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 […]
Kategorie: FLOSS
Free, Libre, Open Source Software
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), […]
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 […]
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 […]
Tuuli
Tuuli is a text adventure game about life, death, fate, social roles, and black magic. You play a young witch apprentice, suddenly forced to replace her former teacher in performing a ritual to defend her home village against enclosing invaders. Will you succeed? And if so, for what cause and price? While the developers say […]
Kryftolike
Kryftolike is a minimalist dungeon crawler roguelike game. You control a tiny adventurer, roving through an infinite maze, collecting treasure. Points are awarded for gathering treasure and for exploring new tiles of the map. Monsters haunt the place, and will chase you once they become aware of you – you can’t fight back, only try […]
A row of chairs abandoned on the beach
A row of chairs abandoned on the beach is a short interactive fiction by LaughingPineapple about a person who melts with the ocean. The protagonist finds a row of verloren monobloc chairs on the beach, waiting for the flood to come. You might decide at any time to leave them and return to your warm […]
Shell Song
Shell Song is an interactive fiction or a digital essay about the voice as a medium, its relation to the body, the attempts to recreate it by technical means, and the ethical questions that are opened up by the advances in this field through digital means. At the beginning, the story mainly introduces the narrator: […]
The Archivist and the Revolution
The Archivist and the Revolution is a interactive fiction set in a dystopian future. You play a trans person who is working as an „Archivist“, extracting historical information that were decoded into the DNA of bacteria strains by preceding societies. Recently, you were fired from your job, and turned into a contract worker – getting […]
Solitary Stars
Solitary Stars is a hyperlink fiction game. I was tempted to write that the game circles around questions about the nature of memories, remorse, relations, or the entanglement of individuals within an imperfect world – and this would have been somewhat true, as these themes are present, yet it also would not do justice to […]