Every May I embark on a seasonally-germane cleaning session for one or more of my backlogs. Since starting Indie Game of the Week I've been making plenty of forward progress on my Indie backlog in particular, however I've found that I've been unable to stem the tide of late due to some very generous charity bundles put out by Itch.io over the past few years. They've so far included the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, the Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid, the World Land Trust Bundle, and the Bundle for Ukraine: each bundle was inspired by various injustices happening across the world to raise money and awareness for organizations helping to improve or repair the situation as best they could. Each bundle also, while they had plenty of overlap due to the largesse of the same developers volunteering their art to benefit the world in a more direct fashion, served to introduce around 20-30 new Indies to my library, a majority of which have sat unplayed since the bundles were active. The donations themselves were what mattered of course, and yet I still feel I haven't been grateful enough to the many Indie devs who gave up a share of their livelihoods for the sake of their principles (though if I really wanted to put my money where my mouth is, I could just go and double-dip with the Steam versions for a lot of these).

Since I'm running out of classic games (without resorting to spending sprees or piracy, which seem inconducive to the spirit of a backlog-clearing exercise) and all my capital-B Backlog games right now are 50-hour-plus RPGs and VNs, I've decided to see how many of these small, weird, and wonderful Itch.io Indies I can get through (and put in a good word for) during May 2023. I'm prioritizing those that are perhaps on the short or low-budget side, more for the sake of volume more than anything else (though with many of these I might've been hard-pressed to write the requisite thousand or so words I usually put into the average IGotW blog).

MM01: And All Would Cry Beware!

• Developer: Tales from the Renegade Sector
• Year: 2019
• Status: Complete.

For this first week I've been focusing on games I was going to do for IGotW but couldn't, mostly because I couldn't get them to run well (a theme that's been ongoing in IGotW itself this year, thanks to a new system I picked up around Xmas), the first of which was this lo-poly FPS-explormer hybrid I became curious about after feeling impatient for Metroid Prime 4. And All World Cry Beware!—the title comes from a line in the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; as a Falcom fan and Olivia Newton-John fan both, I'm all for anything relating to Xanadu—has you fleeing into an old abandoned tech corporation building to escape a street gang, whereupon you discover a portal device that they left behind that whizzes you across space and time to an alien planet. While searching the place, you come across odd hostile creatures based on simple geometric shapes (the idea I think is to make a truly alien type of foe that might coincidentally be a little easy on the art assets creator) and various datalogs left behind by the corporate expeditionary force that came before you.

The game's pretty simple, doing the explormer thing of herding you to a boss that is carrying an upgrade you need to reach more areas and picking up the breadcrumb trail by revisiting older locations for the barriers you can now remove with your new gear. Without exception, each new upgrade is also a new weapon: shotguns can clear out brambles, machine guns make quick work of regenerating barriers by overwhelming their ability to repair themselves, and an Unreal-style rocket launcher serves as a means to reach greater heights by firing straight down at your own feet and riding the shockwave upwards. The gunplay and platforming are very simple stuff but it's still reasonably challenging, with a variety of enemy behaviors that might urge some caution, and though there's no map the overall game world is probably small enough to do without one. Collectibles-wise you have the datalogs and a small group of permanent health increases, but as long as you don't barrel into every new location and let the enemies overwhelm you it shouldn't be a huge endeavor to stay in one piece. There's only a wisp of a narrative even with the logs, but it does have a couple of endings to explore. It's about an hour long so it gets in and out fairly quick; my understanding of the developer's output is that they produce a lot of smaller games with this specific visual style while experimenting across a wide range of genres, so I'm definitely curious to try more of them even if "first-person explormer" is going to be tough to beat. It's so much rarer than it ought to be.

MM02: Fossil Hunters

• Developer: Reptoid Games
• Year: 2018
• Status: Suspended, like a mosquito in amber.

