In recent years, I’ve been trying to expand into playing a wider variety of games, especially indie games created by small teams. Steam Next Fest, an online event held three times each year, is an excellent way to explore a variety of games and game genres to find something new. The most recent event, from February 23 to March 2, event hosted a slew demos for forthcoming indie games in a wide variety of genres.

As I scrolled through the list of games participating, I made my choices mostly based on vibes. Interesting artwork or creepy atmospheres caught my attention immediately — and before I knew it, I had a massive list of games to explore. Unfortunately, I only made it through a small fraction of the games I wanted to play. Here are some of my favorites, and if any of these games sound interesting, you can support them by wishlisting them on Steam.

Continue reading on Once Upon the Weird…

The post Megaphone-Controlled Dystopias, Rad Record Stores, and Haunted Post Offices: Eight Cool Games from Steam Next Fest first appeared on Andrea Blythe.

Dead Letter Dept., developed by Mike Monroe and Belief Engine, is a fantastic horror game with an interesting premise. After moving to the city, the player is taking part in a data entry job in an empty, dank warehouse in the middle of nowhere, filling in addresses that a mail-scanning system finds illegible. Each day, you wake, wander down the dreary corridors of your apartment hallway, hearing the muffled voices of your neighbors in their own apartments, and take the train to work.

The job — and gameplay — involves hand-typing in addresses and, in some cases, increasingly bizarre passages of text. Little narratives unfold in the strange letters and postcards sent through, each building a sense of dread. While typing, the electricity sometimes flickers and pops (multiple times causing me to jump) and also hear strange sounds of things shifting around the room.

Atmosphere is huge in this game. The art has a grainy worn quality, the lighting is appropriately moody and shifts to reflect the changing mental state of the character, and the sound design is top notch. The audio built a high level of tension, and in general I loved the experience and want to play the game again to get some different endings.

Considering how many games I’ve been playing lately have fallen on the creepy or terrifying side, I wanted a game that would be adventurous and chill, which led me to finally playing Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch Productions). After surviving a battle against the Mongols, Jin Sakai, one of the few remaining samurai, sets out on a quest to to save his captive uncle and avenge his people on Tsushima Island.

The game is beautiful and wonderfully satisfying to play. It does a good job introducing the player to the use of the sword in combat, with different stances designed to handle different kinds of enemies. The world also has a ton of collectibles, from supplies that allow the player to level up their weapons and gear to fox dens, temples, artifacts, and hot springs that either provide benefits for the character (such as additional health, charm slots, resolve, etc.) or expand the story lore and world.

One of my favorite parts is climbing on the back of my loyal steed and riding through the forests or blooming hills. The use of wind to guide the player to the destination of their next quest is such a lovely touch, because it feels less intrusive than a marker, letting me explore as I’m riding and discover new locations or collectibles on my own.

I’m also really enjoying the story and the various side questions. The characters all having interesting backstories and their own relationships to honor and loyalty. The question of whether to bend how one approaches battle against and overwhelming force is such an interesting one to me, evolving naturally out of the way the player approaches combat. The choice of whether to behave like proper samurai, attacking enemies head on versus using stealth and quiet assassination to eliminate enemies has an interesting impact on the narrative, as Jin flashes back to memories of learning the ways of the samurai from his uncle.

For the most part, I’ve stuck with attacking my enemies head on and for the most part haven’t feel too overwhelmed (though, I am playing on easy mode). However, some sequences lend themselves to stealth, especially when a kidnap victim is involved, since the enemies will begin killing their captives if attacked openly.

So far, I’m having a great time with this game. I’m still fairly early on in the game, but I’m already wanting to be thorough and discover all the collectibles, if I can.

Browser Games

Bicross RPG(eli_li) ate up far too many of my hours this month. It’s a simple puzzle game, in which you have to find the proper placement of the plants based on the numbers at the top and right, indicating how many are in each column. The RPG element adds a nice twist, providing additional life or tools to help find the solution, while the puzzles getting larger and more difficult.

“Ten Things I Learned In The Red Room,” an interactive fiction game by Nessa Cannon. Inspired by Twin Peaks, this surreal horror broken into ten vignettes that build on a sense of unease and dreaminess in a strange red room.

