The Flipside of Gaming
This is a preview of Void/Breaker played with a gamespass key. Footage shown is in early access and may not represent the current version.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
For this perceptive podcast, the YouTube channel Indie Enjoyer reached out to want to chat about covering indie games, and what it’s like to be a Youtuber today who enjoys talking about smaller and underrated games.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
As I write this, I have paused a game of Pac-Man Forever, a freeware Pac-Man update/homage/clone by My Dude Studios available on itch.io, on Round 154. I have spent almost three straight hours of playing it. It’s pretty good, but I’ve been tired of it for the last hour of it. Yet, it keeps going. It keeps going.
It helps to keep the game fresh by adding gimmicks throughout the first 60-or-so levels, but it’s been recycling them for a while now. I’d like to emphasize that I don’t think the game is meant to be easy. I have been playing Pac-Man-style maze games since the original hit unwary US arcades back in 1981. I’ve also played my share of Ms. Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Pac-N-Pal, Pac-Mania, Pac-Man Arrangement, Pac-Man 99 (R.I.P.), and all three Pac-Man Championship Edition games, a couple of which I had at one point respectable slots on its scoreboards, or would have if they hadn’t been full of obviously hacked scores. I’ve even written my own Pac-alike, Octropolis, also freeware and on itch.io.
Suffice to say I’m a bit of a Pac-obsessive. Not nearly as much as the great Jamey Pittman, author of the sacred bible of the game, the Pac-Man Dossier. And maybe not as much as PacMania67, of the comments section of the Pac-Man Forever download page. They mention getting slightly further than me at the moment, to Round 163, only stopping when hitting a mazegen bug. I don’t know if I want to play a few more rounds and get to that point. I feel Round 154 sufficiently establishes my bona fides here, I don’t have to be “the best,” whatever that means. That way lies speedruns, and ultimately insanity.
So long as you aren’t trying to finish Pac-Man Forever you’ll have fun, generally. The quirks and gimmicks are mostly good ones, with a couple of irritating exceptions. One gimmick shrouds the maze with tall grass, which sometimes makes it very difficult to spot the last dot on the board, yeah that can go into the garbage, I say. Another one I came to loathe is the jungle board, for whatever reason I can’t read the maze layout as easily in that theme as usual. Pac-Man works best when you can easily tell the shape of the maze and where the remaining dots are, and to play with that makes it into a different, worse, game. Fortunately those gimmicks are relatively rare.
Pac-Man Forever borrows liberally from the whole range of Pac-Games, and other Namco games of the era too, with themes based on Galaga, Dig-Dug, Mappy and even Pac-Man’s sibling Rally-X, which is one of the better themes. The Rally-X boards replace the screen-filling dots with more sporadically placed flags, meaning you don’t have to travel every inch of the board to finish it. Another game that’s borrowed from is one Namco would never touch nowadays, Jr. Pac-Man, which had extra wide mazes, extra Energizers, and big dots worth more points, but that are slow to eat. There’s a reason Jr. Pac-Man isn’t looked on as fondly as Ms. Pac-Man, but its additions work well here.
One aspect of the game I feel I should warn you about. There is a power-up gimmick; when you’ve eaten a number of ghosts in total, a fairy arrives and leaves a powerup on the board, that cycles between one of three choices. If you just gobble it down without paying attention, you will regret it! One of them, the champagne glass, will cause you to lose almost all of your extra lives, converting them all into speed increases. It is easy to get your speed up without having to use this, in fact you can get it up so fast that you may have to collect another powerup, a director’s slate, to slow the game down enough to keep it playable. Most players will eat it at least once just to see what it does, but may not notice all of their extra lives vanishing when they do it. Even if you know it exists, Pac-Man Forever can get so fast that you end up eating it on accident. Its inclusion it a bit head-scratching. Instead of it, maybe get the Sneaker (a speedup), the Fried Egg (increases score bonuses) or especially the Pear (increases Energizer duration).
I know this sounds negative for a game that I ostensibly like. I would say more positive things about it, but three straight hours of it has dried out my brain and depleted my writing style, yet I still have to finish this post before I can go to sleep. If you like Pac-Man, you’ll probably like this, although there is a danger that you’ll play it to distraction as I have. My hope was to get to a level that unlocked the Trog enemies promised on the game’s promo artwork.
In my current state, that’s all I can squeeze out of my brain on this one. I’m off to have nightmares about eating dots and fleeing ghosts. Ta.
Pac-Man Forever (My Dude Studios via itch.io, $0)
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the (Game Wisdom) channel. Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.
