This is the recording of our Debut Devs Showcase stream, focusing on first-time indie devs and student projects. If you want to sign up for a future stream, here are the rules and sign-up page

00:00 Intro and The Last Empire
28:44 Basket Bots
50:27 Climb out of Hell
1:25:20 King Static

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

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.

Neal.Fun makes lots of great games and game–adjacent amusements. Every one is a winner, and Cursor Camp is just the latest of the lot.

When you load the page it’ll inform you that the page wants to take over your cursor. Let it, but remember that you’ll have to press Esc(ape) to get it back. It needs it so it can let it to fun things, like slide down slides, float down rivers or ride carousels!

There’s quite a lot of fun things for your summering cursor to do! There’s movies and Popeye cartoons in the camp theater to watch, there’s a cat to pet, there’s chairs to sit it, seashells to collect, hats to wear, chandeliers to knock about, and much more! And you can do them all with a horde of other pointers from around the world who are exploring too, each with a little flag to indicate which country they’re in.

Low-powered machines like my Pi 500+ may struggle with all the 2D effects going on, but other than that the only thing wrong with it that it doesn’t remember anything about your session when you close it. So if you want to have a go at collecting all nine achievements (noted in a book in the cabin lobby), you’ll have to do it in one sitting. Fortunately they’re not difficult to earn, and even easier to re-earn.

There’s even what seems to be a backstory to the camp, which you can uncover by reading the book in the treehouse, playing with the radio there, and maybe also interpreting the drawings on the wall of the cave. Are they just quirky easter eggs, or is there some meaning to them? I don’t know; maybe you can figure it out.

Cursor Camp (web, $0)

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Balatro Multiplayer (homepage, GitHub), a.k.a. “Balaatro,” is a mod for base Balatro that adds a robust versus-play component to the base game. While the stake and deck may (or may not, it’s heavily configurable) be selectable between the participants, each player plays with the same random seed, and will find the same shops, the same tags, the same deals (presuming their decks have yet to be modded) and so on.

The mod has a few extra Jokers that add additional nuances to the game when played against a human opponent, but in Major League Balatro they try to keep the settings as close to standard Balatro as possible. The basic idea is that all but the first of the boss blinds are replaced by Balatro deathmatches against an opponent. Each plays their own round simultaneously, receiving updates on the score progress of the other player’s round. At its end, the player with the least chips in the Blind loses one of four lives. You also lose lives if you fail to make the normal escalating score challenges of the Small and Large Blinds each Ante.

Even if you lose, you still get the money and other rewards from playing the Blind as if you won. One potential strategy is to not make a strong effort on early Boss Blinds, saving consumable resources (especially Glass Cards) for later bosses, but Balatro being Balatro and focused as it is on super powerful exponentially-growing strategies, it’s easy once you start losing to keep losing.

The third season of Major League Balatro has just wrapped up in a battle between Dr. Spectred of Balatro University, possibly the strongest Balatro player in the world who’s pulled off tricks like earning the rarest achievement, Completionist++, from scratch without losing a game, and Bean, a very strong player themself.

If you’d like to follow Major League Balatro, either in the future or to watch prior seasons, you can do it on their Youtube channel. Or you could just watch the finals with commentary, although beware: it’s 5 hours and 50 minutes long! Maybe you might turn up the playback speed, or skip around, or to the end.

Everyone in the Balatro community is waiting for news of a major update to the game, teased by its creator Localthunk, that is promised to add lots of new Jokers, but in the meantime there’s certainly lots of other things going on there, from competitive play to lots of insane mods.

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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.

NANDgame is one of those puzzle games that’s really an educational game in disguise. By hooking up wires and relays, then logic gates, then larger pieces of basic computing hardware, you construct a basic processor from first principles, step by excruciating step.

Of course, the difference between a puzzle game and an educational game is only if the skill the puzzle requests you to learn has some objective use in our physical world. Tetris masters are robbed by the rest of the human race that their unique skill can’t be used to write software or design cars or something, for the kind of effort involved in getting good at all these things is exactly the same. This puzzle, at least, can get you on the road to designing low-level computing hardware, or at least started on that road.

Now that’s out of the way, I’m not completely happy with this introduction to computing architecture. It is true that you can start with NAND gates and, from them, derive all the other logic gates, and from there the rest of computing in its entirety, and this game has you do essentially that.