“Jagged Bone” is another interactive horror fiction by Nessa Cannon. In this one, the player is at the home they inherited from their father, but the woods hold a deep and deadly secret. One of my favorite things about this game is how it shifts perspective, adding a nice layer of depth along with the tension.

“Intrusive Thoughts” is a fascinating dating sim created by Josep Valls, Peter Vaňo, softeal.png, and Sam. In the game, the player goes on a date with a beautiful woman and has a rather basic conversation. However, in order to select a line of dialog, you have to play an increasingly difficult mini-game to make the optimal choice. Failing the mini-game causes the date to go off the rails. It definitely added a stressful layer to the conversational structure.

“A Murder Most Fowl,” developed by Ouch Pouch, is a charming little interactive fiction about a crow attempting to hide evidence of misdeeds, while also having to host a party. It’s a sweet little tale with an amusing end.

If you’d also like to know about the books and media that I enjoyed recently, you can check out my Culture Consumption for February.

The post Games I Played in February 2026 first appeared on Andrea Blythe.

Sorry We’re Closed (á la mode games) is a survival horror game with immense amounts of style. The art (which is one of the first things that attracted me to it) is stunning, both the nostalgic computer graphics and the character portraits. The music hits the perfect vibes and the gameplay adds to the survival horror experience.

Michelle is a young woman working in a corner shot in a small neighborhood in London. Though on another continent, the community feels very much like some of the counter-culture neighborhoods I’ve seen in San Francisco, being full of charming punks, oddballs, and weirdos. Everyone seems a bit on edge, considering the number of disappearances in the area.

Michelle is struggling after breakup with her ex girlfriend, who is now a TV star with episodes of her constantly playing and reminding her of what she lost. One night, a terrifying nightmare enters her bedroom and places a curse on her. It marks her as the property of a demon, known as the Duchess, who demands that Michelle love her and/or end up as one of her many victims being tortured for all eternity.

In order to combat the curse, Michelle has to enter nightmare realms full of demons bent on tearing her apart. These segments of survival horror contrast with the other areas of the game, in which Michelle wanders around her neighborhood and chats with her friend and neighbors. In the nightmare areas, she faces these demons with a combination of weapons and a limited ammo.

The actual combat mechanic is both fascinating and sometimes frustrating. It involves exploring the areas with a third-person fixed-camera perspective, and then switching to first person perspective in order to use weapons and attack. At times, this switch can be disorienting, causing me to be wildly off with my shooting or escape. But I eventually got used to it (for the most part).

Another element is the Third Eye ability, which shifts perspective between the real world and hell worlds in which she finds herself. The technique helps to solve puzzles and get past impossible obstacles. It also stuns enemies, making it easier to combat them.

Everything kind of circles around themes of lust, love, and obsession, with certain aspects that feel inspired by Hellraiser. All of the community members seem be caught up in their own relationships and desire for love, while the Duchess herself is desperate to get back the love she lost when she fell from heaven. Even the combat reflects this, with the demons having hearts that can be broken to take them down more quickly.

Sorry We’re Closed was such a cool experience, and I’m planning on playing it again (despite the wonky, for me, combat). I have many more thoughts, which I will write up soon.

Stray (BlueTwelve Studio) is a cozy cat game set in a post-apocalyptic scifi world. A ginger tabby is separated from his family, after a pipe breaks casting him down into the dark depths of an underground city. After finding a tiny flying robot with spotty memories, kitty and bot attempt make their way up through the depths and back to the surface. Along the way, the kitty meets and befriend a number of companion bots, and the player gets a look at a world in which humanity is lost, but remembered through the manners and longings of the robots left behind.

I intended for Stray to be a break from playing SOMA — only to realize that Stray is also a horror game at certain points. The Zurks, tiny little offshoots of a virus that has grown wildly out of control, attempt to consume everything that crosses their path, both flesh and metal alike. As the player delves deeper into their nests, they grow increasingly terrifying in ways I wasn’t prepared for.

Despite the unexpected horrors, I loved the game. It does a wonderful job creating the experience of embodying the life of cat, while creating a haunting and wistful world. (My full review of it is up on Once Upon the Weird.)

Soma (Frictional Games) is absolutely terrifying. I’ve played Layers of Fear, Resident Evil 2 Remake, and Resident Evil Village (particularly the Dollhouse level), but nothing has gotten to me quite as much as Soma. The level of “nope” is intense.

