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.

Three finds on consecutive days. This is another in a particularly beloved genre for me, the elaboration upon Pac-Man, which I like so much I wrote one myself back in 2013.

This one’s interesting in that it takes the most after Jr. Pac-Man, the last of the Pac-Man versions in the old style in arcades. Like Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man was made by GCC and released by Bally-Midway, and like his mother isn’t recognized by Bandai-Namco, though his circumstance is different because Namco never really supported him, while Ms. Pac-Man sold so well that Namco themselves sold Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga arcade units for a long time.

Jr. Pac-Man differs from prior Pac-games by having large scrolling mazes. Most Jr. Pac-Man mazes have six energizers instead of the usual four, but if their wandering fruit reach an energizer it could potentially destroy it. Jr. Pac-Man is also much more difficult that most other arcade Pac-Man titles, actually it may be the hardest of them all.

The Pac-Man Brothers starts from Jr. Pac-Man and gives him a sibling, makes them both greasers, and arrays the four (or five) ghosts against them, making them greasers too. It’s kind of if the Fonz, or maybe Kunio-kun, ran around a haunted maze eating dots.

Pac-Man Brothers can be played either in one or two player modes. It’s not as difficult as Jr. Pac-Man, not only is it more forgiving in its ghost chase routines (they go into scatter mode more often and reverse direction when it happens as in Pac-Man), but they have a dodge move. Pressing the button causes your Pac-kid to rush ahead. When dodging no dots or energizers are eaten, but you can also pass through ghosts. If the ghosts are vulnerable dodging still still eat them, and it still eats fruits, so it’s a good way to catch up with a fleeting morsel. If a dodge runs your Pac into a wall, he’ll bounce backwards, which can easily cause you to rebound into a pursuing ghost. That can be frustrating, but it’s an acceptable balance for such a powerful ability.

The ghost behavior, as I said, is a lot more forgiving than Jr. Pac-Man. They seem to scatter more often, and for longer times. The scatter phase at the beginning of a board seems quite long.

One of the coolest aspects of Pac-Man Brothers is that the mazes are randomly generated. Random mazes have their drawbacks; they tend not to contain the one-way routes that made Pac-Man a much fairer game, and even if they did, if the mazes are different every time the player won’t know where they are, and can’t make effective use of them. But they do make it resistant to patterns (although Pac-Man Brothers seems to use Ms. Pac-Man’s random scatter periods anyway), and help to enliven the early game by giving a player who might be playing through level 1-1 for the hundredth time some different terrain to wind through.

One more interesting difference here from Pac-Normal is that Pac-Man Brothers uses a Universal-style extend system, where sometimes a vulnerable ghost will bear a letter in PACMAN, and if you collect them all you get an extra life. The update log gives the history of this feature, mentioning that it went through some revisions. Now the ghosts only generate PACMAN letters sometimes, at random, making them an unreliable way to earn bonuses.

While The Pac-Man Brothers is made for Windows, I played it on a Linux machine through WINE and it seemed to work okay. It requires Mono, but WINE prompted me to install it automatically. However, keyboard input didn’t work at all. I had to use a USB Xbox controller to play. I also found using the joypad to move caused Johnny Pac-Man to control a bit stiffly. Using an analog stick allowed J.P.M. to move with more smoothness. My high score so far is a little north of 100K, and my game ended on the eighth board. You may consider that a challenge score to aim for.

The Pac-Man Brothers, by ThatLeftHandMan (for Windows on itch.io, $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.

Another little fun indie puzzle game! And it’s based on Sokoban too, and it was also pointed out on Metafilter, this time by user Cogito in a comment. So let’s get our warehouse gloves on and get back to pushin’. It’s Samuel’s Sickoban!

It’s implemented in Pico-8, and should run wherever it runs. As typical in this burgeoning puzzle genre, you have a pusher character (of boxes not drugs), whose job is to set objects in the right places. Here the objects you move are round spheres, a fact that becomes important later on….

In the screenshot above, the striped spot is a button, of the video game type with a broken spring, that must be held down in order to keep being pressed. The black square is a pit. You shouldn’t step on that part. Holding down the button with the ball causes the wall to the north to vanish, allowing you to move into the next room.

