Not long ago I played a game called Maptroid on the can-you-believe-it’s-still-around “educational” video game website coolmathgames.com. The premise is simple: it is a metroidvania, but without the pesky direct control over a character. Instead, you control where you are on the map and can only see the map and map accoutrements. “You” are the cursor on the map and the goal is to fill out the map by traversing it. It is very basic, but it is also very chill. I had a good time playing it.

One of my favorite chiptune artists is Bill Kiley. I have no idea how I came across his work, but I must’ve been listening to his stuff for at least ten years at this point. My current method of exploring new music is to just keep a list of anything that strikes me as interesting in a notepad-ish app and listen to something from that list at almost-random when I take a shower. It’s probably not the best method, since the shower is loud and makes it hard for me to hear the music. It’s also not good for reminding me to listen to new music by musical acts I already like. Thanks go to past paste for using a Chrome extension that saved a bunch of tabs I had open when I switched to Firefox many years ago because it reminded me to listen to a Bill Kiley soundtrack album for two games: A Kitty Dream and The Valley Rule, both by a Flash game developer called Raiyumi.

At its heart, Tametsi is Minesweeper, both in mechanics and presentation. I don’t know who I’m explaining Minesweeper to, but the premise is that you have a grid of tiles and there are numbers on some of them. The numbers indicate how many of the adjacent tiles are mines. Mark the mines with right-click and click on the spaces that you believe don’t have mines. If you click on a mine, you lose.

Do you ever get the overwhelming sense of dread that things aren’t entirely covered with moss? If so, drop everything and head over to Noel Cody’s itch page and play Moss Moss, a game created by Noel a mere month and a half ago for the PICO-8 platform.

I’m ashamed to say that PICO-8 is mostly unexplored territory for me, considering everything I have played on it or seen for it has been fun or, at the very least, adorable. Moss Moss is no exception, on both counts.

If you’ve ever wondered how the first few minutes of Jonathan Blow’s/Thekla, Inc’s 2016 puzzle game phenomenon The Witness might’ve looked if it was developed for the NES, then you have quite a specific imagination. Nevertheless, homebrew NES developer dustmop had that in common with you and brought your thoughts to lo-fi life.

I came across The Wit.nes while putzing around on RetroAchievements, looking for interesting games. I was a big fan of The Witness, so this seemed right up my alley. Short, retro, puzzley; The Wit.nes ticked all three boxes for me. I immediately downloaded it from dustmop’s itch page and let it sit in my rom collection for two or three years. Okay, it was more like a couple of months, but such a short time frame really is an exception for me.

I’ve played a lot of games like Uniracers before but I’ve never played a game like Uniracers before.

At its heart, Uniracers is a racing game, and I have played my fair share of racing games. The layout is a little different than your typical racer. This is not the over-the-shoulderish view of a Mario Kart nor is it the frozen three-quarters view of a Super Off Road. This is a side-scrolling racer rivaling the speeds of Genesis era Sonic, Nintendoing what Sega thought they could not.

Today I spent about 40 minutes with Linelith, a game by Patrick Traynor, creator of Patrick’s Parabox. Linelith came out a few years ago, almost immediately after Patrick’s Parabox, but somehow flew under my radar. Having played it now, I decided to follow Patrick on Steam so as not to miss another of his games.

Linelith starts with very little in the way of tutorial: The letters WASD and the image of a moving mouse cursor are all that is shown to you, and the rest is left to experimentation. The HUD consists only of a single progress bar that goes to 132. What resulted was a bite-size TUNIC-ish experience which left me with the mental “oh… oh! … OH!” of realizing the repercussions of what Linelith taught me.

At first glance, the screenshots of TUNIC tell any Zelda fan where it draws its inspiration. Upon playing it though (or from hearing about it from those who love it), you find the ingredient that pushes it past most games in Nintendo’s franchise. TUNIC is soaked through with riddle-like puzzles that far outclass the square-peg-in-square-hole tasks found in most Zelda games.

It took me around 80 of the game’s 150 total puzzles to consciously put the label “sokoban” on Dungeon and Puzzles. From Chinese developer Nekolyst, consisting of only one person (although with some assets from elsewhere), D&P is a prosaically-named top-down tile-based puzzle game where you kill monsters so you can open the door so you can get to the next level(s). Monsters are slaughtered using gear that needs to be collected in each self-contained level, namely a sword, a bow and arrow, a shield (for bashing enemies onto spike traps) and/or a gauntlet (for yanking enemies onto spike traps)