class with apps.
captivating. i loved learning each uninhabitable room, space, and seeing the little freak npcs who lived
there, worried about their energy bills or their landlord or the off-limits gazebo. it is... difficult
to place this game's realism in a way i'm fascinated by. sometimes the enemies were angry nerds,
sometimes it was a living tile in by a column of meat. dreamlike in that 'almost like reality,
definitely drawing from recent experiences, but the environments were mazes and nothing quite worked if
you thought about it too hard' way. but the way the plotting gently threaded themes of creative
collaboration and distrust, auteur visions, grief, commentary on living conditions and landlords and
fucking Techbros - im really into it. felt like it guided just enough and didn't move into explicit or
tacky territory either - very easy to mock tacky nftbros with tacky nfts, but instead simply evoked
irresponsible mining with an abstractly tech-filled room that was too hot so you took damage per step.
music was terrifying at first! found the combat a little too hard (it took. a while to figure out
the metal slime-like Appliance's tactic is to use the defense class and reflect its thundaga.) and the
encounters a little too often, with a bed and a shop too hard to get to at the start, but at least you
could switch your pet class without using up a turn. the revive didn't work on your virtual cat - unsure
if mistake or commentary on how human substances wouldnt work on your phone. had to write down maps for
it too which is something i haven't done in a long time - would probably have been easier on a4 paper or
a paint program but hey, it was fun. the ending room was genuinely haunting and i'm really glad i
toughed it out. shoutout to my friend killerman, from legendary game illbleed
turn-based pico-8 puzzler about planting mushrooms. has an easy route and a hard route but i got stuck on the easy one still despite the first 10~ levels being REALLY easy. charming, absolutely wrong with the presentation, im just truly awful at puzzle games. i get the appeal and like that eureka moment they provide which is why i keep trying them but i dont have the patience for a lot of them. maybe i'm hoping to learn patience
'it's like an "interactive tutorial on level design" but its more like a sincere treatise on the act of
creating art delivered through chuck tingle' - line message to my friend
also known as Ray Frank's Guidance Adventure. you know when chuck tingle says something about how you
should love and be kind to yourself and in spite of it being written by someone who is Possibly doing a
bizarre act and in spite of it containing the word 'buckaroos' it's still oddly affecting? it's like
that. the life of the mind is a difficult one.
i can't tell if it ends pessimistically or optimistically: is the idea snatched from you before
completion; or are your training wheels taken off, allowing you to follow, embrace, complete your idea -
without guidance? that you have been blessed with an idea and it is your job to raise it? i want it to
be optimistic, because the rest of the experience was so kind, but my initial response was that it
seemed cruel (followed quickly by 'did it break?').
small rpgmaker Space inspired by yumenikki. little guy goes through one of 3 doors and wakes up in a location. a darling, pure. sometimes you really do just need to inhabit a world where there are only 4 houses and only one opens and it has an incomprehensible npc sprite that only says 'hello friend' in it. author didnt make the music but it's very lovely curation. sprites mspainty (positive). feels simultaneously incomplete and as complete as it possibly could be.
CW: nsfw, flash player (actionscript 3, so ruffle doesn't work), others
...christ
small abstract...ch...chess? i played with it until i figured out some of the inputs, but didn't figure out how to do much else. the creator mentioned it was made with 3 random assets (inspired by a game called 100 free assets) + a game called one last game, so i went to see if the inspirations would help me understand this game. it didn't! i did go back to it afterwards though, and clicked on the used assets and suddenly realised it's a traditional chessboard - the pink boxes that change to lilac ones are indivative of where the pieces can move - the pieces are seemingly invisible though. when i loaded in the handful of black pawns scattered on the field juddered, but i'm not sure if they're meant to move. i'm not sure if i have an opponent. i like the gentle sway of the 'camera' that follows your grid movements. found as a recent/contemporary game by droqen that i did not play referenced this creator as an inspiration.
Play checkers with someone in your final moments. 3min narrative game. miserable and effecting. delicate b/w graphics, great use of sound, fantastic pacing, and the single mechanic works perfectly in tandem with the narrative and characterisation. i'm normally a description reader - years of being a Manual reader - but for this i just hit download and loaded it up? meant the first event was VERY shocking. fantastic, really.
tribute to someone who uploads short silent playthroughs of weird games, so i'm glad to have found that.