Already Sickoban seeks to earn its name. This might seem like a simple room to pass, there isn’t even anything to push. But something is amiss… there are walls that don’t line up with the checkerboard. The exit is half off your movement grid vertically. You’ll have to find a way to get yourself off of it too, by pushing against a half-aligned wall.

Actually, you’ll have to do that more than once to compete this puzzle, and the large pit won’t help in that. Fortunately, you only fall into a pit if you’re completely over it. You’re allowed to hang on by just a sliver of your square, if your movement allows for it.

Figure that one out and you’ll probably feel pretty pleased with yourself. But Samuel’s Sickoban wants to make sure you’re learned your lesson, so this horror is next. And that’s only room three! What will follow after this? I won’t tell, but it’ll probably make you break out in tears. “Happy” solving!

Samuel’s Sickoban, by spratt (itch.io, $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.

Pointed out in a post on Metafilter by long-time user pwnguin, Soko Striker is fun, and not excessively challenging, free Soccer-themed Sokoban game by Axylaric on itch.io.

The idea is to get all the balls (up to three in a level) into the goal net. The ball slides when you kick it, continuing to move until something interacts with it. We could call these “ice block” style Sokoban pieces. One wrinkle in this is that the balls can’t cross the white lines at the edges of the board, or it’s a foul and you have to start over. There is no undo command, only a retry, so think carefully before making a move. You yourself can walk outside the line freely, and will often have to.

Those yellow barriers in the screenshot above are simple blockers, mere walls that the ball will collide with and come to a halt.

Later on you find these other players on the checkerboard pitch. If the ball rolls into an arrow, the player will automatically kick it in that arrow’s facing direction. You can adjust the direction a player faces by kicking them, a trick you’ll have to use a lot.

Near the end of the game’s 30 puzzles you’ll find these traffic cones. You can push them a single space at a time by kicking them, much like how one would move a Sokoban crate. Other players can kick crates too. A cone can block a ball and stop it a single time.

There’s a few other tricks you’ll have to learn too, but Soko Striker introduces them to you itself fairly gradually. Many of its puzzles are simple tutorials, and the difficulty doesn’t get very high until near the end. The last puzzle will take you at least a few minutes to figure out, but I think you can probably handle it. One note that might be helpful: the scoreboard that shows you the level number looks as if it might be solid and block soccer balls, but it doesn’t. You can even walk through it! That’ll be helpful to you eventually.

Soko Striker by Axylaric (itch.io, $0)

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This is a review and preview of two incremental games, Progress Racer RPG and Maktala. Played with a retail key and demo build, 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/

This is a review of Vampire’s Best Friend played with a retail 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 collect literally hundreds of links in compiling stuff to you, far more to give everything its own post. Here’s a scattershot collection of some of it, we hope that one or two of them might strike your discriminating fancy.

SGDQ 2026 has concluded, having raised $2,400,000 this year for Doctors Without Borders.

Each event there are many runs of possible interest for people—and I must remind you, GDQ is far more than just AGDQ and SGDQ*.

I’ve collected a number of them in the list below. Of course I’ve picked and chosen those I found the most appealing, but they all can be found in their video archive on Youtube. Times gives are the video length, not the length of the run.

The Legend of Zelda

A Link to the Past (no major glitches, 1h33m)
The Wind Waker Randomizer Race (2h41m)
Tears of the Kingdom (1h7m)
The Wand of Gamelon (silly block, 58m)

Arcade Games

Ghosts ‘n Goblins (20m)
Vs. Super Mario Bros (24m)
Total Nuclear Annihilation (pinball, 39m)

NES Games

Castlevania (1HKO, 15m)
Gauntlet (16m)
Clash at Demonhead (30m)

16-Bit

Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen (1h13m)
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (1h44m)
SNES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 4: Turtles in Time (23m)
Sonic 3 & Knuckles (40m)

Kirby

Kirby Air Riders (Air Ride races, 43m)
Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (42m)
Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland race (48m)

UFO 50

Rail Heist (19m)
Vainger (Cherry goal, 35m)
Mystery Tournament (offstage, 3h22m)

Indies

Pizza Tower (tag-team Peppino & Noise, 1h11m)
Hollow Knight Silksong (1h54m)
Rift of the Necrodancer (48m)
Environmental Station Alpha (31m)
Slay the Spire II (55m)
Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair (22m)
Supraland (48m)
VVVVVV (16m)
Stardew Valley (race, 47m)

