Ha, if only it seemed like that when playing it, because they sure spent a lot of money on it, and made it way too long for that joke to be funny.
parsecs, iirc
4 Likes
don’t start this
9 Likes
New bloodborne run. Going big strength I guess. Might also pump some arcane as well because I can’t help wanting to shoot some tentacles. I also found the messenger disguise but since I refuse to buy PS+ I doubt there’s much use for it. Maybe it’s PVEable? I should try it but then I forget.
I’m up through Amygdala and I think I’m going for true ending this time. I’ve never actually gotten that because I never get around to finishing it. I also need to beat Laurence this go as well.
I forgot how nasty the first part of the Nightmare is though. This might be the worst poison swamp yet! (haven’t played Sekiro much). I also forgot how confusing the map is. There are two closed doors that I need to go back to and I already forgot where they are. At least I got to Cainhurst. I think I might go back and pay Iosefka a proper visit though.
2 Likes
the fuck
1 Like
Basically you stall for a second, and are prompted to press B. Circle pops up with a little active reload spinner, and you gotta hit it within the zone.
I still don’t know what exactly triggers it but whew it’s stressful when it happens.
2 Likes
Oktrollberfest 2026 came early this year, and it looks like there were about 13 submissions. I played a few of them last night.
https://itch.io/jam/oktrollberfest-2026/entries
Robin Hood in “Barrels of Trouble” by @a_new_duck
A very transparent riff on Donkey Kong. Robin Hood is a bit more limber than Jumpman was back in the day, but so are his hazards. I had a good laugh once I understood the title.
Six stages. No scoring. Good fun. Recommended.
The Last Tree
This was submitted to 23 game jams:
It’s a very rudimentary browser game where you have to click on bugs and stuff before they reach the tree. There are 10 levels, apparently. I stopped playing when I got to a level that introduced a giant meteor that I was supposed to block by moving a paddle using the keyboard.
There is a name entry widget at the bottom at for your high score, but the game has no scoring mechanism and pressing submit just produces an error message.
I checked the author’s profile and looked at their other games, and I suspect this is slop. Not a fan of that as a troll, tbh.
Time Tri̶a̶ₒₗₗ by MomoHut
Very rudimentary top down racer. I was almost ready to dismiss it as slop, but the credits provide attribution for ever stock asset the game uses (my apologies).
There’s nothing really going on here except for the game’s one troll: on certain laps the track swaps the offscreen road with a different layout. There appear to be two tracks chosen randomly at the start. The behavior is otherwise deterministic.
I wish this reported your total time at the end of the race, rather than a list of per lap times.
Defusal
A bomb defusal simulator. It tries to be funny by giving you contradictory instructions (it almost is). There is nothing going on here mechanically. The UI makes me certain this is undisclosed AI slop.
Sly Squeaky’s BREAK/OUT
This is a Breakout clone. It has the same slop-looking UI as the above game. The thing with this one is that every time you lose the ball, it plasters some information about your browser’s fingerprint onscreen, and the robot at the bottom of the screen lectures you about the subject. Pretty early in the game, the walls/ceiling will disappear, drastically increasing your chances of a miss.
Don’t stream this both for slop reasons and infosec reasons.
Character Cooeste by Noahsoft
Very silly old school styled MegaZeux game. The writing is very lolrandom, and the font is even more absurd. I had fun with this.
There was a bug with the final boss where destroying parts of it wasn’t triggering progress, but I just reloaded my save until it didn’t break.
Verdict So Far
The middle four games in this post were made by random itch users outside the ZZT/MZX communities. Two were definitely slop and one was probably slop. I am not a fan of this development.
12 Likes
Got a backed up demo dump of 15 demos:
Beastfolk Barber
Chatty but it’s the means of getting people to talk about slice of life issues that affect living in an anthro world while you do the infrequent haircut qtes. You have a magic mirror which allows you to preview haircuts and you have to give the customer a haircut they like based on what they say. Rather than just getting the cue and nailing it, the game insists you make 3 guesses and intuit it out from the response to each one. I found I just got it in one based on the dialogue and then was forced to keep sussing it out for their to be more of a game but I don’t see the need personally. I’m here for the furry hairdressing, not playing Guess Who with the customer.
Fields of Aaru
A survival sim aesthetic I can get behind. It’s also bolstered by being set in the Egyptian afterlife which allows for a gamelike space that is still grounded in historical paint to make me feel like I’m engaging with a subject of interest as opposed to an abstract tech-tree.