But NANDs are not the simplest gate to understand. Even their name comes from combining two other gates that you’re not introduced to first. And forcing the player to invent one out of relays, which you are actually required to do here, is a difficult first step. If you aren’t already well-versed in the kind of thinking this involves I’d suggest making use of the hints for each level, because the game gives you no other aid. It is a real trial by fire, and without prior exposure you’ll be staring at the relays for a while wondering not just what you’re supposed to do with them, but why.

But if you can power through them all, again using hints, it is really rewarding to know that, if you had the parts, you could construct a simple processor from first principles. It is difficult, but this is a good introduction. I’d treat it as kind of a test, and that the actual game is learning what you’re supposed to do to win by looking it up from other sources, including the help system. That’s to say, it’s all bosses, with the skills learned to defeat them coming from what amounts to GameFAQs.

NANDgame (web)

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This is a review of Freeride played with a press key provided by the developer.

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

Here’s what I’ve been enjoying lately on my Switch 2. These are store links, but we get no affiliate or advertising dollars from them, they’re provided just out of convenience.

Cruise Elroy’s great retro-styled action platformer Annalynn (Switch, Steam, itch.io)

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream (Switch), a social sim abounding in quirkiness

UFO 50, for many things but especially for the addictive Party House (homepage, Switch, Steam)

Caves of Qud, the terrific true roguelike, filled with equal parts, with atmosphere almost as great as its challenge, but also two accessible easy modes (homepage, Steam, GoG, itch.io)

Chibi-Robo, the sleeper hit for Gamecube where you help a tiny housekeeping robot save a fractured family and also discover the secret of the house’s living toys (Nintendo Gamecube Classics)

Kirby Air Riders, Masahiro Sakurai’s remake of the Gamecube cult classic, with even deeper gameplay, robust online multiplayer and so much fun that it oozes out of the system’s USB-C ports (Switch 2)

Dragon Quest I+II HD-2D Remake, not just a conversion but a redesign, not always for the better but still great (Square-Enix page, Switch)

Blippo+, Yacht and Panic’s sci-fi tale of interplanetary communication told through the medium of an exacting recreation of 90s satellite television (homepage, Switch, Steam, Playdate; currently on sale for Switch and on Steam)

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For this episode of the perceptive podcast, I spoke with Jake Houston who is a solo developer working on his rhythmic RPG Game Over. We spoke about working on the game, RPG design and more.

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

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.

Some time back, I don’t remember how long, I made a Metafilter post about Nickireda’s weird and fun mixup game Return to Castle Monkey Ball, free on itch.io.

In a place like Metafilter, it’s not always obvious what will work and what won’t. Presentation matters for a whole lot, and there is also a random aspect to it. While no one said anything negative about it, I remember it being one of the least favorited-posts I’d ever made on the site. (Favorites are one measure I use to see if people liked a post or not. Sometimes comments just don’t tell the whole story.)

It’s a shame because the game is a perfect mixture. Not as punishing as either original game, its levels are procedural generated so a lot of rolling on your feet is required. You get a time bonus for defeating a guard. While you don’t have a weapon, you do just enough damage at full tilt to take one out in a single hit, and it feels great to do it.

There’s only eight levels (at least in the first “episode”) so it doesn’t take long to get through either. In the first version they kept Wolfenstein 3D’s graphics unchanged, meaning unfortunate reminders of Bad Person and his Stupid Symbol. Those have been removed since, which makes it less accurate to Wolf3D but also less saddening to play.

I was reminded of EFCMB by Vinesauce having recently streamed it. (13½ minutes) I don’t often return to a Gamefinds game, but given that I had made an attempt at telling people about it before I feel a slight bit of ownership here, and my previous attempts at spreading the word slightly predated Set Side B, so please go enjoy if you think you’d like it. It really is brilliant, and it runs in a web browser, even on my Raspberry Pi 5.

Escape From Castle Monkey Ball (by Nickireda on itch.io, $0)

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Nearly the whole program (with minor edits for copyright) is on Youtube (4 hours), with a table of contents with links in its description. Although, unless you have an insatiable hunger for random gaming clips, you’ll probably want to go through the TOC.

This post is mostly intended to point you to Get Info’s much more substantive piece, but here are links to a few of the more recognizable clips these days: Ballblazer, Space Invaders, Out Run, Flight Simulator, Super Mario Bros., Eliza, Zanac, Little Computer People, Fantasy Zone, Karateka, Pinball Construction Set, Marble Madness, Rescue on Fractalus, Wizardry and Galaxian. All 100 clips are also on Youtube separated out into individual videos (and with better image quality overall).

