arcane cache

Half Earth Socialism is a browser based infotainment game that takes place after an successful socialist revolution in the year 2022. You are appointed as the central planner for the new socialist world state, and your objective is to stop the natural crisis caused by the capitalist economic system. There is a corresponding book, but […]

Citadel Unchained does hardly fit into any genre; the developer (Hodslate – their game „Caverns of Underwood“ was featured here) describes it as a 90s inspired open world game, and I’m willing to adapt to this just because I can’t find anything better. If you search for gameplay in the classical sense, you might not […]

In Ascent, you awake in an unknown, alien environment, seemingly as the result of crashing with your spaceship. The game is a minimal metroidvania, and clearly took inspiration from the aesthetics of Super Metroid – but it doesn’t stop by recreating the sonic and visual atmosphere, but instead condenses the melancholy that was hidden by […]

„The Dark“ is an audio game. Since I worked on an audio game last year (ditched the project, though) I really expected it to be accessible – but unfortunately the main menu, the tutorial and the winning screen are without any audio feedback. However, playing the game itself is possible for visual impaired and blind […]

Chesstris 2000 is a logic puzzle game inspired by chess and Tetris. Figures on a board can be moved according to the usual chess rules, but are connected to Tetris tiles; one figure is marked and needs to be moved onto a given field to finish the level – to do so you’ll need to […]

Mother Machine is – technically – a shoot em up game, but it breaks or flips basically any convention of this genre. You are in control of a small spaceship or drone on its way into the innards of a strange giant cyborg being. The game is a bit mysterious and cryptic – it remains […]

Precipice is a very short point and click adventure realized with AGS back in 2015. As far as I can tell it got reviewed by RPS and a feature on a interesting website called WarpDoor, but didn’t get much attention besides of that – the author tagged it as a prototype, but in my opinion […]

Since I didn’t had the time to try through different games on Itch, I decided to showcase a long time favorite of mine when it comes to indie-games. Rescue: The Beagles was created for an contest at the TIG-Boards in 2008, and I was surprised to see how unknown it remained given how good this […]

Dungems is a tower defense game that draws heavy inspiration from dungeon keeper – you are an evil overlord and your dungeon is stormed by treasurehunting adventurers. To stop them, you place traps and monsters into your floors and corridors. The game is structured in levels divided into smaller heaps („Waves“), with each wave taking […]

Magic and Metal Zero: Tower of Metal was made for a game jam. Since I always had the impression that they tend to be raw (in the bad sense), unfinished prototypes I usually avoided jam productions. But in this case I stumbled upon the game over the announced follow-up, Minerva Labyrinth, that looked interesting to […]