Some years ago, my parents made a vacation and visited the Netherlands, a few kilometers away from The Hague. When scouting for good destinations in advance, they had noticed that there was a museum dedicated to the band „Golden Earring“. Since they both have some love for this band, they decided to visit it. Arriving […]
Glittering Light 2
Glittering Light 2 is a rogue-like game that combines unique ASCII-graphics and minimalist game design. There was a – by now long begone – period, when glyphs and symbols were the primary interface between human and computer. Partly out of technical need, partly for practical reasons, the letters got pressed into a raster by then […]
Messages from the Universe Graveyard
Messages from the Universe Graveyard is a unique combination of interactive fiction and multi-user-dungeon. You connect to a abandoned server of an shut-down and mostly defunct MMORPG. The game is largely dysfunctional, but certain locations of the games world can still be visited: Defunct, industrial spaces, overgrown greenhouses, and astral-surreal places – all of them […]
The works of Cal Michael
Cal Michael is a developer who release a series of small games and zines on Itch.io – most of them cycle around a specific set of interwoven themes: The search for god, demons, (probably christian informed) mysticism, the sea, and especially sea urchins. I’m used to deal with strange media, but if the author hadn’t […]
Escape Guldur
Escape Guldur is a retro action RPG. A nameless character is channeling their way out of a prison cell and through a dark castle, filled with heavily armed, unrelenting, and – probably – undeath foes. Escape Guldur doesn’t bother with giving the player context (beside of the title, the vague graphics, and the weapon names), […]
Agentia
Agentia is a poetic 2D exploration game. You take control of something (that might be a human, animal, or even a plant or a thing) over some time of its existence. Depending on what you are, you have the ability to move around and interact with your surrounding world. In some cases you are a […]
I, The Living Flame
I, The Living Flame is a puzzle game developed for the GameBoy Color. The core game is a reinterpretation of the classic „Theseus and the Minotaur“ logic-game: The player controls a girl that has to find a way through a dungeon maze while collecting notes and evading an angry Minotaur that chases her. You have […]
Summer Vacation
I will go offline for the next two and a half weeks, and will return on 09/04/24. Have a nice summer, and thanks for reading the arcane cache!
Quantum Origination
Quantum Origination is a 3D exploration game, inspired by the developers dreams and the classic „LSD Simulator“ playstation game. Pouring dreams into media isn’t easy to do; dreams follow their own logic, and many of their aspects can’t be transferred by just retelling or recreating them, and creating a continuity needed for the audience to […]
Pocico
Pocico is a minimalist abstract puzzle game. Some games can’t be assigned to a certain time or era – they might have been developed in the early years of the medium or only recently, and still seem so futuristic that they could be easily used as a prop when a video game happens to be […]