The book that followed contains Denshi Yuugi Taizen : TV Games,” presents 40 interviews with a who’s-who of game creation at the time, including Nolan Bushnell, Ed Logg, Steve Cartwright, Fukio “MTJ” Mitsuji, Trip Hawkins, Freefall Associates, Timothy Leary, Shigeru Miyamoto, Yuji Horii, Toru Iwatani, Sir-Tech, Shigesato Itoi and many more. A full scan of the book is on the Internet Archive.

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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.

Another one, so soon! I feel like I should post these as I find out about them, or else they’ll fade in memory, and in importance. I want to get them out to you immediately, while the bytes are hot.

Yet also, with this one, I sort of want you to discover what it’s about, the promise of that title, Trees Hate You, for yourself. That’s not how these descriptions work though. If I just say “play it, trust me,” some of you will, but most won’t, which will be something of a shame for this very silly game.

Basically, you’re trying to find your way home after a picnic, but for some reason (littering maybe?), the trees on the way back have decided to stop you. The ways in which they display their vegetative ire are the humor of the game. The ways you must discover to evade it are the game of the humor.

This is just a free demo, a preview of what developer tykenn hopes will be a longer game. I’m not sure how long they can sustain the joke honestly, but at least the demo is entertaining, if you can handle a bit of frustration. I look forward to seeing if they can sustain the premise.

Trees Hate You (itch.io demo by tykenn, $0)

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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.

One of the best puzzle games out there is Noumenon Games’ colorful, fun, and challenging Snakebird, its easier sequel Snakebird Primer, and their combined version on Switch Snakebird Complete.

But even Snakebird Complete costs $15. What if you just want to dip your toe in and find out why the snakebirds are the snakeword(s)?

Try Snekburd, on itch.io.

Created by a Pico-8 dev called Werxzy, they’ve made a “demake” of Snakebird that is essentially just the original but with different levels and pixel graphics, which can even be tried out on the web. And if you’re already a certified serpent-falconeer, it even has some new tricks for you to learn.

You control up to four colorful adorable snakebirds, who you can switch between freely. Their mission is to consume all of the fruit on each level, and then escape to the next island. They all move, one turn at a time, like the snake in Snake, but in a side-view, gravity-burdened world with unexpected implications.

It’s a good idea to spend some time at the start getting used to how the SBs operate. Despite being nominal birds they cannot fly. It’s easy to get a longer one trapped against a wall, but you’re allowed infinite undo levels, and you’ll need all of them.

A snakebird that eats a piece of fruit grows one space longer. In multibird levels it doesn’t matter to completion which feathery slitherer eachs which fruit, but sometimes the design of a level means a specific bird will ultimately need to be a certain length.

To complete a level, not only must all the fruit be eaten, but all birds must make it to the goal portal. This will often be the hardest part of the puzzle. The ease with which one birdbrain can get stranded unless their snavian colleagues help them to the exit will confound you, but they should be applauded for not leaving anyone behind. (They can’t applaud themselves—no hands.)

There’s even a level editor for making puzzles to challenge your friends, or maybe even yourself if you’re really forgetful. Progress is saved between sessions on the same browser. And it’s a good thing, for the game lives up to the original’s reputation for difficulty.

So please, give these fluffy beakworms a place in your heart. I’m told that as parasites they’re completely benign!

Snekburd (from Werxzy on itch.io, $0, based on Noumenon Games’ Snakebird series)

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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.

There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of quirky little games and things on itch.io. Lots of them are worthless, some are mere cash-ins, and a few are really nice, but good luck finding them with the towering piles of meh blocking view of the horizon, or indeed anything else.

So it’s nice when you find something through the browse feature that’s a joy to play, and such a game is Emlise’s Conservation of Bass. At first glance it looks like it’s going to be another game of the type that bitsy makes it easy to construct. Nothing against bitsy or its games, but most of them are pretty simple, leaning more into the fun of exploring a little world than offering challenging gameplay.