The set up is interesting — a man with brain damage after an accident goes for an experimental medical scan, only to wake up in a derelict underwater station infested with rogue robots bent of killing anything that moves. Considering the set up and a number of “glitchy” moments, the game seems to be suggesting that this is all a simulation. But simulation or no, I’m so stressed trying to get through this game.

I’ve been taking a break for a couple of weeks, but plan to get back to it. I’me genuinely curious to see where all of this is going.

I’ve had some new ideas for a puzzle game I’d like to make, which would require me to learn some coding. As part of the planning process, I decided to pull up some games that a similar style fo simple puzzle that I’m going for with this project.

The first is Landlord of the Woods (Madison Karrh), in which the player character is frustrated by their life and escapes into the woods to take up the role of landlord for a bunch of odd creatures. Each one requires collecting a specific kind of rent, reflecting their personality. To collect the rent, the player has discover where it is by solving a variety of simple puzzles. I particularly like the way Karrh layers her puzzles, with the solutions being hidden inside other puzzles, which might be a way to approach things with my game.

A Little to the Left (Max Inferno) is a charming puzzle game in which the player organizes various objects. In some cases, it’s a junk draw of screws, tape, and tools. In other cases, it might be books, pencils, or other objects. I’m interested in the way these puzzles are deceptively simple. In some cases, the solution is so obvious I overlook it entirely, and I’m wondering how I might use simple design like this to reflect a specific narrative experience.

If you’d also like to know about the books and media that I enjoyed recently, you can check out my Culture Consumption for December.

The post Games I Played in January 2026 first appeared on Andrea Blythe.

Over the weekend, I participated in the Global Game Jam at the UC Davis location hosted by the Game Development & Arts Club. I’ve done several jams in the past, but always as a solo developer. So, this was the first time I participated in a jam with the intention of joining a team, let alone at an in-person event. Quite nerve-racking.

Fortunately, everyone was wonderfully chill. The event kicked off with a presentation, with former Davis alumnus providing advice on how to approach a jam, before declaring the theme for the 2026 jam: Mask.

This was followed by a matchmaking session. The hosts (professors at the university) had a really great method for this process. Everyone present came up with a game concept based on the theme, which we wrote out on large sheets of white paper and presented to the group.

All of the pages were pinned to the wall, and everyone took three Post-it notes with our name and abilities and put them on the projects we thought we’d like to work on. It was such a great method, because it really took the pressure of the team forming process and got everyone talking.

I ended up working on two game projects — Thomas Was NOT Alone and Best Face Forward. On the first night, this created a few funny moments, when I would be talking with one group and then turn around and find myself talking with the other group. Delightfully chaotic.

Thomas Was NOT Alone

Led by Thomas Ruiz, Thomas Was NOT Alone is an FMV dating sim, in which Thomas takes the player on a date, asking pointed yes/no questions, which lead the player down increasingly chaotic places on the date. I collaborated with Thomas on writing the script and branching out the various pathways, coming up with a few of my own ideas for how the date could go wonderfully wrong.

After we finished the script, the team set up for filming in the auditorium, where it would be quiet. I served as sort of a script supervisor and performing a bit of feedback on the performance. Not much feedback was needed though, because Thomas did great and we pushed through the whole filming rather quickly.

At that point, it was up to Thomas and the rest to finish off the coding and implementation. They did a fantastic job and it turned out to be a fun game. The character is delightfully awkward and weird, and the story is funny and chaotic.

Best Face Forward

Led by Charlie (IRateBurritos) and Sophie (sdrozd25), Best Face Forward is a Jackbox-style multiplayer game, in which the players are presented with a prompt. They have to create a face from various parts and answer the question with a random assortment of words. Then, the players vote on which one they like best — and the one with the most votes wins!

For a long time, I’ve been rather down on my art capabilities, since it’s something I do casually. However, since what the project needed was a bunch of disconnected fragments — and I tended to draw eyes and lips and such on their own as a kind of doodling — I figured I could pull it off. I presented my idea to the team and they liked it, so I was in.

Doing the art required working in a digital format (instead of the pen and paper I was used to). I experienced a bit of fumbling at first, but taught myself how to efficiently use layers to my advantage and ended up developing a style that I liked and that would allow me to create a lot of pieces rapidly.