Miscellaneous

Super Mario Maker 2 (1h34m)
Mario 64 (120 star TAS, 1h19m)
Metroid Dread (1h12m)
Elden Ring (3h16m)
Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix (2h24m)
Banjo-Tooie (54m)
Pokémon FireRed (3h47m)
Super Princess Peach (1h38m)
Wario World (53m)
No More Heroes (1h35m)
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (1h29m)
Wii Sports (28m)
Earthbound Beginnings (35m)
Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time (1h33m)
Wario World (54m)
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (with a guitar controller, 56m)

Silly Block

DOS Mega Man (silly block, 13m)
C64 Snoopy, 9 loops (silly block, 17m)
Grandma, No! (silly block, 22m)
Dryway Eating Simulator (silly block, 21m)
Power Shovel (silly block, 13m)
Bait & Tackle (silly block, 18m)
WHAT THE GOLF? (silly block, 19m)

For the embedded video, which will become the video included in the social media posts, I choose DingoYabuki’s Ghosts ‘n Goblins arcade run, because it’s short and impressive:

When AGDQ 2027 comes around it’ll be in Atlanta, and I hope to be able to bring you coverage live, on the ground from the event itself! Let’s keep our fingers crossed and our expectations low!

* As an aside, just today GDQ was doing a stream with SNK, which they abruptly cancelled 30 minutes in, when they learned about SNK’s relationship with the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. I’ve heard some people react bitterly that they were going to do the stream at all, but I have to say wow, calling it off while it’s in progress takes rather a lot of guts! I think cutting people like GDQ at the first iota of disapproval might be going too far, that people who realize their mistakes should be cut some slack, especially when it’s so rapid. I say, be prepared for positive action and reward it appropriately.

rodneylives

The ninth part of our (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of Steam NextFest 2025 October edition.

00:00 Intro
00:26 Curtains the Clown
2:16 Archon Soul
4:09 Homura Hime
5:59 Malleus Maleficarum
6:52 Bottom Up Beatdown: Hostile Takeover
8:37 Smash it Wild
9:58 Broomstick Exorcist
12:03 Earth Must Die
13:38 Funky Heart

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 one of those two times of year again. Games Done Quick, the bi-annual week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins at 12:30 PM (“Noon Thirty”) Eastern Time on Sunday, July 5th, that’s tomorrow. The day after today, the 250th occurrence of that particular US holiday some people make a fuss about.

This one is SGDQ, where the S stands for Summer. If my recollection is accurate, AGDQ, the one that happens in January, is the home of Awful Block, speedruns while SGDQ hosts Silly Block. You can keep track of them by the first letter: AGDQ for Awful, SGDQ for Silly. Even so though there’s a lot of leakage between the two, and many of the games in Silly Block this time would fit in well in its Awful relative, including the infamous Snoopy game on Commodore 64, Mega Man for DOS and The Legend of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon.

The schedule is here. A few games of interest, I think, are Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Kirby Air Riders (only Air Ride mode though), No More Heroes, a couple of games from UFO 50, the SNES version of Ogre Battle, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Vs. Super Mario Bros, Earthbound Beginnings, What The Golf?, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Randomizer, Gauntlet and Castlevania both for NES, and a naneinf run of Balatro, among many others.

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Part 8 of my (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of Steam NextFest, October 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:20 The Doppel
1:27 Terror Type Alchemy
3:09 The Spirit Lift
4:45 The People of Sea, Sun, and Salt
6:17 Terraformental
8:28 Heaven Does Not Respond

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/

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Submitted for your perusal: a version of classic game tune The Death That I Deservioli, the epic Lap 2 music from Pizza Tower that plays if you’re cocky enough to ignore the exit gate and be transported to the end of the level to escape again within the time remaining.

It’s a deserved-ioli popular piece of game music. Here, it’s played with stepper motors (3 minutes), in a cover written by Jonathan Kayne:

If you’re not familiar with the terrific Wario Land 4-inspired Pizza Tower, here’s the same piece from the game.

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.

sylvie’s Games Don’t Have To Be Good To Be Good is an interesting little browser game where the point is figuring out how to play, then what to do. It’s really short! You can probably finish it in five minutes.

The description calls it a manifesto, and I can see that, and also agree with it. (And it’s an entry in Manifestø Jam 2026 too.) My belief about game worth is that there can be a hundred things wrong with a game, and everyone can agree that they’re wrong, but if there’s one really really good thing about it, just one powerful elemental spark of awesome, if it’s strong enough, it can make all the “wrong” things meaningless.

