Check out some titles that might have slipped your notice.
Growing My Grandpa!
Some grandpas aren’t born. Some are made, in the dilapidated basement where little Adrienne retreats while her parents squabble in their new house. Growing My Grandpa! is framed as the young girl telling her “pretend” story to a school caseworker, and we choose what Adrienne does down there in the dark and dingy quiet. She picks up trash, finding bits of old food and a litany of detailed scientific documents: radiographs, recorded observations, a termination protocol.
Developer Yames sculpts a chilling atmosphere of rich detail and tangible grime all centered on the thing in the next room, the amorphous entity that Adrienne feeds and teaches while it gradually takes shape into a “he.” Teach him word pronunciations and his vocabulary grows, better able to convey knowledge toward one of two endings. Feed him semi-nutritious refuse to keep him healthy, or feed him something bad and then sift around in his vomit to see if anything useful comes back up. No matter what happens, just remember: Grandpa loves you, and he won’t hurt you unless he has to.
Presenter Slides™
Free (Itch, Steam) | brin & Mathias Schifter
Hm. How to describe this one. Initially depicted as outdated office software, Presenter Slides soon sends you to the place we’re all going to eventually: hell. It’s brief and it’s weird, shifting formats and mechanics without breaking the reality of its old-timey Windows OS. Dying plays that one “uh oh, something broke” tone that sets your teeth on edge, and going to the gym is accompanied by grainy webcam footage. One sequence has you working out of heaven’s call center, which has naturally outsourced to the world downstairs where the labor is cheaper.
Last Call BBS
Included with Game Pass; paid (Steam, Microsoft) | Zachtronics
The final game from Zachtronics (Spacechem, Opus Magnum, etc.) is a barn-burner, a dial-up ecosystem of faux-pirated PC curios. With download speeds and a light “data limit” that nudges you to try out each game you download from a BBS (“bulletin board system”) server, Last Call BBS lovingly evokes a bygone computing era that, while less widely accessible, was also less overtly commercialized. It was more conducive to experiments that didn’t have their odder, more personal edges smoothed away, and each program comes with a short text entry that talks about its history and its place in the life of a fictional curator.
The variety alone is impressive: a Picross-type game about plotting dungeon maps around the monsters within; a macabre flesh-sculpting sim calling back to that era when entertainment industry figures might throw their weight behind some eccentric game project; a food court-themed programming game of the type that Zachtronics is known for and that I am absolutely not smart enough to complete. There’s even a program to build and then painstakingly spray-paint fake Gundam models by taping over the parts you want to cover and then tearing off the tape with tweezers once you’re done.
Curseball
Free (Itch) | Kultisi
Prolific developer Kultisi has a whole treasure trove of distinctly-styled projects worth digging into (for extra aesthetic synergy with this column, try the frantic window-closer lose95). My favorite thus far, though, is Curseball, an arcadey arena action-platformer about maneuvering your character to smack the ricocheting ball enough times before the timer ticks down. The complications are what really send Curseball into the stratosphere: every victory requires you to spin the curse wheel, piling on additional hazards on top of some already tight and satisfying basic controls.
Save the Reactor
Paid (Steam) | Hypnohead
I suppose you could call Save the Reactor a clicker, albeit far more involved and hands-on than that genre implies. Each new day finds you facing down a collection of individual panels with distinct dials, buttons, and gauges. They all come with instructions, and the trick is to keep doing them correctly in order to stabilize the reactor for the duration of your shift. They’re also all absurd, with one that might involve hitting the switch on an electric kettle while another might be navigating a maze or punching in a code.
The most devious wrinkle is that the control inputs differ. Some panels need you to click around the screen, some require you to hit something on your keyboard, and some finish automatically while others ask you to hit a button to confirm. You’ll be better at some than others, and you’ll learn to fine-tune their outputs according to what you think you can manage. Fair warning, the game’s writing is very irritating in that “epic bacon” sort of way, but once you get past that, there’s no dampening the thrill of Save the Reactor‘s unbridled chaos.