It was fun! And now I’m feeling more confident in my art skills, which I might be able to apply for some new game concepts that I’ve been noodling.

The heavy lifting for Best Face Forward was definitely done by Charlie and Alex (AlexGGJ42), who programmed the game. The multiplayer component definitely took the longest amount of time. Their work was incredibly impressive.

The multiplayer lobby is impressively smooth, and the UI works well. The faces assembled together are wonderfully uncanny and strange, and the word selection process is like chaotic refrigerator-magnet poetry. The end result is a game that feels like a delightful fever dream.

Other Cool Games

One of my favorite parts of the jam was the final night in Davis. After all the entries were turned in, the participants were invited to set up computers around the room, so we could all mill around and play games.

It was so cool to see people play the games I worked on in real time. Even more fun was being able to experience the games everyone created and talk to them about their process. Here are the games I got to play:

Lost Faces. is a horror visual novel about a girl who is born without a face, so she steals them from others. Beautiful art work and sound design, along with an interesting story.

The Masked Merchant is a cozy game about selling masks in a shop. Each mask provides different benefits, and the player has to choose the right mask based on what the NPC asks for during dialog. Adorable art and a fun premise.

Photomask is an alt controler game, in which two player engage in a 1v1 competition. Each player solders a point on a computer board, then they switch boards and each player tries to trace the path and complete the connection. My first time soldering something! And I won!

RGB Runner is an endless runner game in which you have to switch between RGB values to see the safe way to progress. It was a very cool design, though I had a hard time wrapping my head around it (especially with keyboard controls).

Identity is an adventure game in which the player has two bodies and has to put on a mask to switch between each body and progress through a series of puzzles.

XOR Puzzle is a puzzle game in which you decode the text using an XOR Cipher. Since I have no idea what that is, I struggled with this one. It was a cool and complex puzzle, and lots of folks with more knowledge than I had a great time with it.

The post Global Game Jam 2026 first appeared on Andrea Blythe.

In Stray , developed by BlueTwelve Studio, the player gets to experience what it’s like to be an ginger tabby cat exploring the ruins of the human world. At the start, the cat is living with a group of fellow strays, who wander along giant pipes and culverts, likely looking for food — when one of the pipes suddenly gives way causing the kitty to fall into a deep crevasse, with their cat family helpless to do anything but watch him disappear into the dark.

Alone in an underground structure full of garbage, the kitty must find their way back outside (hopefully to return to their family). Fortunately, he’s not alone in this journey. Neon signs and lighted arrows guide the cat through dark tunnels, helping him to avoid danger, and ultimately leading him to a small, empty apartment with a secret room full of computers and technology. After solving a simple puzzle, the cat encounters a new friend in the form of a small, floating robot.

B-12, as this robot is named, would also like to reach the Outside, because that’s what it’s long-dead creator wanted. So, it straps a battery pack to the kitty’s back and together, they head off to escape to the world above.

Continue reading on Once Upon the Weird…

The post ‘Stray’ Is a Cute Cat Game… Full of Horrors first appeared on Andrea Blythe.

Cocoon (Geometric Interactive) is a puzzle platformer with some of the most satisfying and interesting puzzle mechanics I’ve ever seen. As a strange bug-like humanoid creature, the player is released from a cocoon and tasked with exploring and finding their way through alien worlds. The worlds are strangely biomechanical, making them feel unsettling and cohesive all at once, and the puzzles are fascinating and intuitive. In almost every instance, I could figure things out by bumbling around a bit, with the solutions being so satisfying I found myself getting emotional just through the sheer act of playing the game.

My only frustration came from the boss fights, since the gameplay felt disconnected from the beautiful wonder of the rest of the puzzles. Each boss fight just felt like an annoying obstacle holding me back from the delights of the rest of the game.

Consume Me (developed by Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, and Ken “coda” Snyder) is a coming-of-age memoir game about a young woman dealing with the daily stress of trying to be perfect and meet all your goals, when you don’t have enough time. At the heart of the stress is disordered eating and the attempt to loose weight in order to gain approval and acceptance from others.