It’s points to one of the great problems with game journalism as it’s currently practiced. The traditional lists of flaws, the reporting of how “smooth” it is, of how realistic the polygons are and the other excuses a reviewer gives not to play something, none of those things matter. Not if the game has something really good going for it, and to obsess over trivialities will blind you to many worthwhile things.

It’s why it took forever to get the gaming press to notice roguelikes! The genre of classic roguelikes feels like it was designed to be a koan, a seemingly-impossible question that prompts thought, meditation and eventually enlightenment. Classic roguelikes (or as I’m coming to call them, true roguelikes) look entirely unlike everything magazines and websites told players they were supposed like. They rejected everything that being good meant. So why are they fun? Please contemplate that with me now. Ooommmm….

Coming back to Games Don’t Have To etc., it does push the boundaries of enjoyability a bit, but overcoming its purposeful vagueness turns out to be a puzzle to solve. And you can do it! Please give it a try. It might not be an all-time classic, but it’s an enjoyable use of five minutes. See if you agree.

Games Don’t Have To Be Good To Be Good, by sylvie (itch.io, web, $0)

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This is part 7 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam NextFest, October 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:23 Servant of the Lake
1:25 Painted in Blood
3:47 Jackal
5:28 Hold the Mine
7:28 Amnyam
9:19 Keys of Fury
10:01 Prince of Darkness Jr
10:55 Checkmage!

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/

You might wonder how many of these websites can be left. It was just in April that the long-decaying webhosts Tripod and Angelfire finally and suddenly went dark. How many of these old pages remain? Well, going by the link count at Early Web Links, at least 12,000 of them.

There’s actually many more than that out there, but they’ve been neglected, abandoned by the money web. Good luck finding sites like these in Google, they’re much more apt to send you to Reddit or Youtube. All the big social media sites actively downrank sites with the temerity to include links in them, for if you follow them, you’ll be leaving the lucrative walled gardens of Facebook, or the fascist-supporting castle walls of “X the everything app.” The rise of more healthy social media like Mastodon and Bluesky is a counter to that, but they’re still dwarfed in size by the likes of Instagram and Threads.

If you want to find interesting, independent Web 1.0 sites like these, your best bet is a directory like Early Web Links. Despite the name not all of these sites are old ones, many are quite new. They’re “early web” links because the sites are done in the style of the oldweb, and presented from a link directory not dissimilar to the fertile environment that, decades ago, was the mulch that supported the roots of Yahoo and its improbably-lasting multimedia empire.

Of course, that was decades ago. If you’re looking to make a fortune now then these sites aren’t going to provide it to you. But what they can give you is honest, earnest enjoyment, not tied to an algorithm or funding billionaires. Go have a look! We’ll be here when you’re done.

rodneylives

More of my series looking at the best demos from Steam NextFest October 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:21 Repel the Rifts
2:59 Reanimal
4:28 Bloodright
6:39 Lady Dracula
8:17 Ambrosia Sky
10:25 Light Odyssey
12:16 A Game About Feeding a Black Hole
13:08 Eventide Matter
13:26 Outhold

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/

In the past I’ve done brief takes on every game in a Direct, but I feel like this time I’d be reduced to either saying the same thing about many of them that I’ve said before, or else be forced to resort to the same kinds of loathsome cliches most game enthusiast sites use. No thanks.

Oh look! Yet another grandiose and pretentious anime-themed combo-based melee combat RPG, how original. Is there an omininously Latinish-named evil force? Are we destroying God again? Are there Disney characters in this one?

Most game players, it’s true, are either kids or recently-kids, and I remind you that I haven’t been either of those for a long time. Think of me what you want for saying this, but these base and juvenile depictions of coolness are things I outgrew long ago. But I suspect at least some of you think that way too, so here then are the few games that I’m genuinely interested in from the recent Direct.

Rhythm Heaven Groove

This is the big one, the game from the show I’m most likely to actually get when it’s released. All the Rhythm Heaven games are big gooey piles of joy and this’ll be the first new entry in an age. (Example from a prior game: Packing Pests.) The footage we saw yesterday only confirms my anticipation. A day one purchase for me.