But as it turns out Conservation of Bass only looks like it’ll be an exercise in pure exploration. It’s actually a completely linear platform-puzzler, and it requires a surprising amount of skill to get far into it. Your walking fish protagonist can only jump one space high, and can’t move very quickly, so sharp jukes in the air won’t save you. As is the custom for these kinds of puzzle games now there’s no penalty for failure, it immediately resets the puzzle for another try.

The fish’s special trick is, it can swap spaces with blocks exactly two spaces away from it with the X button, if they’re the same size as it. It can do this in all for cardinal directions, by pressing that arrow key. These are the same keys that move the fish, and allow it to jump, and it can even do this in mid-air. That’s where the control skill comes in, even if you have a solid plan for how to solve the puzzle, putting it into effect may take you a few tries, as the timing window for swapping a falling fish with a block over safe ground is pretty demanding.

Helping out is a special property of that X button that’s unveiled to you a short way in: holding it down freezes time, and lets you then use the arrow keys to decide which direction you want to swap in at a bit without needing split-second accuracy, so long as you pressed X with that same accuracy to begin with.

This is another of those games where you’re introduced to its elements slowly, which is great because the puzzles get hard fast. I got to the early levels of Chapter 3 before my pending deadline forced me to set it aside and write it up. See if you can get beyond that.

Conservation of Bass (itch.io, $0, playable on the web with optional download)

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Why is it misunderstood? Because it received several ports to other platforms around the time it was popular, they all lacked the special something of the original game, and in more recent times the game has been unfairly derided on the strength of those ports.

What is it that makes Dark Castle great on original Macs? It’s a combination of super-sharp art, responsive and unique controls (it’s a platformer but you attack enemies by throwing rocks at them with the Macin-mouse) and character. The game has gotten more worthy remakes in the current era, but still faces difficulties. One of the best modern versions sadly became unplayable on later-day macOSes when Apple decided to no longer support 32-bit software, a decision that I can’t possibly attribute to Steve Jobs, but somehow it still feels like it has to be his fault, somehow.

Now, as the video tells us, there’s a new remake programmed in Unity, released on the Mac App Store but also Steam, and is finally playable in a decent port for non-Apple platforms. It even got a whole episode of Retronauts about it, which I can’t link because, ha ha, it’s paywalled. I’m sure this video will give you enough information to decide if it’s worth your time, and even if it isn’t, it’ll fill you in one one of those many secret little corners of video game history that Set Side B exists to point out to you.

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Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future Showcase. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from Josh Bycer’s own collection.

00:00 Intro
00:14 Windswept
1:32 Sacre Bleu
2:45 Stand Alone EP.O
4:09 Nairi Rising Tide
5:29 Boyce the Voice
6:25 Poradora vs. Monsters of the World

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

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.

Expedition Sasquatch is a homebrew Gameboy Color rom that can be played on itch.io in your browser for free, or you can pay five bucks to download the rom image to support the makers and play it wherever you like.

It’s a short game that’s like Pokemon but without the battling. You go out and catch creatures in various ways, then take them back to the museum to sell them for cash to get better equipment. Your ultimate aim is to find and kill the sasquatch that’s been sighted nearby. It’s left unclear if this is possible, but it’s fun playing the early game at least.

Expedition Sasquatch is made by Andrew Roach (Mastodon) of New Ellijay Television and Elvies, and is based off of a podcast and local access TV show. It’s a nifty little use of your time. Here’s a few screens:

Expedition Sasquatch ($0 for browser play, $5 for the ROM, itch.io)

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This is a video review of Cultic Chapter 2 played with a press key.

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

This is a review of Beyond Sunset played with a press key.

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

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.

Less a game than a puzzle, and not so much runnable software than a website, enclose.horse is a very nice thing to spend a few minutes of your day, each day, on.

Every puzzle is a map of a field, with an arrangement of lakes and a horse somewhere in it. You have a number of square blocks to try to completely surround the horse. The horse does not like to be surrounded (click on them to get their opinion), so the more space you can enclose the horse within the higher your score.

When the horse is surrounded, a field of wheat springs up to show you how much space you’ve left the horse. Each space of wheat is one point. Some puzzles have cherries on the map, and also enclosing those is worth five bonus points. There’s also Golden Apples, they’re worth ten points. There’s bees too, trapping the horse with those is five points off your score. And there are pairs of portals, which count as an additional avenue of escape for Horsie that you must also account for.

