Game Reviews -- 2025
03/11/2025 -- Tangled Blessings
Price: $18.99 PDF, $27.00 Softcover
Platform: Itch, mothwin.com
Tangled Blessings is a solo or duet journalling TTRPG where you play a person enrolled at a magical college. But this isn't a cozy academia simulator. Brackroot Academy is haunted by sinister forces, and danger lurks everywhere. And on top of trying to survive your studies, you've got a Rival to deal with...
The game of Tangled Blessings plays out over four in-game years, culminating in a final graduation duel with your Rival. How you get there is up to how you respond to the various journaling prompts the book provides, chosen by drawing Tarot cards. You separate the deck into its various suits, pulling cards for both you and your Rival. Each Minor Arcana prompt can be further elaborated on by drawing a Major Arcana for more detail. Year-end events connect the school years and provide the framework for a more overarching story.
This review focuses on the solo version of the game. Some rule variations are discussed in the book if you're interested in a two-player game where you're each other's Rivals. But I will say I didn't feel the solo variant was tacked-on or any less engaging than playing a duet game appeared to be. I also only played the base game, and not any of the official or unoffical expansions linked on the game's Itch page.
In fact, I found the system worked pretty well--the prompts were detailed enough to spark the imagination, and asked interesting questions. I ended up breaking up the game into four sessions, each one school year, so that I felt able to expand on the individual entries as much as I wanted. The one critique I have of the game is that I often found it unnecessary to draw a Major Arcana card after the minor suit, as the prompt and the imagery on the first card were enough to spark ideas. But the additional context might be helpful if you find yourself creatively stuck.
As someone who has a complicated relationship with magical school media, I found Tangled Blessings handled its theme pretty well. It doesn't feel derivative--there's a lot of character in the prompts and setting background, while still leaving enough room for you to insert your own ideas. The beginning of the book also notes that they understand the problematic aspects of "dark academia", and has links to further discussions of those aspects for the interested.
So I would definitely recommend Tangled Blessings if you're interested in solo journaling games, and are okay with a darker theme. I think there's enough content in the game for multiple playthroughs, and that's without considering the community content available or the recently-released official expansion. That's a lot of spooky cursed academic vibes.
03/03/2025 -- Pocket Delver
Price: $2.00
Platform: Itch
If you're looking for pure dungeon-crawling goodness, without frills or fluff, you might look into Pocket Delver. A small zine-sized TTRPG, Pocket Delver simplifies the core game loop down to its essentials, with clear rules that still allow for imagination and homebrew.
This game definitely evokes an old-school feel: roll and drop one for character creation, and a questing system that boils down to three simple plot points. There's no thought to how the dungeon came to be or what inhabits it, beyond what you insert yourself. And the combat system is definitely on the old-school deadly side.
Still, there's a lot to be said for simple. The rules allow you to add your own flavor to the dungeon-crawl experience, if you want. And if you don't want to concern yourself with much story and just want to roll some dice, you can play it as barebones as you want.
Despite space being so constricted by the zine format, I found the rules covered most scenarios. There is some room for interpretation, which can allow you to effectively adjust the difficulty for yourself: can I pick up treasure before combat? What enemies should I face per story beat? And so on.
Another point in the game's favor is its portability. The zine easily fits into a pocket or wallet, and the character sheet isn't much bigger. The author suggests a blank sheet of paper to draw the dungeon, but I found I had plenty of room on the back of my character sheet. The only other things you need are a pencil and some polyhedral dice (I recommend multiple d6s). I can see this being a good game to take travelling.
However, fair warning that you probably shouldn't get too attached to your character. In the spirit of old-school, this can be a brutal dungeon crawl. I played six games and won one of them. To be fair, I did have some spectacularly bad rolls.Some people in the comments on the Itch.io page apparently had a much easier time. Such is the will of the dice.
The game is in my opinion quite fairly priced at $2. There's enough replayability in the form of different character builds that you can get at least a few hours' entertainment. I can recommend Pocket Delver to people who like rolling dice and slaying baddies, but who may feel hesitant about diving into a bigger system. Or those who're looking for a quick game to occupy a lunch hour or other small moments.
02/26/2025 -- Shutter Stroll
Price: $6.00
Platform: Itch, Steam
Shutter Stroll doesn't advertise itself as a game, but a photography simulator. And that's what you get when you purchase it: a realm of islands to wander through and take pictures of, with no goals, enemies, achievements or rewards. Aside from your photos, of course.
It's extremely minimal in terms of features: you can adjust the focus of your camera, apply a few filters. You can journey through the map of islands via coordinates, or pick a randomly-generated daily island from the main menu. But there's no story, no timer, not a ton of juice. There's not even any music. There's just you, the landscape, and your camera.
It's an interesting experience, not having any destination or progress to make. I found myself making up my own goals, my own system for exploring the islands. When I didn't know what else to do, the daily island was a great way to simply pop in and take a couple pictures. I was even inspired to load up my Flickr account for the first time in a while.
It's overall a pretty seamless simulation, with just a few hangups. Sprinting is not enabled by default, presumably to allow for a more meditative pace. I quickly found walking too slow, though, so I'm glad there was at least an option to go faster. There's not a ton of filters, surprisingly, and the ones available didn't wow me. I also think it would have been cool if we could adjust the exposure length of the camera.