It’s got deserts. Soft, sandy colours. Cute 3D models. I have a farming game I like now.
Magical Blush
Cool flowy effect on the hair but otherwise I’m out. The game is dull. Combat requires spamming spells on enemies spaced quite far apart and the design feels like a general mismatch of aesthetic, camera, and satisfying combat balance.
Micromega
Amanita-like puzzle game. You have to take care of the route of a floating orb by manipulating little creatures and Giacometti people. Levels have names like Guilt and Shame since your orb is often at threat of being pricked by the scenery. You can rewind and fast-forward since you’re directing a runaway train and it’s annoying to have to redo everything or watch the orb slowly trundle down (up) the tracks. It’s good and fairly distinct and there are little secrets to find by zooming out and taking in the whole scene. I don’t think I’m sold but I liked it.
Steel Maiden
One Finger Death Punch with pixel art shaders on 3D models. Looks slick. Good theme tune. Zombie cops presumably to make it so you don’t feel bad killing zombies. This has become a genre I like a lot, my guilty Vampire Survivors-esque pleasure. The theme song is great but alas is AI generated
Sadly I think it’s a genre that is more prone to slop. Dangit.
Town of Zoz
A lot of indie games opt for this pseudo retro low-poly anime aesthetic with dropped frames in the character animations so that the game and its attendant features are an easier pill to swallow. This Zelda-y mush is kinda just washing over me. I was drawn in by the style but nothing really held my attention. Cooking is the other half of the game and the combat is fiddly because your swords reach is pretty stubby. I like the slop game I just talked about more. I think this makes me a bad person.
Buster JAM!
Warioware buried in the Ur-flavours of indie comedy: Undertale and Pizza Tower. The character stuff and writing are in the mould of the latter two with little walky bits and skits on the way to the ‘meat’ of the microgames. Instead of the Warioware interstitial transitions for whatever the themed level is, the game contextualises combat through this so your characters are just in a fight or trying to blow something up. It’s pretty good, but is a patchwork of influences rather than feeling fully like its own thing.
Difficulty is tuned a bit high, and the timers could be more generous. You’re often just finishing the microgame even when playing optimally. You can skip the Warioware segments but I’d rather they just add 2 seconds to every timer. My guess is that maybe the timing is being fitted too closely to the music and its accidentally a skoosh too short which has led to a harsher window of completion. I enjoyed.
Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle
Presentation is nice but playing it is more CYOA than full RPG. You use 1-2D6 for rolls. Like a CYOA, you’re effectively outguessing around dead-ends. It even gives you page numbers but this isn’t really physically replicated by the interface. Just retrying through all the dead ends is not as fun to do in a videogame and although the interface is very novel and artful, it’s just not compelling as a thing to do. I think ironically the desk and equipment takes me out of it. The fantasy should be the content of the book rather than the content of the book as mediated by the stationary that is actually a UI layer that contains the book.
Ghost Hunting Journal
Chinese indie which seems somewhat influenced by Nintendo-platform ghost mystery adventures. You work for your family’s skeezy ghost hunting agency except you’re legit. There’s a webpage for filling out info on your jobs which nails the ghost hunting fantasy of filling out forms.
The current build has a rough English translation, audio and art work but there is at least a voice coming through. The tone is comedic with an element of family drama. You have to travel around the city in a way that sort of simulates a real journey using public transport which is a bit unusual for this type of game that usually abstracts travel between different locations via chapter transitions and loading screens. I tired of it but admired its pluckiness.
Boost Vector EX
The menus are very stylish! Actual game is quite a slippy on foot racer. It’s very easy to fall out of bounds or get stuck halfway on a loop-de-loop. Feels weirdly slow because the environments are so huge. I too like Bayonetta, but you could spend a lil more time tuning the player controls iykwim.
About Fishing
Mesmerising and moody.
Fishing verbs are repurposed very well by giving you a fish POV so you’re trying to reorient the fish to the line. Casting the line feels like diving into the water except you’re piloting the little lure physics-object. I like that they use the ‘low-poly realism’ as a licence to blend a depressing small town murder story with fantastical fishing abilities. All in.
Pokemon: Let’s Go Pikachu!
Framerate chugs like mad and we’re just in Viridian Forest. Catching with the Go motion controls feels like a cynical attempt to win over millennials who haven’t touched Pokemon since Red/Blue. Saved myself 40 hours and deleted it.