What makes this game excellent is how much the gameplay — involving a series of mini-games — perfectly reflects the stress of each day, the feeling of not having enough time, of not completing tasks fast enough or good enough to achieve your dreams. The cute art style is also a great choice, giving it a youthful feel. Though the main character is a teenager, the style reminds me of Sanrio and similar adorable-style characters that I loved when I was a teen (alongside my love for alternative rock, horror movies, and so on). The game is fairly quick to complete was a delight.

Viewfinder (Sad Owl Studios) is a puzzle platformer that relies on the kind of fixed perspective illusions are really only possible in a digital medium. The player picks up photographs and art and holds it up to the world. When released, the images become real in the game, building new platforms or rooms or bridges, thus allowing the player to progress. As the game progresses, additional methods of forced perspective are included and the puzzles become increasingly complex.

In the narrative, the player is roaming a simulation that contains the memories and records of four scientists who had been working on solutions to climate change. The aim is to find a technology that will heal the world, in which oxygen levels have reduced forcing all of humanity inside enclosed spaces. Much of this narrative is related through communications with a collaborator outside the simulation or through audio logs and notes left behind by the researchers.

While the story is solid, the main joy is the experience of the perspective shifting puzzles themselves. It’s a beautiful, delightful, mind-bending experience.

I finished up the main quest of The Outer Worlds 2 (Obsidian Entertainment). As with the first game, I found the actual ending to be the least interesting part of the narrative (compared to the many quests and side quests that led up to it). But I enjoyed the final battle and seeing everything come together. I especially liked discovering how all my choices throughout the game affected the world, the factions, and my team of companion characters.

Fallout (Interplay Entertainment) was the game that made me fall in love with the dense narratives of RPGs and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic storytelling. The opening cinematic and the song “Maybe” by The Ink Spots is burned into my brain. I remember watching it and getting full body chills, and the way the image pulls out to reveal the wind-swept wasteland continues to haunt me.

With the Fallout TV show being so great, I decided to return to the start of the franchise. Since I only have a Mac, I have to use a bit of a janky set up playing the game through a Windows emulator. The game window is tiny and has a watermark over it, but that in no way takes away from my enjoyment of the game.

From the outset, it’s clear that Fallout is old fashioned (not really a surprise, since it came out in 1997). The game dialog is fairly direct and doesn’t quite feel as in-depth as modern RPGs. The quests are interesting and fun, but the game doesn’t provide a detailed list of the quests or reminders of the next steps to take. Hints are sparse, so the player is forced to figure it out on their own — and it’s not always immediately intuitive. So, I’ve had to look up guides on how to complete quests on more than one occasion.

Nevertheless, I’m having a great time with it. I enjoy the turn-based combat (even if it’s sometimes a bit slow). And I love returning to this world. Some of the characters and quests I remember — especially my bestie Harold. Some I’m discovering all over again. And hey, maybe I’ll actually finish the game this time.

Demos

Psychotic Bathtub, currently being developed by Natasha Sebben and her team, is a dark visual novel that explores mental health. The main character sits in their bathtub, and the player interacts with various inanimate objects to initiate conversations with them, dredging up the character’s memories or emotional state. I love the illustrated art style, the sound design, and overall tone. When released in 2026, the final game is expected to provide additional interactions and endings.

Am I Nima? is a psychological horror game in development by Ho! Games. You play as Nima, who wakes with no memory and is trapped by her mother in the basement. Through dialog options and by making mental connections (by combining words to open new memory options), the player has to figure out what’s happening and prevent Nima’s mother from doing something terrible. The game is quite creepy and I’m looking forward to exploring it further (though no release date has been announced yet).

If you’d also like to know about the books and media that I enjoyed recently, you can check out my Culture Consumption for December.

The post Games I Played in December 2025 first appeared on Andrea Blythe.

Over the last year, I played 28 full games, of which I finished 24. As with previous years, most of my gameplay has come from the lingering backlog of years past, with only a handful of games having been released in 2025.

It’s been an interesting year of play for me. In many cases, the easy joy of play gave way to more complex experiences. Some left me emotionally wrought. Others featured gameplay that slipped into the frustrating, but nevertheless held me captive with their narrative.

Fortunately, some lighter fair was also included in the mix. There were games that delighted me with their puzzle design, offered unique narratives, or just granted me the simple joy of a fun experience — something I definitely needed by the end of this year.

Continue reading on Once Upon the Weird…

The post Games I Loved Playing in 2025 first appeared on Andrea Blythe.