This isn't a game you'll sink a ton of hours at a time into. I think it's best experienced in short bursts. Hop in, see an island or two, take some photos. Look back over your album and remember all the sights you've seen. In the absence of a destination, enjoy the journey for all its worth.
02/16/2025 -- Nikita Kryukov
Price: Varies
Platform: Itch, Steam
This review is for the various games created by the developer Nikita Kryukov. They specialize in short, atmospheric visual novels which tend to revolve around someone experiencing mental illness or otherwise an altered perception of reality. They're probably most known for their games Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk and its sequel.
The dev states that they're inspired by Yume Nikki, and you can really feel that with the surreal nature and atmosphere of their games. Milk in particular, with its focus on a tormented young girl, really feels like the visual novel answer to something like Yume Nikki. Their other series, Daiku no Medium and its sequel, feel more directly retro-inspired with their pixel graphics and NES-esque sound effects.
When it comes to games that focus on mental illness, it's easy to find works where the insanity is done for shock value and feels exploitative. However, I feel that Kryukov's works avoid the cliches and make their protagonists feel deeply human, their experiences extreme but relatable to people who've gone through mental illness themselves. It can be uncomfortable to read, but while there are horror trappings I wouldn't say these are scary games so much as disquieting.
Each individual game is short--some have multiple endings, but you can easily finish any of them in an afternoon. Even hunting achievements in Milk outside of a bag of milk should only take a couple hours. And each feels reasonably priced. So if the subject matter interests you, I highly recommend playing these games. If you're looking for a place to start, I'd suggest Milk inside a bag of milk. My sole suggestion is that, according to reviews, the game loses some of its impact in English compared to the original Russian. So if you know Russian, perhaps consider playing in that language. For my part, aside from a few typos, I didn't feel like I was playing an inferior translation of something at all.
02/10/2025 -- Mandrake Sanctuary
Price: $5.00 PDF, $13.00 Softcover
Platform: Itch, DrivethruRPG
Have you tried those habit-building methods or apps, but found they didn't work for you? You may want to try Mandrake Sanctuary, a relaxing solo LARP that tasks you with caring for magical plant-creatures that grow in response to your real-life habits.
The game is divided into turns meant to represent one IRL day. Each turn, you may transplant a new mandrake seedling to one of your garden plots, and possibly trigger the growth of any current seedlings. What grows depends on the soil type you've chosen for the plant--said soils can be activated by socializing, exercising, self-care and more. You track the growth of your mandrakes by drawing a bit of them, or if you're not artistically inclined, the book provides the idea of journalling their growth instead.
All the language in the book is very forgiving and gentle--it stresses that there is no pressure to grow every mandrake every day, and that if you need to step away from the game for a while, everything will be there for you to come back to. The game wants to meet you where you're at, while providing a framework for you to gamify habits you want to build.
As someone who's tried other means of tracking habits, I appreciate Mandrake Sanctuary's gentle approach. If I had one criticism of the game, it's that the suggested method of managing your garden plots--by cutting out and pasting rectangles of paper into a larger page--seems a bit cumbersome and messy. This is likely intentional, as the book wants to simulate transplanting plots in a real garden. But I decided to follow the lead of some commenters on the Itch.io page and just use index cards instead. Still, it's a very nice, contemplative sort of game, the sort I can see playing over a long period of time. I can't wait to see how my mandrakes turn out.
02/06/2025 -- Heroic Archivist
Price: Pay What You Want
Platform: Itch
Did you know that the historical Library Of Alexandria employed mages? When the infamous fire claimed the library, said mages managed to spirit away most of the collection to a pocket dimension, creating the Shin Mecha Library of Alexandria II. Ever since then, mages have been popping into various eras to find rare and obsure texts to preserve in the library, annotating them for posterity. But the Roman legionnaires responsible for the burning are still lurking around...
Thus the setup for Heroic Archivist, which isn't so much a game as a pretext for getting you to read and engage with your indie TTRPG collection. There's a few scraps of a levelling mechanic and a rising threat to take care of, and of course the ultimate reward: a personal-sized pizza from the author if you meet them at a con or something. But ultimately, this is just a thin gamification of the TTRPG hobby.
In fact, the author freely states at the end of the rules that you're free to take the mechanics and apply them to your other hobbies, like novels, fanfics or even video games. Their one suggestion is that you stick to logging indie stuff, as larger publishers' works are less vulnerable to being lost forever.
As someone who's acquired far too many indie rpgs, video games and the like from Itch.io's famous bundles, I can appreciate any incentive to further engage with my collection. There's so much drive and creativity in the indie scene, and every day on the internet we lose works to the ravages of server failures, cyber attacks and other forms of link rot. The dressing up reading TTRPGs as something like continuing the Library of Alexandria may seem a bit grandiose to some, but at the same time, I think art of any kind is valuable to someone. And preserving it is a worthwhile endeavor.
If you're interested in using Heroic Archivist to log your indie collection, the author has links to several forms of recordkeeping on the game's Itch.io page. There's a copyable spreadsheet, and a notebook too. Check the comments for other inspiration, like one person's log kept on their personal website.
This review would earn me 25 Archivist Points.