Games I'm playing. Newest entries on top.
Note: These are not reviews or recommendations! I'm playing more games at the moment to try to figure out what I like and what I want to make, and I'm making no effort to predict what other people will like.
2026-05-25
Funeral Song for the Elemental Lords, Itch, 2024
I beat a couple false lords in this and then felt like... I don't have the energy to bring for a Sylvie game right now. You need to actually show up to play a Sylvie game.
R.T.3. Search, Web, 2023
Looking through Jack Crawford's old list of 50 favorite games I see a lot that I already love (in fact, I wonder if maybe he read my recommendations blog since hardly anyone other than me wrote about Infernium), but also a bunch I had never heard of. R.T.3. Search is a really different take on 'riddles' than what I'm used to, and with Gabe I blasted through the first half. Really nice, made me re-evaluate my designer's kneejerk assumption that riddles do not make good games. Very sorry to hear that the designer died young.
International Linguistics Olympiad, Sample Puzzles PDF, 2025
JW recommended I check this out as a companion piece to RT3 Search - the idea is that these puzzles (which are examples of the yearly puzzles in the international competition) are hard problems in understanding foreign languages which don't require or expect you to know anything about those languages. It uses the kind of reasoning I enjoyed in the excellent translation game Epigraph but it gets some extra juice for the fact that the languages are real, so the problems are 'found' rather than 'made'. Solved a few of these too, but they got too hard.
An Angel Dances in the Sparks of A Bonfire, Web, 2025
Also picked from Jack Crawford's old list of games, this is the most minimalistic action game I've played in years, technically resembling something a student makes as their first videogame - simpler even than Flappy Bird. But I see why he picked it, there's something very interesting here, it feels like breathing more than dodging. Will play more.
2025-05-24
Brogue CE, Open-source, 2009-2026
Got to level 22 out of 26.
INFRA, Steam, 2016
Back to this, played a lot more of it. Something about this is really working for me - part of it is the sad janky beauty of the dishevelled, decayed world that is portrayed. Part of it is the extreme commitment to diegesis in the puzzles (meaning: the puzzles are plausible elements of the game world) - in this sense it is a kind of anti-Myst. I also am loving the way it continually instils a sense of having gone the wrong way.
2025-05-23
Virtual Driving School, Steam, 2026
Timely new release for me as I need to finally get a US driver's license and I haven't driven a car in fourteen years. It seems fine but I feel there was a missed opportunity here to employ a more pedantic 'Murphy's Law' type of simulation, like in Police Quest, wherein every missed mirror check or head check results in an accident. It'd be more educational and probably more fun.
City Car Driving, Steam, 2016
Now this is a lot more like what I'm looking for! A disciplinarian game. Three instant fails in a row (crossed a yellow line making a U-turn, failing to put on my seat belt, went the wrong way up a one-way street) and I'm hooked.
Brogue CE, Open-source, 2009-2026
Really not even trying at this any more. But it's still a great laptop game, and I am still addicted.
2025-05-22
MX Bikes, Steam, 2019
Quick round of one of my all-time favorites. The QWOP of racing games, but it's obviously way deeper and more interesting than QWOP. Maybe that means it's the Toribash of racing games.
Subnautica 2, Steam, 2026 (Early Access)
I was so hyped for this, especially in multiplayer, but heard the faint hiss of balloon-deflation upon booting it up. It's pretty and well-made and I'm sure it's great for most people, but it seems like it's distilling the elements I didn't care about in the original, and filtering out the parts I liked. I felt kinda the same way playing Diablo III, and Street Fighter IV, like it was just immediately clear I had loved the previous game in the series for reasons that didn't matter so much to the designers or to the rest of the fans. I'll try some more in single-player though, where maybe it'll have more time to get the dopamine drip going.
2025-05-21
Set Yourself on Fire, Steam, 2025
Finished this one today. The main visual motif of this is the stippled foliage of the trees, and it works really well. It gives everything a soft texture, brings to mind those Samuel Palmer etchings that I like. Gorgeous.
Derelict Star, Steam, 2026
Finished it! Hardest game I've finished in a really long time. I don't usually have energy to do that, but when a game is good+hard, and you put in the work, there is something really magical that happens. Which isn't there for games that are merely good or merely hard.
Private Playtest
Should I be logging these? I mostly can't say anything about them, except to vaguepost. But it does go toward taste exploration. I'll say this: I'm jealous of my friends who are good at designing and balancing numbersy systems. A kind of game I love to play but have no business making.
Dice Have No Eyes, Steam, 2026
Sort of like Balatro by way of the dice game in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I think Franek is from Poland? Maybe they have that same medieval dice game in Poland.
Spelling Bee, NYT Website, 2015-2026
Still turn to this game if I have trouble sleeping. Somehow I always manage to grind out a win just as I fall asleep. Gabe says I have an 'anagram module', though this is just his excuse for always losing at Anagrams.
2025-05-20
Derelict Star, Steam, 2026
Played some more of this, got a couple of really tough energy tanks and scratched the surface of a couple of nice mysteries. This really does feel like 'what if the B-run from Super Mario Brothers was taken to the ultimate extreme?', which I love because platformers have trended so far away from that over time.
2025-05-19
Brogue CE, Open-source, 2009-2026
Played another game of Brogue. I think maybe I have to accept that I've maxed out how much sweatiness I can bring to it and I'm not ever going to beat it.
Set Yourself on Fire, Steam, 2025
First time I tried to play this I bailed after a couple minutes, I was not in a receptive mood. Got more out of it this time, economical, specific (imagist?) writing pairing well with really specific art. Interesting comparison to Mixtape! I wonder if I could ever make a 'flatgame' or a visual novel.
2026-05-18
Mr. Mosquito, PS2, 2002
Really love the concept of this one - you're a mosquito in a suburban house in the height of Tokyo summer, and you have to drink the blood of the family members as they lie around, hot, bored, languorous, variously undressed. What an excellent canvas to paint a portrait of a family in simmering tension or decay, like Lucrecia Martel's movie La Cienaga. The staging and voicover do a good job of making you feel sweaty and itchy, but the game is very modal and synthetic and at odds with the tension of the scenario. I think 'ultra closeup on sweaty skin' is probably worth exploring.
Horsey Game, Steam, 2026
Nobody does more with less than Justin Smith, it makes me extremely envious. This one made me think about how 'bet on a horse race' games are the oldest type of videogame in a sense, since it started with the old electromechanical games in the 1920s. This idea feels like it's back in the water right now, like with Blake Andrews' 'Horse Race Tests' getting attention too.
Prologue: Go Wayback, Steam, 2026 (Early Access)
Surprised at myself for being attracted to this because the pitch (which seems to be "single player The Long Dark in a fully randomized world") seems like a recipe for the infinite bowls of oatmeal problem. But there's something somehow very relaxing about this game, how it's not trying to push you into dramatic situations or environments... it feels like walking around the wilderness in Daggerfall. Maybe that's just that it's early in early-access, and it'll fill up with mechanics and set-pieces as they go. It's too early, actually, so I'll give it a year to marinate.
SiNiSistar 2, Steam, 2026
A new release, Gabe said it was recommended by a sex-positive games Youtube channel... I've played a few 'vania eroge games (erovanias?) but this one seems committed to working through a defilement fetish that isn't at all to my taste, and so I process it entirely as horror. But in horror the games (or films) take the position of 'wouldn't it be horrible if you were impregnated by leeches?' and in this case it's more like 'wouldn't it be wonderful??'. I like the kind of 2D/3D thing they are doing with the pixel art, but probably won't play more.
INFRA, Steam, 2016
Having seen a glowing Steam review of this (in German!) from Increpare, I got intrigued and bought it. It's very proudly Finnish, like Alan Wake 2 or My Summer Car (both games I adore) and it seems to be a ridiculously detailed game about things being broken. I like its sense of humor and the apparent scope is enticing, so I can't wait to play more. But it might have to be on a smaller screen because we all got motion sick pretty fast. Unlike their follow up, Obenseuer, which is still sitting in my unplayed queue, INFRA doesn't have the Rust-style crafting and item-placement stuff, and I like how minimalistic and focused it is.
2026-05-16
Pandora's Box, Windows, 1999
Talked to Pajitnov about his lesser-known work - I'll figure out how to write that up at some stage. But he also mentioned he was proud of this Windows CD-ROM game that he made when he was at Microsoft, which I had never heard of, so I had to try it. There's something very modern about the project, trying to seek out the audience of smart non-gamers, in this case by taking the concept of 'jigsaw puzzles' and extending it really far. I had to give up after an hour since my Windows 95 install couldn't handle the 3D painting puzzles without crashing, but it really was giving me the nice jigsaw feeling.
Outer Wilds, Steam, 2019
Can't believe how long I've been putting this off, I played the original student project as an IGF judge, probably in 2013 or 2014 or so, and somehow haven't been able to come at it since then. Of course the final version is a lot better than I remembered, and it has a kind of openness to off-rails play that is great. It reminds me of Damocles, a game that is even more open to off-rails play, in a way that probably makes it impenetrable by modern standards. I'll play more of this I think.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Steam, 2025
Tying up the final chapters of this incredibly ambitious and big game after a long hiatus. I didn't really have it in me to do all the side content after the break, so I kinda just beelined my way through the critical path, a choice which so often seems correct for big-budget games, but in this case I felt like I was probably depriving myself of the best of it. Felt very proud of Zeke Virant, one of the first advisees I had at NYU, who led the design team on this one.
2026-05-15
Brogue CE, MacOS, 2009-2026
I started playing Brogue this year, finally, and I'm having a bit of trouble stopping. There are gonna be a bunch of entries in here that are just like 'played more Brogue' until either I win a run or the spell breaks. Something about how you can fine-tune how automatic it is to play makes it fit around my life very nicely. But I do feel like I'm playing it too lazily, too much like a slot machine, and it feels a bit unhealthy.
Microsoft Entertainment Pack: Puzzle Collection, Windows, 1997
Alexey Pajitnov kindly agreed to do an interview with me tomorrow so I can ask about some of the missing design history from his Wikipedia page, particulary the stuff before he emigrated from Russia in 1991. I've deduced that some of his older Tetris-era work was modernized on this 1997 compendium, so I played some of the games on it by way of prep.
2026-5-09
Mixtape, Steam, 2026
There's a nice thing that happens in Alan Wake 2, or at least I read it this way: it starts in this borrowed version of the Pacific Northwest, romanticized and redigested by the Finnish devteam through American export media: Twin Peaks and the X-Files and so forth. But you keep on meeting people who randomly are fluent in Finnish, walking in on Finnish karaoke in the local dive bar, you notice every single house has a sauna, and you're like, oh it morphed into Finland.