This is a series about the shorter PC games I’ve completed or abandoned recently.
Thimbleweed Park
Developer: Terrible Toybox | Released: 2017 | Genre: Adventure, Point & Click
A pixelated retro adventure game in the style of Maniac Mansion – made by the legendary Ron Gilbert. He made the first two Monkey Island games as well as Return to Monkey Island, which I really liked.
However, it seems I’m not that into retro adventure games anymore. I played almost two hours until I admitted to myself I wasn’t having fun. The humor didn’t do much for me and the archaic game style with verb buttons didn’t give me the nostalgic vibes I was hoping for. If this game had existed back in the 90’s, I would probably have loved it – but today, it just wasn’t cutting it for me.
That’s not to say it wasn’t well done. It had a great palette of colors (probably way more than was possible in the 90’s) and it had a lot of interesting scenery. After a body was found by the Mulder and Scully look-a-like FBI agents, Ray and Reyes, they started investigating a town. During conversations there, I got to play two more characters in flashbacks. One was Delores, who wanted to be a game programmer and even owned a Commodore 64, and the other was the constantly cursing circus clown, Ransome.
The Exit 8
Developer: Kotake Create | Released: 2023 | Genre: Adventure, First Person
After taking a break for more than half a year, I decided to return to gaming with a small one. This one took less than an hour to get through.
This game was cut from the exact same cloth as Shinkansen 0. I had to run through the same linear zig-zag subway tunnel over and over, looking for anomalies in a section where a man was walking past me. If I noticed an anomaly, I had to turn around and run in the opposite direction.
The final exit up a few stairs just ended in darkness and some sound effects. Quite underwhelming.
Anomalies could be things like additional eerie persons appearing, doors unlocking to darkness, the lights turning off, flooding, and more. Sometimes I could be running through the same tunnels many times in a row without an anomaly appearing at all. If only there had been branching tunnels.
Yume Nikki
Developer: kikiyama | Released: 2018 | Genre: Adventure, Top-down
A free top-down walking simulator made in RPG Maker. As a pixelated girl in a confined apartment I could go to sleep and visit various dream worlds, all accessed through a hub with a circle of doors.
The dream worlds were often very psychedelic. Sometimes empty with little graphics, sometimes filled with weird graphics and even weirder inhabitants minding their own business. A dream world could have a special character that gave me an effect, such as turning into a frog.
I checked out all the doors and sometimes also found dream worlds within dream worlds. If you’ve been reading my blog you know I’m a fan of walking simulators, but this one was honestly too tame for my liking. Way too much pointless walking around with not enough variety. Good thing it was free.
Eclipsium
Developer: Housefire | Released: 2025 | Genre: Adventure, Horror
A very pixelated first person adventure. In fact, it was so pixelated on my 32″ screen it almost looked like ZX81 in color. I understand the need to do this to make the development of the art easier, but I wish it had been just a little bit less pixelated. Especially when the vistas got epic.
It wasn’t quite a walking simulator. I got transforming powers for my right hand during the game such as cutting through obstacles and a few other I won’t mention here. The atmosphere was excellent – it felt like playing an adventure game in almost the same universe as in the Heretic series.
Although the smell of walking simulator was abundant at times, there were varied puzzles such as light platform jumping, moving light sources, rowing a boat, finding three keys, and more. Sometimes it was all about navigating a place without getting stuck. Especially the industrial complex was massive.
It got even more surrealistic towards the end. There were a few levels in succession that were quite difficult to navigate because of utilizing the gimmick of dropping through mirrored level design. I even got stuck due to a soft lock bug in an end sequence involving moving pictures around as portals.
I must say the game was incredibly varied and sometimes had innovative solutions I haven’t seen before, but they could at times be challenging in a way that expected a lot from the player to figure them out. That makes it all the more surprising that the opening hours almost feel like a walking simulator.
The Cabin Factory
Developer: International Cat Studios | Released: 2024 | Genre: Adventure, Horror
A short horror adventure in the style of Shinkansen 0 and Exit 8 where you have to find anomalies.
A conveyor belt moved in a small cabin for me to investigate. If I found something moving inside, I had to get out fast and hit a “Danger” button. If everything was static, I would hit the “Clear” button. A good jingle played if I got it right. I had to choose wisely for eight cabins in a row to complete a game. If I guessed any cabin wrong (or got smacked by a ghost) I had to start all over. It took me 1½ hours to get there.
In its default look, the cabin had the mother in a portrait on the wall, dad sitting by the dinner table, the son upstairs with a cloth over his head, and of course the usual furniture. Anomalies could be anything from a ghost appearing and hunting me down, limps or items barely moving, dad having moved his head when I turned around, a house fire breaking out, that kind of stuff.
Of course that was barely scratching the surface. It felt like there was an array of haunted situations, and I did get to see a few more than once. Probably the ones where I died the first time.
See also: Short Sessions, Part 21
Bookmarked this post because Exit 8 looks cool. And I see I even bookmarked your linked Shinkansen post long ago! Seeing these posts (partially again), they remind me of the Ju-On (Curse/Grudge) movies…