Tag: indie

Gamefinds: Conservation of Bass

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.

Here’s an early example level, that relies on the fact you can swap both horizontally and vertically.

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.

This one is very tricky! The fish can only jump one space high, and it can only swap with blocks two spaces away. To get a block into a place where you can use it to get up to the glass of water goal, it has to come from the bottom layer of the starting platform, but that’s directly over the void. How to solve it….

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.

This is the last level I got to before posting.

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

Classic Mac Gaming’s History of Dark Castle

MARCHintosh is almost over, so here’s a short doc (13 minutes) on one of the most misunderstood games for pre-OS/X Macs, Dark Castle.

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.

Indie Showcase For 3/26/2026

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

Gamefinds: Expedition Sasquatch

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:

Visiting the Museum
Preparing to fish
Selling Jackalopesis appears to be a good source of early cash.
Mysterious encounter in the woods….

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

Gamefinds: enclose.horse

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.

This is not the perfect solution to today’s enclose.horse puzzle. Can you see how it could be improved?

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)

Indie Showcase For 2/2/2026

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

A State Space Walkthrough of Two Early Stephen’s Sausage Roll Levels

We try not to shy away from hardcore geekery-peekery here, and I think this one qualifies for that nonsensical nomenclature.

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?

A Pair of Great Puzzle Games

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

The Perils of Social Media for Gamedevs

Christina Pollock of the blog Load-bearing Tomato has an insightful essay about how opinions shared on social media can come to shape, and often ruin, the work of unseasoned (and even well-seasoned) developers, letting the guiding design principles of their work get blown to the winds because of internet randos forming ill-considered opinions about them.

It’s a link to a blog post, what else am I supposed to put in as an image than a screenshot?

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.

What kind of post would it be without an embedded video?

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.

An Indie Game For Everybody

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