The puzzles vary in difficulty. It’s usually easy to score at least something, but your true aim is for an optimal, perfect score. When you submit your score (you only get one try!) you’re told what the perfect score is and shown a solution that earns it. You can also browse past puzzles and see how well you do at those, create your own with a simple editor, and play other users’ puzzles.

The site continues to be worked on. Up until a couple of days ago there was a Check button, that you could use to find out what a puzzle’s perfect score was, so you could keep trying until you achieved it. However that introduced a bit of reluctance to submit anything that wasn’t perfection (it certainly made me a lot less likely to submit a score), so in the past couple of days it was removed, and that was probably for the best.

Give it a shot, while it’s harder than you’d think, it’s also not usually very hard. I think you’ll like it.

enclose.horse (web, $0)

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The indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on game-wisdom. Please reach out (to Josh Bycer) 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 Nimrods
1:47 Trash Goblin
3:09 Thunder Age
4:25 BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3: I OPENED A PORTAL TO HELL IN THE FAVELA TRYING TO REVIVE MIT AIA I NEED TO CLOSE IT
6:22 Beastieball

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

We’ve brought up Stephen’s Sausage Roll (SSR) here in the past, it’s a uniquely challenging turn-based puzzle game. You move a little fork-wielding guy around to cook sausages in an infuriatingly precise way: each two-unit long sausage has two sides to each of its units, and each must be cooked exactly once per side. The controls are simple, but the puzzle start out tough and get tougher. New wrinkles get added in an organic way, and the game feels like it changes as you advance through it, even if you doesn’t actually gain any new verbs; the levels are just cleverly designed so that Stephen’s advanced tricks just aren’t possible before the game’s ready to unveil them.

In this 7½ minute video, a Youtube channel with the suitable name Stephen’s State Space examines two early levels of SSR with their move spaces graphed out, and shows that, while there is room for some slight variation, both of them require the player to progress through a specific sequence to finish the puzzle. If you don’t know anything about SSR, the shown-off solutions will seem to be brain-melting in their specificity. Let me assure you that these puzzles are only the beginning.

When people talk about why they play these kinds of hard puzzlers, they often express it in terms of how they make them feel when they solve it, the harder the puzzle, the greater the feeling of accomplishment. When I hear that, I think, duh, but more than that, why do people have a “feeling of accomplishment” when they play these games?

When you put it in terms of a feeling, I think you’re getting dangerously close to those people who put it all in terms of dopamine, which I hate. Game players aren’t dopamine addicts! If you could get it out of a syringe, would you do that?

You get a jolt of dopamine, experienced as a feeling of accomplishment, because you accomplished something! I have long thought that the best reason for playing difficult puzzles isn’t the feeling you get when you solve them, but their improving aspect. Working through tricky puzzles actually makes you a little smarter for doing them. The fact that they’re fun to do is the spoonful of sugar, to borrow Ms. Poppin’s phrase, to get you through.

So go forth and cook those sausages! If you can get all the way through SSR, I reckon that’s enough to get your INT score up to at least 15. I don’t know if I can say if it’ll affect your WIS, and it certainly won’t help your CHA, but let’s work on one D&D attribute score at a time, eh wot?

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This is a double review for Elephantasy 1 and Neyyah, played with a retail key and press key, respectively.

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

It’s related to something I’ve said for a long time: people don’t know what they’ll like. Statistically, your favorite game probably lies out there, miles away from your field of view, and you may well never hear of it before it (or you) expires. But beyond that, the way punchy memes and quickly-thought opinions on social media snowball can rapidly turn someone’s casual observance into obvious truth results in games slowly being ruined, over successive updates, into a bland design paste.

Take for instance Navi from Ocarina of Time, and how some decided that her occasional annoying cries of “Hey! Listen!” made her a nearly game-ruining feature. Her annoyingness was even referenced on The Powerpuff Girls (video, 40 seconds) at one point.

Sometimes the crowd has good points, yes. But also sometimes they turn molehills into mountains. Taken too far this line of thinking can turn into Always Trust The Dev, which can also be false. The answer, as it is with many things, is it’s complicated. Turn to Pollock’s article for a lot of examples of how it’s complicated.

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The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the channel. (JH: That would be Game Wisdom, please consider dropping by there!) 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 Mech Shuffle
2:06 Karate Survivor
3:51 Neva
5:36 Anomaly Collapse
7:48 Feed the Deep
9:56 Phantom Spark

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

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.

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

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.

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

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)

rodneylives

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

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

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)

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives