I don't know exactly why but i feel like tetrachroma and mixolumia are like genders. there are more than those two, but these are definitely two of them.

I am so fucking obsessed with this game

This week has been a banner week for indie game releases. But there's no associated Youtuber with financial interest, or very accessible game from big publisher with zero accessibility features, so you may not know it.

I played more of the REDACTED game from large publisher and virtual online game sales monopoly. I'm still rather mixed on it, but this was the first time I actually played with friends in a group. There was no amazing teamwork or co-ordination between us, but despite that I probably had about 10x more fun than any previous attempt to play it.

There's a very small demo for the game Tenebris Somnia that I discovered via the Video Game Esoterica Youtube channel. It's a cosmic horror themed game with an interface roughly between original Resident Evil games, and point-and-click adventures, with the twist of also having FMV sections. The demo does not show much at all, but I am very much anticipating the full game which is due in "2025".

People on this website have recommended Tetrachroma demo, which is Tetris with an added colour mechanic. They were correct to recommend it, because it's great. One too many buttons though.

Nova Drift is a dual-joystick shooter style game with randomised skill-tree progression options on level up. The key gimmick here is that it controls more like Asteroids than the typical modern dual-joystick shooter. I really enjoyed the early versions of this game, but playing the new Version 1.0 I found it extremely awkward and cumbersome to play. I don't know if something's changed or if I've just forgotten the game.

More Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers. The game is good. I've hit the same wall I did with Balatro, but this game is still better.

I've kept up Cogmind. The game is still great, but I've gained an even greater appreciation for the atmospheric audio used as you sneak around ruined and/or abandoned industrial equipment.

On Thursday night I wanted to play a builder game and randomly fired up both Farlanders and dotAge for the first time in a while. Both games I enjoyed in earlier versions, and much like Nova Drift, I found them totally alien on return.

Farlanders is set on a Mars'esque planet and you have to build out a base for inhabitants. It's turn-based, but you can build infinitely with whatever resources you have, until the next turn when some random tile or event appears to drop on the map. The game is great at highlighting the next turn button, not so great at highlighting the need to build multiple connected systems first. Meaning I just end up getting "10 settlers tried to land, but there's no housing!" events a lot.

dotAge is less obtuse in interface. But more obtuse, by design, in it's gameplay. It's themed around building up a village to cope with an oncoming apocalypse. I remember the first time I played it, it had a very long tutorial. Trying to play it without said tutorial just led to me making mistakes on turn 1 that doomed the village immediately. Despite this, I do want to give this game another try, as it has a lot of things that I like in games. But I don't see myself doing that before I forget the game again.

You Will Die Here Tonight is a 2d survival horror game, again with a Resident Evil 1 theme. I purchased this on another's recommendation some months ago, but only got to playing it now. The game concerns a raid on a RE'esque mansion by a special forces team, but you play as one member at a time in vignettes similar to Eternal Darkness. Each protagonist is apparently fated to die, and you can use the progress made by one to help the next progress further in the mansion. The game adapts Resident Evil gameplay to 2D well. It also occasionally switches to a first person shooting gallery for combat, which is neat, but a tad awkward. I found the game really fascinating, though I did think the almost certainly scripted damage in some parts to be rather clumsy.

Thank Goodness You're Here is an English game about a very small consultancy worker who can jump and hit things. You travel to a northern England town to meet with the mayor for some reason (probably involving rent-seeking) and while you wait you end up wandering around the town helping people by hitting things. It's also hilarious and one of the best games this year.

Apparently at some point earlier this month World of Goo 2 was released¹. The game falls squarely in the "It's Fine" pit of mediocrity. I liked the original a lot, but it's also nearly two decades old and I have nearly zero memory of actually playing it. But the current one seems to be clumsily adapted from a version intended for a mobile device, very keen to force you to use said clumsy mobile controls in a rapid and precise manner, and designed as if it weren't a game with loose and unpredictable physics engine based controls. Apparently there is controversial content in the 4th Act, but I don't see myself getting there. Then again I'm over a quarter of the way through the game in the first of five acts...

The Crimson Diamond is an adventure game with incredible EGA-palette graphics and text parser controls inspired by The Colonel's Bequest. I've been anticipating this game for years, with the game's developer and artist Julie Minamata being quite open about the development of the game. I've only played the tutorial and the first hour thus far, but I've enjoyed it a lot so far. Despite a few weird technical quirks (like every button advancing a text window, instead of just enter like the game states, meaning text often appears and then disappears before you realise it was there.)

I did however find the start of The Crimson Diamond to be a tad slow and drawn out. The intro sequence looks spectacular, but is very long, and with the constant looping midi has the quality of a silent movie. This wouldn't be a problem, except it leads immediately into a bunch of text parser room searching, all of which involves one too many fully worded text parser commands. Bizarrely, over the next 10-15 minutes the game somehow transitioned into much more interesting room searching in a way I can't specifically describe. It did enjoy quite a neat self-contained puzzle around taking a shower though.

Lastly, Arco is another game I've just started on. In this case it's a narrative adventure game, interspersed with map navigation and turn-based strategic combat. The combat has the added twist of spectres (representing the weight of the past) attacking in real time while you plan, forcing you to hurry along. Thematically, the game seems to take place over multiple generations, and you play as members of an indigenous population of an unspecified South/Central American location. So far the story really does a lot with very few (occasionally too few) words, and seems to have a fairly explicit anti-colonialist theme². Its created a lot of memorable characters already in the ~80 minutes I've played.

The biggest issue I have with Arco so far is that it seems to be 95% incredible game, and 5% crazy choices where I can't tell if it was intentional design or not. There have been multiple occasions where the game has railroaded me into fixed paths immediately after promoting the game's focus on choice. And the combat often seems to punish you for just having the wrong idea, rather than what is actually depicted on screen (You dash past an enemy, then take damage from the enemy attacking the spot you were 2 seconds ago. Or you click to punch an enemy, cancelling their attack, and your character instead slowly loops around the back of them to attack, taking damage first.) These are minor complaints though, and probably not deserving of the paragraph I dedicated to them.

All Games Played

• Cogmind: GREAT
• Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers: Good
• Redacted: Redacted
• Redacted: Redacted
• Tenebris Somnia (demo): Good
• Thank Goodness You're Here!: GREAT (Notable)
• You Will Die Here Tonight: Good
• Nova Drift: OK
• dotAge: Good
• Farlanders: OK
• Tetrachroma (demo): GREAT
• World of Goo 2: OK
• The Crimson Diamond: GREAT
• Arco: GREAT

1. Many have lamented that the lack of attention World of Goo 2's launch has garnered due to being an "Epic Exclusive". It is, of course, not an Epic exclusive as it's also available for purchase on the developer's website.

2. Judging by ambiguous buildings I've noticed in the background, I can't completely rule out a "Pro-indigenous, and also extremely pro-quaint upper class villages" theme. But it genuinely doesn't seem close to that sort of game.

Thanks to a Twitter post from @aurahack I saw TETRACHROMA, grabbed the demo and I played like 3h of it this evening. It fucking rules, it takes some getting used to when you're used to Regular Tetris but when it clicks oooooohhhhhh you feel like the smartest genius on Earth, really solid stuff already. And the soundtrack is great, big Tetris CD-I vibes all around.