October

I finished Immortality (Sam Barlow / Half Mermaid Productions), and it’s phenomenal. To learn how to play the game, the player really just has to dive in and discover how to play the game. The mechanics of pulling up videos, scrubbing them (playing, fast-forwarding, and rewinding), and then zooming in on objects or people in scenes allows for an impressive amount of discovery and exploration of this multi-layered and powerful narrative.

Marissa Marcel was an up-and-coming actor, who starred in three films — none of which ever aired. The game presents itself as a retrospective, allowing the the player to delve into clips from these films along with behind the scenes footage to discover her story. In the end, it’s so much deeper than the surface story, revealing a fascinating perspectives on how artists strive for a kind of immortality through their craft.

I don’t want to say much more here, because it will lead directly into spoilers, but I love the way the discovery aspects of the game allow the player to piece together the narrative in their own way. It provides a space that allows the player to shape the narrative in their own way, especially as there are some clips they may never discover. As a result, each experience is truly unique, and its fascinating how this game is able to achieve that using live action video.

I’ve finished God of War (Sony’s Santa Monica Studio) after about two years away (more or less, since I would pop in for an hour or two during that time before getting distracted again). I was able to get up to speed on the controls rather quickly, and I’m not having a blast with the game and am getting close to the ending.

God of War features some excellent blending of story and gameplay. One particular example is how it has been difficult to face ice creatures in the game, because his axe was also made of ice. Later, when Kratos makes the momentous decision to face his past and dig up the Blades of Chaos (his weapons from the previous games, which I haven’t even played), I got chills. Suddenly, the combat against the ice creatures shifted and the fights against them became … so satisfying.

The story wraps up in such an emotionally satisfying way — and now I’m so curious about what happens in the next game after all that is revealed. I’ll probably jump into the sequel Ragnarök sometime soon.

I’m about 30 hours into Act 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios), and I love exploring the city of Balur’s Gate. It’s full of interesting side characters and quests, and my goal of focusing on the main storyline has entirely gone out the window.

However, I’m getting frustrated with the level of difficulty involved in many of these later battles — many of destroy my party multiple times before I can finally beat them. Sometimes this can make victory all the more satisfying, but it’s making the game take so much longer, and I’m finding myself more frustrated than anything else.

This is especially true when it goes in combination with the increased number of glitches that I’ve been encountering. They don’t happen all the time, but in certain sections of the game or in certain battles. During the “poltergeist” quest, the game would freeze every time I attempted to swap between characters. And during two different battles, an NPC would freeze in “decision making mode” just as I was about to finish the conflict, which forced me to start the difficult battle all over again. It’s enough of a paint that I was seriously considering just quitting the game entirely.

And yet, I would like to complete the storyline. So, I’m going to go ahead and take another break from the game. Later, I’ll come back, drop the difficulty down to an easier mode, and will attempt to complete the story.

November

The Outer Worlds 2 (Obsidian Entertainment) has been an absolute delight, consuming large swaths of my time (including a couple of ten hour days of play). Set in a different system of the galaxy than the first game, the player is a an Earth Directorate agent, who end up trapped in an escape pod after their team is betrayed on a mission. Ten years later, the only surviving member of the team manages save you, and you are faced with the task of tracking down the traitor who kicked off the series of catastrophes in the first place.

As much as I enjoyed the first Outer Worlds, the sequel resonates with me so much more. And I think that’s in part due to the core of the story having personal stakes. The traitor matters; they cost the player their team and lost them ten years of their life. It feels so much more narratively relevant (as opposed to being pulled into a situation without context by some kind of mad-seeming scientist to save the world). Having a former team member there also anchors that connection.

I also just really love the companions this time around. Niles is so interesting, especially seeing him go from a hopeful, eager kid to a traumatized survivor finding his hope again. Marisol is fascinating as an aging spy in hiding, bringing a sense of grounded wisdom and a desire to do better than her past. And Inez, Aza, Tristan, and Val are also fun and interesting characters to bop about on worlds with (though I do I wish I overheard more conversations between the characters as we were roaming).