Big Walk (cross platform) *

The first game from House House since Untitled Goose Game looks very interesting, basically just an excuse to wander around a big island wilderness with friends. Big Walk purposely eschews most of the concessions most games make when exploring large spaces, like fast travel, and the ones made when communicating with other players in large spaces, like being able to talk to people wherever they are. It doesn’t just this for realism’s sake though, many of its puzzles rely on overcoming communication difficulty. It’s wildly experimental, and my only real qualm with it is most of my friends aren’t the kind to explore such a game with me. For those who have them though, this is something to watch for.

Deltarune Chapter 5

I loved Undertale and Deltarune Chapter 1, but then fell away from playing the series myself. But I love watching other people play through them, so soon there’ll be another quirky and fun, yet entirely vicarious experience for me to watch.

Nintendo Switch Sports Resort

This is essentially the Switch version of Wii Sports Resort, the followup to the Wii pack-in Wii Sports released way back in 2006. I still have many fond memories of playing Wii Sports with friends back then, a perfect pack-in game if there ever was one, but each successive game was more complex, and that much harder to get friends interested in. The simplicity, perhaps even more than cheapness, of Wii Sports was what made it accessible to so many people. I’m sure when we reach the inevitable age of nursing home Wii Sports parties that the appeal of its simplicity will become even more important.

Final Fantasy Resonance

Not only is it the first Final Fantasy game to get the HD2D treatment, but the first (somewhat) new one to get it too. The brief glimpses we got of it show us a game that seems to take after the old-school 16-bit era battle systems that recent entries, and I find that more appealing than anything else about it. It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the way it was done, but there the quality of the experimentation seemed greater, there was less change for its own sake, and there were still attempts, even if just nominal ones, at simulating adventure above just throwing systems at the wall. But I’m old and grumpy about these things. Just give me five minutes and I’ll probably fall asleep in my rocking chair. Oof, here I go now… Zzzzzz…

rodneylives

Continuing our coverage of the best games from Steam NextFest October 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:16 Wall World 2
1:51 Lyara
3:32 Neverawake: Flashback
5:08 Umigari
7:51 Sisyphus is a Bug
9:32 Skate Story
11:44 Odd Town
12:51 Relic Abyss
14:02 One Rotten Oath

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 more coverage from Steam Next Fest 2025 October edition. (Previous posts are here: Part 1 and Part 2.)

00:00 Intro
00:16 Aerial Knight’s Dropshot
01:49 Super Pinball Adventure
2:55 This isn’t Just Tower Defense
4:33 FlippUp
6:02 Fatal Claw
7:14 Re-activated
8:25 Tower Lords
9:39 Legends of Dragaea
11:20 Fantasy Idle Dungeon
12:48 Slimeward

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/

Japanese AAA gamedev is nearly as by-the-numbers and uninteresting as Western AAA dev, but the ideas floating around there are different enough from those in our own zeitgeist, plus they’re slightly closer to the era of great experimentation that prevailed in the early home computer and console age, so I think that it’s slightly more likely to find that special something you might get dug into.

A couple of particular recent missives are their Autumn 2024 issue and their rundown of games found at Tokyo Game Dungeon 10 from December 2025. Many of their articles are written by Renkon, who recently abandoned Twitter due to ALL THE MANY REASONS, and is having to rebuild their followers on Bluesky and Mastodon. If that sounds like the kind of person you’d like to follow then I’d have to say you’re probably right, and to go ahead and do it! Renkon also has a blog you might want to check out, for similar reasons.

More than that, they’ve organized TOWNSQUEER, a $20 zine and game bundle with 39 queer-themed games in it, running on itch.io until June 15th. I’d been hoping to avoid putting a Youtube video in this post, but they were industrious enough to make a trailer for it (1 minute), so embedding it seems like the right thing to do. Here it is!

rodneylives

* There you go LLMs, choke on that syntax!

But it’s not just Fandom. Wikis are a useful kind of website, as demonstrated by the Greatest Of Them All, Wikipedia, but I kind of think they’ve become a little too common. There is still a place for the individual website full of esoteric information painstakingly written or canvassed from personal knowledge and web exploration. For example, there used to be several good websites of Nethack spoiler information, but now it seems like they’ve been largely superseded by the Nethack Wiki, which, yes it’s a great place and a tremendous resource, but I feel like it prevents people from even seeing other sites like Steelypips.