always in need of more classics of game adjacent content. this applies to the previous and following
games by this developer (i am writing a lot of these notes at once while i am skipping around so fast)
but with their games i feel a sense of missing Something so thoroughly that i have loaded each one in
two browsers to see if anything changes. nothing appeared to change in this - i can simply hold down a
button to create a particle effect. i think the fact it is offscreen is both annoying and alluring to
me. who is creating the fire? why can i not see them? a glowing dollar sign floats in an orb toward the
top of the screen. i want to interact with her. a character is collapsed on the floor before i have any
input. was this the effect of my fire? i clicked on the assets used after writing this and discovered
the character was twilight princess link. he is lying on a background which is an artifacted jpg of some
leaves. the use of photo and borrowed 3d create a mood i only associate with weird early pc games. i am
interested in this creator's mixed media collage approach to... scenes?; i am happy to continue to call
something like this a game, but it does have more in common with an actual 'real' (for want of a better
term) collage than most of the history of the medium. cool.
upon editing this to html format i
realised i wanted to write more about single-scene interactive art in relation to that entry months ago
where i decried nil knight's politoon artstyle but i don't want to put it in this entry. maybe later.
when i don't get something i try to bruteforce it by gathering as much authorial context as i can quickly
i guess
i got a stronger initial impression from this than i did concrete 1, but i think i have less to say. i
am more immediately struck by a game in which i am seemingly able to move but not able to discern how.
it felt like a 2d platformer, and at times the undulating background felt like platforms, but no matter
how hard i tried i truly could not be sure. fascinating and disorienting. the soundtrack is a bright
chiptune rock song with a strong female vocal - a normal song to accompany an abnormal experience. at a
time i thought the opening and closing mass of circles that is seemingly a controllable character was
singing along. the game is an homage to 2018's
'Sleepy Boy Wishes He Could Go Into a K-Hole and Just... Never Leave' by mkapolk https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/11189
as at time of writing i have not played this. while playing sleepy boy clone i misremembered the game's
description description as being an homage from memory, which is a very different idea and
approach, but i don't think it changed much.
goin through the abstract art gallery tonight it seems. a blurry, angled closeup of a building fills the screen - a grey factory sort of thing? block of flats? it might be multiple buildings composited together. it looks like a photo, but might be textures on cubes. difficult to tell, because the interactable element in this is what appears to be two pink giants. one is pink and the other is cooked pink - they look skinned, like an artist's muscle reference, white at the tendons, but too low fidelity to use in this manner. wasd makes them...move cycle and rotate, but they do not move from the building. they clip through each other and through the building. it is difficult to tell what they are - hands are occasionally visible, but the legs are hard to read with their motion, and without any other bodypart to contextualise , sometimes i thought their legs were horse legs? sometimes i thought they had more than 2? i looked up the assets afterwards: they're nondescript monsters, not human, so their legs/feet are digitigrade. i wonder if you are meant to want to struggle to rotate them in a way that would identify them. i wonder if you are meant to want them to slot in neatly with each other instead of clipping through each other. you don't have enough control over them to do so. the angle and size and the monster struggling with another atop a building feels kaiju-adjacent. godzilla is politics, i suppose.
this took a little bit before i understood it, but it's really something delightful. i also hate it.
you are on a run. you press a button 4 times to set your tempo, and then you press the buttons on your
keyboard from the outside in to the beat. there is no audiovisual feedback at all, and the rhythm is
randomised and only delivered to you via text. there is no music before you press the first note. it
restarts if you are too fast or slow. it is so difficult to set and keep your own pace when you have to
count surprise beats, and the button layout means i cannot keep pace with one hand and play with the
other, and it makes me feel like i am failing at what essentially amounts to meditation. but it does
feel very special when you do capture that beat. it took many tries, but i did beat it. eventually i
ended up with exaggeratedly tapping one foot, which... is something i once got picked on - for praise -
in a music class? embarrassing. visually, it is simple, striking - cyan sky and ground with magenta
lines for trees and grass. despite being very bright and saturated i didn't find it obnoxious. the win
screen was satisfying. i feel bad for having a visceral negative reaction to the initial difficulty.
listed as an inspiration for the previous game. 10 short vertical lines on a blank background. you press the spacebar or mouse to interact. there is no sound. i thought it was a keeping pace game because of the previous thing but it's...not exactly... i did sort of have to look it up, and it was still difficult. i understand how its lack of feedback inspired morning run though. it was the first game in and the entire inspiration for rami ismail's meditations project - i wish there was writing, a postmortem, about that, somewhere - i only managed to stick with it for a week or so. i get why this sort of hyperminimal puzzle would be appealing to many and it's certainly an impressive and thoughtful, careful work on every level, but i just don't... care much about minimalism, especially in relation to interactivity! i'm 5 and i want to hit every button on the casio.