The goal of Fossil Hunters to run around a bunch of caves assembling fossilized dinosaurs by pushing body parts together. Like anything relating to the act of pushing body parts together it's ideally done with a second person around, though the game is just about playable solo albeit with a few additional annoyances that being in a team would mitigate to some extent. A typical loop would involve descending into a new cave, looking for a blueprint of sorts for a specific dinosaur skeleton it wants you to assemble, digging out the nearby rocks until you have all the fossil parts you need, and assembling the requested ancient creature to open up the route downwards to the next cave. Along the way you might find money, gemstones, or notes left behind by previous explorers, the last of those getting added to a journal that goes into background details about this cave network and its previous paleontologist visitors that have since become lost. However, the game constantly adds new perils as you go deeper, including darkness, hazardous surfaces, falling debris if you start mining away too many load-bearing rocks, and the worst of all are a bunch of bugs that will eat any unattended dinosaur bones.

Despite the simple loop it's also a pretty long game, which I didn't anticipate: about 15 hours to see everything according to HowLongtoBeat. As such it'll be something I might peck away at occasionally but probably won't see through to its eventual conclusion. Without a partner to help kick those bugs into a pit or contribute to the mining work the game's going to be a lot more stretched out and tedious than I'm in the mood for.

MM03: Marie's Room

• Developer: Like Charlie
• Year: 2018
• Status: Complete.

Marie's Room—which is now free on both Itch.io and Steam—presents itself as a "short narrative adventure", riffing on the same structure Gone Home had of picking around a suburban home for subtextual clues behind a central mystery, and piecing together most of the particulars before the game chooses to show its hand. In Marie's Room's case it's not so much a house but a single adolescent's bedroom that you look around for the sake of backstory. The protagonist is not the titular Marie but her friend Kelsey, with whom she had an occasionally rocky opposites-attract sort of platonic relationship that reminded me a bit of the central female friendship of Freaks and Geeks between the reserved Lindsay Weir and the initially scary "girl from the wrong side of the tracks" Kim Kelly. An adult Kelsey's returned to Marie's old room for initially undisclosed reasons and takes the opportunity to reminisce about their teen years together. The game then teleports back in time, letting Kelsey look at the various ephemera and keepsakes scattered around the room and contribute her own anecdotes of what they meant to Marie and/or herself. Significant items add journal entries to Marie's diary, with the ultimate intent to reveal as much information as possible to produce a hidden five-digit password to Marie's safe, the opening of which effectively ends the game.

It's an interesting exercise in narrative delivery, made all the simpler by a lack of character models and a single relatively small though busy location, and builds its central mystery slowly but effectively by letting you in on how this friendship formed and what eventually happened to it through a series of sad inevitabilities. Like Gone Home, you start fearing the worst almost immediately and the game uses that suspense to keep proposing suggestions as to how everything broke bad before moving along to its actual resolution. It's nothing too new but I think there's still a lot of steam in presenting video game stories in this specific fashion. (Also, it really taxed my new PC like nothing else I've played on it so far, even big-budget games like Hi-Fi Rush and Sunset Overdrive, which makes me wonder how optimized it was.)

MM04: Once Upon a Crime in the West

• Developer: National Insecurities
• Year: 2019
• Status: Busted.

I think you could easily and reductively pitch Once Upon a Crime in the West as a Return of Obra Dinn if instead of trying to forensics your way around a trader ship full of skeletons it was instead the aftermath of the Tarantino movie The Hateful Eight. Coming across a snowy cabin hostel up in the mountains situated between the nebulously defined "Old Town" and "New Town" of the wild west, the player finds the place full of the freshly dead with the only person available to talk to being the equally dead bartender. Despite having a knife through his eye he's animated enough to describe what happened and explain about a newfangled camera device that somehow lets you visit pivotal moments in the cabin's recent history, going back to the first day of Xmas up to the present (the twelfth day). You eventually learn the identities of the bodies around you, each recognizable by a distinct hue, and can start to piece together what went down and who killed whom. The cutscenes are also where you get a strong dose of the game's sense of humor, which plays around with western genre conventions, gallows humor, incomprehensible Scottish accents, and silly wordplay.