00:00 Intro
00:14 Dobbel Dungeon
1:58 Entanglement
3:43 Parry Nightmare
5:07 Extreme Evolution Drive to Divinity
6:46 Ultros
9:09 Sniper Killer
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
A second webgame in a row, Urjo is a logic puzzle game about choosing which of each space in a grid should be red or blue, with the following conditions:
1. Every row and column must contain the same number of red and blue spaces.
2. Every numbered space must have the same number of spaces touching it (in the eight spaces around it) as its color.
3. No two adjacent rows or columns can have the same sequence of colors. In practice this is the most subtle rule. It doesn’t always come into play, but if it does it’ll probably be the breakthrough you’ll need to pull off a solve.
Every puzzle has a unique solution. It is similar in style to another web puzzle called 0h h1, but a major difference in presentation is that Urjo is watching as you try to solve it, and won’t let you make incorrect moves. Instead, it counts up all your mistakes and scores you on how well you did. You have an overall rating that goes up as you both complete puzzles with fewer errors and faster times than other solvers. This can be annoying (it’s easy to click the wrong size of a circle on accident), and it pushes you to try to solve them faster than you may feel comfortable, which may also cause inadvertent mistakes.
The software will try to give you puzzles just past your skill level, and I can verify that they get very difficult. If you make mistakes it’ll offer to give you some pointers. Myself I ignore those tips; but I can see how some people might find them useful.
Urjo (web, free)
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
words.zip is a fun word search kind of game. It’s an infinite field of random letters. You try to find words snaking through the array. Words can twist and turn, and can also go backwards, but can’t go diagonally, cross themselves, or intersect with any other word that someone else has ever found.
There is no scoring, but there is a newly-added list of challenges, various categories to try to find words in. If you decide to play, I think you should start out immediately dragging the field in one direction until you find an area almost devoid of other players’ words, and start from there. Of course as time passes it’ll get harder to find unique words. I read somewhere that there are plans to implement private games, with new fields to search through uncluttered by people entering ASS or POOT. If the well-hoed field is too much to tiptoe through, maybe come back in a week or two and see if that feature has gone live.
This is a review of Incision played with a press key provided by the publisher.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Really minor thing here, I’ve already mentioned it on social media in a couple of places, but here it’s a bit more auspicious?
I mentioned Yacht and Panic’s entertaining 90s alien cable simulation Blippo+ before. Blippo+ has 11 weeks of programming, with the last week being mostly credits and outtakes for all the various shows.
If you watch the Credits channel to the end, there’s a QR code that leads to a webpage that directs you to send a SASE to a specific address. (That’s a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope for you people younger than 35 years old.)
If you do this, they send you back something really nice in the mail. This!
In the story of Blippo+, the planet Blip discovers a “bend in space” that carries their broadcasts to a distant planet, implied to be Earth. At the end of the programming, some of the teenagers of Blip venture into the bend and off to an unknown fate. We don’t get any information on what happened to them, but maybe the existence of this patch implies they made it through after all.
This is a review of Zefyr: a Thief’s Melody, played with a press key provided by the developer.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
AGDQ 2026 still has a day and a half to go, but a highlight so far has been Awful Block from early Thursday morning. Among other games they did Rock ‘n’ Roll Adventures (16 minutes), Golf With Your Grandmother (1 hour 33 minutes), The Running Man (16 minutes) and Terry Cavanagh’s Egg (12 minutes), but the unquestionable highlight has to be the obscure SegaCD game Bug Blasters: The Exterminators, at 42 bizarre FMV minutes:
Made in 1995 but not released until 2001, it’s really something. That is, it’s a thing, and there is some of it. Not only are the effects and acting somewhere beyond the line of rationality, it looks like it’s barely playable, even on the easiest difficulty. Imagine plunking down $50 for this in 2001 for your obsolete Sega CD, out of production for five years.
Huh…. on further reflection, that actually sounds awesome! The Playstation 2 had been released by that point! It’s certainly memorable, although I wouldn’t have wanted to buy it for purposes of playing it unironically.
This is the conclusion of my chat with composer Mark Benis about composing music for games. We talked more about working with designers, and how designers can best utilize composers for their games.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
For this perceptive podcast, I (Josh Bycer) spoke with composer Mark Benis who has worked on a number of game soundtracks to discuss his role and what it’s like creating original scores for games and how indie devs can understand the job when thinking about getting music created for their titles. This is a two-parter as we spoke at length about composing music.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