Queen’s Blade Re:Build
Hoo boy, this is actually a decent card game. A lane-based deckbuilding roguelike with mechanics that make for interesting choices. The rogue aspect is purely picking from one of three events at a time, there’s no other thing to do but deck build and battle. Well, no other thing except looking at the porniest character designs. The 3 lanes on the battlefield correspond to head, bust, and crotch armor and when you take damage on any lane for the first time you get ‘an animation’ showing that that lane is no longer armoured and now vulnerable to damage. It’s almost clever of the designers to unite the horny and the strategy. Almost. I played it all the way through to my shame because I was building this great deck, you see and…
Metroid Dread
I sort of swore this one off a while back because of my issues with my hands + the controls, and Ravenous’ announcement made me go back and check if I could actually pull it off now. Unfortunately aiming is just a huge pain, especially having to hold so many buttons during aiming for different things. Aiming a missile is two button holds and an analogue stick.
The presentation of modern Metroid (not so much Prime) is really weird to me. It feels like they can’t really get beyond a sort of limited retro style, but the art team are pleading for something more slick or distinct. I think this is where Ravenous is grabbing me a bit more. I think Prime maybe made the mistake of establishing Samus’ eyes so that every Metroid game afterwards having to show Samus’ eyes, and it just doesn’t work in most games, especially where they’re so actively animated. Her expressions read like Marvin the Martian.
Omega beam sucks.
Elta: Defy All Gods
Another indie game that is on paper meeting a market need but is not really engaging for it.
Genre 1: God of War (modern)-style action game
Genre 2: Metroidvania
Art style: Dreams™ meets Unreal Engine tech demo.
You are some kind of alien military boxer and you have to punch a lot of dudes. In between punching you do more running and traverse all stuff that makes it qualify as a Metroidvania. Neither feel that good. The world feels very empty since there isn’t really much dialogue or context for what’s happening. There’s not a single thing that is unique to the game other than its particular combination of things. I imagine you get more ways to punch things and other vania staples but it’s just so dry.
Dry Dry wafer.
Personal favs:
- About Fishing
- Buster JAM!
- Fields of Aaru
-
Steel Maiden
10 Likes
I tried Barrels of Trouble and got too annoyed at how it seemingly only introduces 1 new troll per stage, and also that the knife barrels that can only be dodged by waiting in safespots seem engineered to make runbacks as slow as possible. Gave up around stage 3.
1 Like
You can bait the knives out by standing in front of the barrels, and then jumping over them when they retract.
1 Like
towers of babble demo
new word game by a friend of mine and his dad, demo came out this week. the gimmick is that the words you spell with your Scrabble rack turn into tower defense items – towers, mods, and resource harvesters (depending on the word) that you can then place on the map to survive the next wave. each stage is also identified by a word, and when you clear the stage, you unlock that word for future use in other stages. Hence, you can also just type any word at the main menu and jump right into that stage to try and clear it.
as all the players unlock stages, the unlocked stages stack up into the eponymous “Tower” to try and reach the heavens.
i don’t usually like tower defense but i’m having a lot of fun. for example I had a tower “POWDER” which gave a bunch of splash damage, and then i added the healing mod “STEW” which gave it an aoe healing aura. This ended up being the nucleus of my little blob of towers, healing everyone while lobbing splash damage from the back.
8 Likes
I found my Shenzhen I/O document binder that I made, and then never played the game because I was overwhelmed
17 Likes
Shenzhen is the next Zach game I gotta get to (I am trying to get through them in vague order) and this is not spurring me forward…
2 Likes
there’s a stream out there of this game making me cry
3 Likes
shenzhen is perhaps my favorite (right ahead of exa-punks and molek-syntez)
I still haven’t played TIS-100 tho
3 Likes
I played the first three and IMO they all have their strengths and weaknesses despite how similar they may seem from afar. I was probably best at TIS-100, except for that one puzzle I skipped because it was absurd.
2 Likes
from what I know if you could handle TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O should be no problem
3 Likes
Because of this Zachtronics talk I booted Last Call BBS up again, finally figured out a solution for the soft serve icecream, and then crashed and burned for half an hour trying to figure out how to count dumplings.
11 Likes
I started up Silent Hill f (a bit early for a Halloween game but this may take a good number of hours) and like… modern games sure can be impressive to look at sometimes. I kinda just wanted to wander around for a bit looking at stuff.
10 Likes