I reviewed all the cutscenes from the previous days, giving me enough information to start piecing together the mystery, but the game bugged out by not letting me ask questions of the barkeep: the idea is that if you take a picture of a body and present it to him, the barkeep will give you some idea of who they were and what he remembers of them, giving you the last few details you need to piece together all the murders that you wouldn't get from just the cutscenes alone. Without his input it was impossible to know for sure how half this group died and the game is short enough that it doesn't bother to let you save. I decided the mystery didn't matter so much if it meant having to watch all those cutscenes again so I cut my losses and walked away from that cabin of death. I feel like I at least saw the best parts of the game, and I'm all for more Obra Dinn-alikes if someone has a novel enough spin on it like this.

MM05: This Strange Realm of Mine

• Developer: Doomster Entertainment
• Year: 2017
• Status: Complete.

For this one, I'm just going to drop a link to a review of it I made a couple years back. Now that I've had the chance to complete it, most of what I said back then still stands. The game is fond of its philosophical musings and dark poetry and those don't abate after leaving those early levels (if anything they increase in quantity) though conversely the FPS gameplay aspect never really grows that much more sophisticated. Instead, it feels like the elementary gameplay serves to prop up the story and a variety of different vignettes as you pass through one strange realm to the next, fighting rat anthro hoodlums on the streets one minute to feeding a hedonistic sloth roast meat to weigh down a button or helping a psychic astronaut repair his spaceship the next. All the while, you're recruiting friendly NPCs to join you at the tavern-like sanctuary hub like it's a Dark Souls game and occasionally meeting up with the insightful if clearly deranged "D", who remains trapped in a straitjacket in a tiny asylum dimension.

The game takes you on a journey, or several, in pursuit of its lofty philosophical messages about the nature of life, consciousness, and the universe and it's definitely going to be one of those games that will strike the right chord with the right audience and leave everyone else a little bewildered, and possibly a little unfulfilled if the lo-fi FPS gameplay was what they were there to see. I'm of the mindset that we could probably do with more surreal and contemplative deconstructions like this, even if I'd struggle to define what it's going for exactly to anyone who might be interested. Psychological horror? Pure meta? Either way, it's probably in the same school as something like The Stanley Parable, where even if it's less openly humorous the feeling that you're getting messed around with is still all too pervasive.

MM06: Miasma Caves

• Developer: Windy Games
• Year: 2020
• Status: Abandoned, like treasures in the dark

Kind of a similar vibe as Fossil Hunters, and a similar reason for halting my playthrough. Miasma Caves has you exploring an enormous (and procgen) series of underground tunnels full of poisonous gas as you seek out the venom's source. Reason being is that your draconid people used to dwell in the subterranean world until the gas forced you all out, and in pursuit of removing this scourge you spend your time finding and acquiring valuable artifacts to sell back in the hub town. Money earned can then be put towards adventuring supplies like torches and ropes or upgrades to the town which might increase the storage space at your home or the price you receive for sold treasures. While there's no enemies or combat, per se, the caves are full of more dangers than just the gas alone (which limits how long you can stay down there): frequent cave-ins can injure as well as change the shape of the dungeon; wild animals while not aggressive can be nuisances such as the waystone-eating slimes; and there's pitfalls (and the concomitant falling damage) everywhere you turn. The most prevalent danger might be getting lost in those tunnels and running out of time, since the procgen aspect tends to make everywhere look the same; hence the utility of certain items like the glowing waystones as a breadcrumb trail back home.

Normally stuff like this would be entirely my shit, but I actually find the game sort of anxiety-inducing due to the combination of darkness, claustrophobia, and that ticking time limit getting me constantly lost and agitated. Death robs you of everything you're carrying, a portion of your cash, and resets the dungeon; however, the last of those might actually be preferable to constantly backtracking to the furthest point in the caves to look for new items, especially after enough trips back-and-forth that such a journey might take upwards of five to ten minutes and uses up most of your precious time best put towards treasure-hunting. Some kind of fast-travel system wouldn't be amiss, though it's possible a service like that is found later in the progression. As it is, I'm financially a long way from any town upgrades and there's nothing else really to spend cash on besides resupplying my torches and healing items. Since progression will be hard-fought and I've got plenty to be getting on with this month, I'll be placing this aside. Were it a little more polished and a little more user-friendly, though, I could definitely see myself sinking hours into something like this in much the same way I might a Terraria or any roguelike with a persistent hub and/or character progression.