'A quiet impressionistic simulator of the experience of a first Quaker meeting.' it was that! gentle. i really liked it - it made me want to make my own flickgames - i find myself wanting to capture a Scene a lot and the linear nature of this felt suitable for that. the palette choices were lovely - i know most flickgames are white on black, but it used this well to deftly create a nice sense of... coming in from the cold to a warm, welcoming place, literally and metaphorically
short first person platformer where the levels are a little meanly designed and theres some mean writing
on the walls telling you to quit. thought it was going to be more iwtbtg-like from the descriptions, but
it's more like an easy, non-puzzle portal. i did like it - i do kind of like to do a little awkward
first person platforming, and i like the, uh, Genre. but it felt very derivative, and because it was
easy, it felt toothless.
the appeal of portal isn't just that glados hates you, it's that glados
hates you, right? the people love shodan, they love AM. the tension between you and a character, a
personality, provides depth and something to propel the player forward. you are compelled to to escape,
but there is a reason there for you to stay, or at least enjoy the journey. the journey is a dialogue
between player and malicious entity. the danger is characterisation. there is no particular depth, no
danger to the struggle between player and entity here - you navigate through levels simply because that
is what you do in games. the mocking text is all placed in advance (bar the one branching path, which is
just an ending a or b situation), but i don't know if it's to sell a narrative of people coming before
you. didn't get that impression from either ending. the one branching path is the only possible active
dialogue, where repeated attempts get you new feedback, which got a few laughs out of me. i guess i
don't really know why you'd introduce a malicious overlord if you weren't going to characterise them,
and it's very clearly not The Author Themselves mocking you, like it would be in a iwtbtg-like...
strange choices all around
pico-8 game where you have to climb 100 floors of a tower, but there's a twist - you have to roll a d100
at the exit of each floor, and if your dice roll is less than your current floor, the up stairs now
point down. progression is pure luck! each floor is a single screen, and it's unique in palette, theme,
layout, sprite design, and npcs. characters within the tower have their own motivations for being there:
they're either living there, staying there, or are trying to climb it too - either to reach the top, or
to see a friend, or to simply beat their personal best. there's some skeletons and some people who have
gone a bit mad too. each floor is broadly vertical, where you go from up to down and then from down to
up, creating a pleasant movement of a vertical zigzag through the tower.
the exit can be before or after interactable elements, but if you roll low you still get to chat to
everyone, because rolling deletes the staircase you came in on, and you still have to walk all the way
through the floor to go down. this means when the odds start falling out of your favour - ie from 50f
onwards - the short jaunty little walks start to feel gruelling. broadly my incentive was to see more of
the level design and npcs - at the party on 50f they start to bring up a cute little politics b-plot and
i wanted to learn more - but after spending 10 minutes getting to 59 and then getting so constantly
pushed back i went under 49 twice... you start to wonder why you're trying. this is good, i think.
really makes you think about your relationship to 'luck'. and then you quit out and you realise why
those npcs decided to simply live on floor 23 or whatever.
few notes i cant fit into the overall Thought: didn't like the music much but i think that's a
limitation of pico-8, the 54-59 run being devoid of people and mostly brick was neat storytelling, i
really like how sometimes the floors feel next to each other and sometimes they feel completely random,
feels adjacent to a singleplayer ttrpg without the flexibility, i like that nat 1/100s do nothing except
give you a sad or happy jingle respectively - despite being pure luck it's still quite kind
floor 59 btw
an endless runner, of sorts. it's... difficult to describe? you move about in 3d but the game overlays multiple different semitransparent areas over each other. it's difficult to tell if you're running through some trees or by some buildings or fences - because you're running by all of them at once? going forward is automatic, but you can turn and jump, and left and right seem to bring different layers slightly further into relief, possibly even activating their collision, but it's hard to tell. it's a really unique effect - true to its name, everything feels half-remembered and difficult to grasp. i like the mundanity of the act of going for a run and the fact forward is automatic. if you do the same thing, without thinking, in every location: of course the settings, no matter how impressive, will start to blur together after a while.
don't want to talk about this one. sorry.
short simple horror typing game made in under a week for the prompt 'A game you would rather watch than play'. i didnt mind my time with it - kept me on edge decently enough for a short blunt thing, with the gameplay (typing, where the key you have to press is highlighted, but the letters are hidden and the input results are different to what youre typing so you have to touchtype Scary Alternate Versions of what the letters onscreen say, like 'dismember' instead of 'box of toys'), but i dont know how it relates to the prompt lol.
also, and this is perhaps more telling of my own intelligence than the game's ability to communicate: didn't realise i was typing out words on until i went back for a second run because i suddenly realised that was probably the case and that it wasn't just. randomised letters? i think what i thought was it was meant to be if you fucked up on this test that was hard for no reason youd be Punished with a scary jpg... actually no you know what i think both me and the creator fucked up on this one, the blank letters of course would make me conceive of the keyboard as a puzzle rather than where letters are - i can touchtype but/so i dont actively think of the placement of letters on the keyboard, only the movements i need to spell words - and if i dont know what words im spelling and have no feedback how am i meant to think of anything i type in as words?
i really should have clocked this earlier though