The factions in this game are also fascinating. Of course, the corporations are present in the form of Auntie’s Choice, bringing their sense of “pull yourself up by your metaphorical bootstraps” commercialism and exploitation. But then there’s also the Protectorate (an authoritarian regime that relies on mind-control), the Order of the Ascendant (a science-focused society that believes the future can be mathematically deduced), The Glorious Dawn (a cult that worships space rifts), and Sub Rosa (black market traders). They each have uniquely interesting points of view, and it’s been fascinating to explore how they have shaped these worlds, especially if you’re trying to keep the peace as much as possible (like me).

Another interesting element is how you build out your character in the game, because if you fail to level up certain skills, it can lock you out of certain looting (such as needing Engineering to open broken doors) or dialog options. It’s also possible to acquire negative traits in the game, which are suggested based on how you’re playing the game. Eat tons of food to heal? Get offered the “Gluttony” trait. Sneak around using crouch a lot? You have the chance to get “Bad Knees” trait.

One of the early negative traits I picked up was “Jack of All Trades” in response to me spreading out my skill points a bit. The trait requires the player to spread their skill points out by only allowing them to choose from the lowest ranked skills (except for the traits with zero points). As a result, I couldn’t just dump points to level up a specific skill, which created some frustration points when I’m blocked by certain skill checks. I wouldn’t recommend this negative trait for a first-time play, but I decided to just roll with my choices and continued to enjoy the experience.

From a quality of life perspective, I only had a few quibbles. One of the bigger things is that I wish I could swap companions out on the fly, since certain factions don’t like certain companions and sometimes you need to have certain companions on hand to complete their character quests. It would be nice to be able to tell them, “Hey, head back to the ship, and send so-and-so out here.”

Overall, the quests are fun — with a good variety of requiring stealth, combat, and/or just negotiation (depending on how you want to approach them). One of my favorites is a small moment in “Forbidden Secrets of the Undisputed Claim,” which was really impactful because I had coincidentally watched “The Company We Keep” episode of Secret Level before playing. Although such a small moment in the game, it just gave me so many feels.

At this point I’m close to the ending (I hope), so I should be wrapping up the game soon.

Messenger by Vicente Lucendo and Michael Sungaila is a lovely browser game about exploring a tiny round world and delivering messages. You’re essentially dropped into this tiny city and giving the task of delivering messages to different inhabitants, giving you small insights into their worlds. It’s beautifully animated with sweet music, and a character creator lets you swap out your clothing style. As you wander, you also see other players running about delivering messages — all of us just doing our thing together.

“For Gregg” by Leon Barillaro is a text adventure about a manager who is about to be replaced with an AI system. As the player reviews the employee files, the bot becomes confused by the fact of employee Gregg’s death and frustratingly attempts grief counseling. The game is a powerful portrayal of how AI fails to understand humanity in the slightest.

If you’d also like to know about the books and movies that I enjoyed recently, you can check out my Culture Consumption posts for October and November.

The post Games I Played in October & Novemeber 2025 first appeared on Andrea Blythe.

Bad End Theater (NomnomNami) presents a simple narrative. A hero is sent to rescue a maiden from the clutches of a demon overlord. But with this visual novel, the player is able to select which character they want to be — hero, maiden, minion, or overlord — and the choices you make as one character effects how things turn out when you switch over and play as one of the other characters. As the player continues, they are able to turn on or off certain personality traits, which impacts all of the possible outcomes. And all of those outcomes are inevitably bad — terrible deaths, failure, and isolation. At first, it might seem like that’s all there is, but the game actually builds to a sweet and satisfying ending. It was a delightful little game.

I’m continuing through Act 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios) this section alone is huge. I played over 100 hours just getting to Act 3, and I’m seriously wondering how long its going to take to get through this section. Some of the companion quests (which I’d like to focus on don’t have clear markers for completion (I just have to ask around and figure out where to go), and the boss fights are exceedingly difficult, it seems. Several times, I’ve had to replay the same fight over and over and over again, struggling to just get through it. I’m really hoping to be able to get through the rest of the game by the end of the next month — and I may have to leave out even more of the side quests in order to do so. Regardless, I’m still having fun, and I love these characters. (I just don’t have that much time to be spending on a single game.)

If you’d also like to know about the books and movies that I enjoyed recently, you can check out my Culture Consumption for September.

The post Games I Played in September 2025 first appeared on Andrea Blythe.