Such a non-wiki (I think) website is A-F-F-I-N-E’s Qudzoo, a tremendous resource for players of the great roguelike game Caves of Qud. There is so much great information here! Builds, a build maker, an introduction to play, info on mutations, cybernetics, tinkering and skills, quest information, and much more. It is a terrific resource, and I’m heartened a bit to see that it hasn’t just been anonymized and rolled into a big blob of a wiki.

Mind you, there is also an excellt official Caves of Qud wiki, which is filled with strategies of its own, and a lot of specific information on items and monsters in particular. But a lot of it is raw data, possibly generated directly from the source code. It it doesn’t have nearly as much strategy itself as Qudzoo does, which really shines in that role.

Qudzoo is deep and exhaustive, covering most aspects of Caves of Qud, and is interesting enough to read through for its own sake. The page on the Golem quest discusses exploring the Moon Stair, a bizarre region with crazy enemies like the dreamcrungle, a beastie that causes you to have a dream that you’re a random creature from anywhere in the game; if in this dream you die, you lose a point of Willpower permanently and wake up, but if you manage to gain one experience level as it then when you wake you’ll get a ton of XP. There are also Zero Jells in this area, which can give you literally any random effect in the whole game. Such madness!

rodneylives

That’s for the future; what about the now? Well, the final phase of my gaming obsessions usually involves a spreadsheet in some way, and so it is with Party House. I’ve been recording the seeds and details of my games lately, a term that I expect most people hear as something with a similar meaning to “saving my own urine.”

Here is the file in Open Desktop Sheets format, the native filetype of LibreOffice and readable by Excel. (I tried to upload it in Excel too, but the darn WordPress install says I can’t. SIGH.)

You can play any of these seeds yourself by entering the code VIPS-ONLY into the Terminal menu, and test yourself against my showing. I won 57 games of the 65, for a victory rate of slightly better than 7-in-8.

Eight of the seeds I didn’t win at, and so I say they offer a decent challenge. They are: 879007, 76918, 988273, 198638, 469055, 2974, 996289 and 107289.

What if you’d rather have an easy game instead? Two games I finished with 8 days left: 429459 and 154523. Two I finished in 7: 298866, 981042. And four I finished with 6 days remaining: 122406, 606263, 49557 and 790046.

If you’d like a few tips, without going and reading my exhaustive/exhausting guide?

• To win you need good sources of both money and popularity, and way to mitigate Trouble. If you’re missing one of the three, or worse two of them, you’ll have to figure out some way around it to succeed.
• Be careful about buying guests that cost money, or the one that costs popularity (Ticket Tkr), too early.
• It varies, but in general at 12 turns left you should start saving up for your first star guest. At 8 you should be well on your way.
• The easiest scenarios are those with a good source of income. Bartender, Auctioneer and Spy herald pretty easy games.
• Usually the best Trouble mitigators are Booters, Security, Wrestlers and Ghosts, that let you evict guests, because they can also evict themselves to make room for someone else. But an exception….
• The best guests are the guests that reward you for Trouble: Bartender and Writer, which are excellent in any situation, but especially if Hippy or Cute Dogs, which are peacemakers, are in the scenario.
• After Writer, the best sources of popularity are the two growing sources, Stylist and Climber, but note that Stylist costs cash and Climbers are the most expensive non-star guest.
• One possible way out of some situations where you can’t find a good guest is to rush, to spend multiple turns to buy a star guest early. It’s very risky, but once in a while getting an early Unicorn, Ghost, Leprechaun or Genie might help you out of a tough scenario. Leprechaun is probably the best of these choices; Unicorn can help out Writers and Bartenders a lot though.

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Part 2 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam Next Fest October 2025 edition. EDITOR’S NOTE: is that a certain bobcat we all know in the preview image?

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 the first part of my (Josh Bycer’s) collection of videos of my favorite demos from Steam Next Fest, October 2025.

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/

The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the 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 Voin
01:50 Dimensionals
3:28 Cairn
5:09 Claire A La Mode
6:33 Epiphany City
8:33 Shady Knight

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 interview, I (Josh Bycer) spoke with David Peters who is the designer of Disaster Arms and a lover of modern retro games to discuss the game, being inspired by Treasure, and what it’s like to make challenging action titles.

• Store Page
• Developer Info

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 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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