arcane cache

The Fair is a experimental exploration game developed for Gameboy dealing with environmental destruction, the melting of digital and non-digital spaces, sound and magic. You explore a area that might have been depleted by a power plant; the fishes that once were the source of life and a centerpiece of the towns culture have disappeared […]

I’m back from vacation, and put one of my more recent problems back online and into public beta: CASSANDRA aims to realize many of the ideas that I worked out in the underground game manifesto while focusing on the narrative part of gaming. A while ago I had the idea to do some simple 2d- […]

hwilson did quite a few games until now; many are variations of the classic „Breakout“ concept – meaning that you use a paddle to reflect a ball flying in a room, preventing it from getting into your dead-zone and try to hit targets with it while doing so. Other than most common exponents of this […]

The Arcane Cache takes a break over the late summer; new reviews will come in early September. Till then, we recommend to browse through our old reviews, check out our games, or connect to others who are into underground gaming via Lemmy. Have a nice late summer.

Nil Rider is a mixture of a racing and a puzzle game that is set in an Escheresque world where space is functioning by laws unfamiliar to most of us. The developer, Zeno Rogue, made several games set in such strange worlds. Their dimension-hopping roguelike HyperRogue is not only one of my favorite games of […]

ÓÐR: The Sunken Flesh is a adventure stealth game with horror elements, set in a submerged world inhabited by ghosts. You probably played a game with such gameplay in the past: You have no offensive weapons, very limited resources, and strong enemies whose limited sight is identifiable to the player. Evade them, get items, enter […]

Hide and Seek is a combination of a zine and a text-only video game made with Twine. Both parts hare heavily interrelated, but could theoretically be read or played independently – both describe a game of hide and seek on steroids. The zine is supposed to be read interactively, but reading through it „traditionally“ does […]

Purgatory Prime is a low-tech and highly surrealist super slow colleactathon game. When entering the game, you are welcomed by an bureaucrat who tells you that there is nothing to do; that would be the sense of the whole thing. But that’s not true: You can search and collect eggs. I won’t tell you much […]

The roots of all our problems has a gameplay could be described as connatural to „Flappy Birds“, but with a strong focus towards story and graphical design. The games story is about a flying seed that searches for a place to grow but can’t do so as the whole space is either destroyed or occupied […]

Shippy 1984 is a arcade shoot em up game that is heavily inspired by early genre classics but modernizes their gameplay to some extend. Nearly everybody played „Space Invaders“ or some more or less faithful remake. Shippy 1984 introduces some minor updates, but doesn’t change the well working basic formula: You move within a narrow […]