Mouthwashing (Wrong Organ) is a psychological horror game about a crew left stranded in space after their ship collides with an asteroid. The five person crew operates a long-haul transport ship, and are constantly reminded by the company’s mascot Polly to stay focused on work and to not linger to long in idle distractions. The isolation on the ship and the slim chance of being rescued reveals dark secrets and the crew’s hidden selves.

The game approaches the narrative as a puzzle, presenting scenes from two points of view — Curly, the captain, and Jimmy, his second in command — and arranges these fragmented scenes out of chronological order. This puzzle structure allows for an emotional escalation, building tension through mystery, rather than a straightforward progression of the plot. It also reflects a sense of workers being trapped in the flow of their lives, struggling to take responsibility for the mistakes they’ve made as the story cycles back on itself and grows increasingly surreal. I was particularly haunted by the Curly’s looming eye swirling in its socket, like the Tell-Tale Heart’s ever beating heart beneath the floorboards.

Most of the gameplay is in the walking sim style, with the player moving through the various rooms and interacting with people and objects. Slight puzzle mechanics involving collecting necessary items or revealing codes help to make the experience feel more interesting and diverse, as well as contributing to the escalation of the experience.

As events become more surreal, the gameplay shifts to include some additional gameplay mechanics, which did not work as well for me. For example, there’s maze in which the player must move silently as possible and a sequence involving having to shoot a person hunting you with an axe. These sequences tended to be more frustrating than frightening, since they were outside of the typical gameplay and didn’t feel like a natural extension of the experience. And because I’m terrible at keyboard and mouse controls, the gun sequence was essentially impossible for me. So, I had to skip it entirely in order to finish the game, essentially loosing a chunk of the story along with it. (Apparently, I was not the only one to struggle with this section.)

Despite these small struggles, I loved Mouthwashing. It’s tightly designed, and I really respect the way the developers leaned into the limitations to support the best experience they could with the tools they had.

Immortality (Sam Barlow / Half Mermaid Productions) is an FMV (full-motion video) game about Marissa Marcel, an actress who was all set to be famous and even filmed three major motion pictures — only to have none of those pictures ever be made public. The game consists of searching through short video clips from these unreleased movies, along with behind the scenes footage and TV interviews. The player can fast forward, rewind, and zoom in on people or objects to switch between and discover new clips.

When I first started playing, I felt a little lost jumping between the video clips, not really sure what I was doing, why I was doing it, or where the game was going. But this was definitely a “stick with it” situation, because just as I was feeling ready to put the game down, strange and unsettling things started happening in the game. Now, the more I play, the more deeper mysteries unveil themselves. And I am so fascinated to discover what’s really going on.

I finally returned to Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios) after some six months away. I needed the break after reaching the third act, because I was feeling rather burned out by the sheer size of the game and the choices involved. Now I’m ready to get back into things.

Upon returning to the game, I experienced only a few minutes of initial confusion (“what was I doing again?” and “wait, how I use these controls?”), but got back into the flow of things fairly quickly. My goals right now are to stay focused on companion quests, followed by the main quest — with the idea that I’m not going to talk to every single NPC in the game, like I usually would.

Nevertheless, I’m finding plenty of random quests that seem fun, and I just can’t help getting sidetracked, because there’s so much to discover. The exploration is fun and stumbling upon a chaotic new adventure is a blast — and I love meeting new NPCs. So, as much as I’m trying to streamline through to the end of the game, this is definitely going to take me a while.

When it comes to tiny games, I ended up playing a bunch of Bitsy experiences while looking through Anna Anthopy’s Itsy Bitsy Exercises, a series of lessons and inspirations for making short narrative games using the Bitsy tool. Here are some of the ones I loved (all under five or so minute to play):

• “The Space Slime” by Skyler Aure
• “muddy water ’round my shoes (homebound just once more)” by adam le doux
• “Junk Shop Telescope” by cephalopodunk
• “Mammoth Hunt” by Cooltendo
• “A Captain’s Lonely 60 Days” by Yellow Attic
• “Tea for Two” by Sean
• “the nightly routine” by miniwoolf
• “The Space Slime” by Skyler Aure

If you’d also like to know about the books and movies that I enjoyed recently, you can check out my Culture Consumption for August.

The post Games I Played in August 2025 first appeared on Andrea Blythe.